- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 2
-
Sparkle (0)
As an anti-plastics blogger, I should be able to write about the gulf oil spill in my sleep. The connections seem obvious. Plastic comes from oil. Our demand for plastic drives up the demand for oil, as do our demands for all the other products made from oil. I should be able to write about this topic as I would write about anything else related to plastic, things like Bisphenol-A, bottled water, PVC, phthalates, ocean plastic pollution, and yet until now, I couldn’t.
Like the vastness of the ocean itself and the incredible magnitude of the spill, the topic was just too big to wrap my heart around. It hurt too much. Somehow the thought of oil gushing relentlessly up from the earth into the ocean felt even more nightmarish to me than that of plastic pollution washed by the tons into the same oceans. What’s more, with all the commentary about whose fault it is, what methods should be used for clean-up, and how the guilty parties should be punished, I just didn’t have the stomach to throw myself into the debate.
And then, a New York Times article this weekend somehow broke through my malaise. In his piece, Punishing BP Is Harder Than Boycotting Stations, columnist Ron Lieber explains that boycotting BP stations will not actually hurt the company much, since most of those stations are not owned by BP but by small business owners, and that often the gas provided by independent gas stations actually comes from BP. According to the article, even Greenpeace is not supporting a boycott, instead urging people to get beyond petroleum in the first place.
Right!
See, I’m not interested in vengeance. If it wasn’t BP, it could have been another oil company. All of them are culpable, as far as I’m concerned, but we’re the ones who keep them in business! Boycotting BP and simply going across town to buy our gas from the other guy does nothing to cut the demand for this terribly polluting substance in the first place. No, we’ve got to do more than carry a sign or “Like” a Facebook page. And thank goodness, there are other bloggers out there saying the same thing.
Drive Less
Diane MacEachern from Big Green Purse says that instead of boycotting BP, we should just stop driving. She asks:
Are there any “good” oil companies? Is Exxon, responsible for what was previously the largest oil spill in U.S. history, better than BP? What about Shell, a company known for its horrid human rights violations? Or Chevron, which has been sued for polluting pristine rainforest in Ecuador?
And Maggie Koerth-Baker from Boing Boing also wants us to drive less:
You and I are not helpless bystanders in this mess. Offshore drilling—especially deepwater offshore drilling—is not a simple project that BP and other oil companies get involved in for the giggles. They do it because there is a demand for the oil.
And Koerth-Baker gets down to hard numbers. She wants every one of us to commit to cutting our gasoline consumption by 9%. And then she delivers my new quote of the day, and possibly the year:
We wanted that oil cheap. In giving us what we wanted, BP and the government made some horrible decisions that we wish they wouldn’t have made.
They picked up a gun, loaded it and shot into the dark. But we’re the ones who told them that the night was full of zombies. Can we really say we’re not responsible when they accidentally kill a healthy toddler?
Okay, so that quote is all kinds of a mess. I still love it.
Get the Oil Out of Your Bathroom…
Ronnie Cummin, founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association writes on the Huffington Post:
There’s an oil spill in U.S. bathrooms that’s roughly the same size as the BP disaster in the Gulf
