We need to boycott BP. It needs to go viral. It needs to start now.
It’ll send a message and will focus the media back on what the oil companies do and don’t do. After Valdez, folks boycotted Exxon, and the media was forced to talk about it.
What's happening now? The story line will remain on the politics of the oil spill, maybe a little on the coastal effects, and then that's it.
The boycott is symbolic in that we’ll get our oil elsewhere. For now, that is. Since oil is a fungible commodity, this won't make folks stop driving, but it will force folks to think about it.
Every time you go to get gas, it’ll make you associate the act of going to a gas station with the oil spill in the gulf. It’ll make the media think about it, and maybe even cover it if the boycott becomes widespread. This is where we start.
Otherwise, the media will keep treating this as a political story (is this Obama’s fault, etc.) and we won’t get anywhere with it.
We should start with the obvious, get that going and then move to finding any more indirect destinations of BP’s oil. According to wikipedia, the following are BP’s retail brands:
BP
ampm
ARCO
Castrol
We can start by boycotting these.
If anyone here is big into social networking sites, please start groups to boycott BP (or share links of them if they exist), spread the word, and let others here know about spreading the word.
Beyond simply boycotting, we need folks to start understanding some realities about oil, where it comes from, and the future we face.
In 2005, the Department of Energy commissioned a report on the timeline and consequences of a peak in oil production, finding a overwhelming opinion among geologists that we would see oil depletion (worldwide) begin before 2016. (This report was called the Hirsch Report.) A more recent British industry report on oil depletion found that we have until about 2015 until oil depletion kicks in.
5 years. That's not much time before every year there's less oil than the year before. In 2005, Kunstler wrote a great book and associated article called The Long Emergency that explored the consequences of global oil depletion. More recently, Chris Smith (director of The Yes Men, also an awesome movie) directed Collapse, which discussed oil depletion and the economy.
It's worth thinking about, and we need to get the media to stop thinking about politics. A boycott could help that happen.