NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — It’s easy to hate Big Oil. Gasoline prices are at record highs, over $3 a gallon. Oil companies have so much cash they can’t figure out where to spend it.
So when an e-mail arrives urging people to buy no gas on May 15 – saying it would take nearly $3 billion away from oil companies “for just one day” and promising a 30 cent a gallon drop in gas prices “overnight” – it’s awfully tempting to go along, savoring that bit of guilty pleasure knowing you’re sticking it to Exxon Mobil (Charts, Fortune 500), Chevron (Charts, Fortune 500), BP (Charts) or what ever oil company sells gas on your block.
Don’t be fooled.
“A one-day boycott makes no sense whatsoever,” said Tyson Slocum, energy program director at Public Citizen, a national consumer advocacy organization. “You’re not reducing consumption, you’re just buying on a different day.”
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Many of the numbers in the e-mail are either misleading or flat out wrong.
The promise of depriving oil companies of $3 billion dollars a day assumes all the Internet users in the country would normally fill up their cars on the same day, which is of course absurd.
And what about the 30 cent-a-gallon price drop, which the e-mail claims happened during a similar boycott back in April 1997?
“It’s absolute urban legend,” said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service, which tracks gasoline prices for the motorist organization AAA. “There was no such drop.” (more…)
Another reason why a gas boycott is such a dumb idea is because most people today do not have the discipline to hold out as generations before us.
