BP (Boycott Petroleum) | Green Energy News

June 13, 2010 – Vol.15 No.13

BP (BOYCOTT PETROLEUM)
by Bruce Mulliken, Green Energy News

After the Valdez spill I boycotted Exxon for years. It made me feel better, but the company continued to thrive without my gasoline purchases. Yet the company, now ExxonMobil, is still tainted from the spill more than 20 years ago.

The damage from a boycott to BP as a global corporation may be minimal, at least in the short run. It’s more likely that a local business owner would be hurt from reduced sales, than the massive company itself. The local BP filling station is a franchise, owned and operated by someone who could be, well, your neighbor. BP exited the retail gasoline business two years ago.

In the long run BP will have the same taint that Exxon has, with or without a boycott. People will remember the messed up Gulf of Mexico for decades.

Gavan Fitzsimons, Professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University, says boycotting BP offers an immediate psychological boost to consumers and a long term impact to the company.

From a psychological standpoint, “Consumers have goals that they want to satisfy. I'm hungry, so I eat. I'd like to seem cool, so I buy the latest tech gadget. But when a consumer has a goal to achieve vengeance against a misperforming company, they can be hard to satisfy. Boycotts provide that opportunity and -- at least for a short while as one drives past the BP station on the way to stop at Shell -- lets the consumer take some comfort in temporarily satisfying a goal,” says Fitzsimons

“Boycotts are often social, which gives a second outlet for the consumer to feel better about the negative situation. By convincing others to boycott we magnify the impact we have, and again feel we've satisfied our goal to achieve payback.

“In general, I think most consumers realize that not buying a tank of gas from a BP station isn't going to have a huge direct effect on BP or its behavior. But the psychological pleasure of ‘punishing’ BP will be satisfying in the short term.

“From BP’s perspective, the long-terms effects of the negative associations and having consumers ‘talking trash’ about BP -- without BP in the dialogue -- would be far more worrisome, I would imagine.”

More than boycotting BP, a better revolt would be to boycott petroleum altogether: That is, use as little petroleum as possible or find ways to switch to other transportation fuels.

Interestingly, the spill comes at a time when vehicles are beginning a long period of transformation: The slow switch from gasoline to electric drive is underway. Car manufacturers worldwide are including electric drive in their product lineups for the near future. Public charging stations are being built while much of the infrastructure for charging is already in place. At minimum, an electrical outlet in a driver’s garage is all that’s needed to keep an electric car fueled. The excess, unsold, off-peak power on the grid can handle the new energy drain for years.

Even with clean electric vehicles coming on the market, those in the oil industry needn’t worry about tomorrow. The switch over to electric drive will take decades, time for economies in oil producing states to adapt.

Oil itself will have a future too, always will. We’ll need it for petrochemicals for use in such things as drugs and light, high strength materials. Oil may actually help us use less of itself. Stronger-than-steel composites of mostly oil are already in use in transportation applications with the goal of saving fuel by making vehicles lighter.

Oil has given us incredible mobility on land, sea and in the air. It has also made us more productive: A gas powered leaf blower is far more efficient in moving leaves around than a rake.

But oil also has been the root cause of international conflicts, has caused death and destruction in our environment, and has added to our economic problems. Sending $800-plus million a day out of the country to buy oil is money that would be better spent at home.

Oil is not running out any time soon. either. It is getting more difficult to get however, and demand is growing daily. Every new car or truck put on the road where there wasn’t one before means that bit-by-bit the global vehicle population is growing and needs to be fed. The next oil finds will be in the Arctic, after that the Antarctic.

So boycotting BP may feel good now, but it won’t put the company out of business. Any damage to the company will be caused by its falling stock value. Even if BP were to disappear, drilling for oil won’t. Right now the only way to get rid of oil is for consumers to quit using it: a long term, petroleum boycott.