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Oil on our hands

Category: Walkable Communities

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Written by Randy Garbin

Oil spill got you down, Bunky? Seeing all those pictures of pelicans covered with muck just making you sick? Are you asking yourself, "Why won't someone do something about this?" or maybe screaming "Those crooks at BP need to be thrown in jail!"

Do you sit behind the wheel of your car idling in a traffic jam during your morning commute listening to the news on your radio, and all it seems to have is one story after another of this disaster unfolding, and it just gets you more and more depressed?

And are you thinking that maybe we should all just boycott those evil bastards at BP to teach them a lesson?

Is that what's getting you down, Bunky?

As usual, the media, the president, and the general population have completely managed to avoid the most salient aspect of this horrific disaster, which simply is this:

If you have bought into the lifestyle that you cannot maintain without the use of your automobile, then you are a part of this problem. That oil well out there might just as well have your name on it. 

Say what you will about BP's competence and its irresponsibility and whether or not they should have better prepared for this disaster. BP was out there doing one thing: Meeting the voracious demand that WE have created for oil and its byproducts. Because we consume ever more amounts of this stuff every year and because the remainder of the planet's reserves for it now lie in either politically or environmentally sensitive regions of the globe, companies like BP have little choice but to risk more resources — theirs and Mother Nature's — to make sure we have plenty of gasoline supplied to fuel our increasingly ridiculous lifestyle habits.

The average commute for Americans now stands at about 45 minutes. We travel most of those commuted miles in cars — alone. Most of those cars weigh a ton or more and require billions of gallons of petroleum to make, use, and maintain — just in this country alone.

We seem to need these cars and this particularly wasteful transportation system because we do not, as as society, want to live near where we work, shop, or entertain ourselves. Much of the working population prefers to live in separate little half-acre enclaves connected to the rest of the world only by their steel and oil behemoths, which they use for even the smallest of errands.

And yet, I suspect that all of those people, when they get home and turn on the news or read the paper and see the images of the spreading spill and the dying wildlife and despite their seething fail to make the connection between that spill and their own lifestyle, which quite frankly is the cause of it. Hate to have to slap you in the face with that, but it is the truth.

No, the most indignant among us want to throw BPs officers in jail and to sue the company into oblivion. Fine. But what then? We get rid of BP and the drilling continues by ExxonMobil or Chevron.

And boycotts? Oh, please. Anyone calling for a boycott of BP is completely ignorant of how the oil industry functions. The oil now heading for Louisiana beaches would have gone to refineries owned by any number of companies. A sustained boycott of BP would have hurt the local retailer far more than it would have hurt any BP stockholder or corporate executive. When the oil comes out of the ground, it flows into a global market, mixing with oil from all the other sources. Gas at a BP station likely originated from wells drilled by any number of companies and vice versa.

Oil is a nasty, dirty substance. But it also makes billions in profits for the companies that extract and sell it for one simple reason: We want to maintain the lifestyle to which we are accustomed and in blissful disregard for the planet on which we live. We might hate to see beaches soiled and shrimp fishermen lose their livelihoods, but how many of us will make fundamental changes to our lifestyles to insure with absolute certainty that this never happens again?

Forget about useless boycotts. Stop your bitching about whether or not BP really gives a damn about you or the pelicans or the fishermen. Prove you really want to do something about this mess and make it your personal goal to live a lifestyle with a severly diminished dependence on oil. Live closer to stuff. Walk to things. Ride a bike. Move to where we already have underused infrastructure (Hint: We call them cities and towns.) Advocate for better transit in your community. Stop looking at you car as your lifeline. And stop accepting at face value anything with the "GREEN" label on it. Most of that campaign is utter nonsense.

Think just for a moment about how our grandparents lived: In communities closer to their sources of food, education, and employment. Combine that mind-blowing concept with some truly sensible technologies that might replace our need to burn fossil fuels. And if you want to provide yourself with some of the "luxuries" not afforded by all this, then expect to pay the real costs to acquire them unsubsidized by government redistributions and tax breaks.

I'm a firm believer that this in no way constitutes a reversal in our standard of living, but instead a true step forward in the right direction we might have achieved if not for the discovery of and dependence on oil. I walk to work. I live near a train station. I use transit. I own a car, but I drive it less than 5,000 miles a year. I'd give it up entirely if I had access to something like Zipcar. If all of you could say the same, I believe that we wouldn't even need companies like BP to put more and more of our environment at risk.