May 15th Gas Out

I’ve gotten several emails recently about a proposed “gas-out” for May 15^th so I decided to do a little research on it. Boy, was I surprised to find out that it wouldn’t do us much good.

Basically this is the same email that’s been going around since 1999!!! This email pops up yearly around May and gets everyone all upset and jumping on the band wagon to do something.

The whole thing makes sense when you first read it but if you dig a little deeper, it really doesn’t. Not buying gas on one day in particular doesn’t effect the oil companies in any way shape or form. It doesn’t ask us all to park our vehicles for the day and not use any gas at all. The same amount of gas is being used in the scenario of the email, we are just shifting when we actually purchase the gas.

To boycott according to www.dictionary.com is to abstain from buying or using. Well, so if we didn’t buy gas on May 15^th, we weren’t abstaining from buying or using. We just bought a different day but we all still used the same amount. Not buying gas on that day will certainly make a lot of us feel better by actually doing SOMETHING but it won’t have any impact on prices at all. Most of all, it will effect the small business owners of the gas stations. The profit margins are so small there that one day of disruption in their consistent flow of business could wipe out many days worth of earnings because you are not going inside to buy your up-sell items.

Gasoline is a global commodity and it’s price is determined not by us not going to the pump one day instead of another but by the regular forces of supply and demand. The answer is much less fun of course, cutting down on our driving all together, car pooling, taking public transportation and things of that nature.

The “gas out” does one good thing on the other hand, it does call attention to the problem that we have with is our dependence on foreign oil and our need for so much of it.

So, now that being said, what are you going to do to use less oil or gas? I was all for the gas out until I read this information.

Let me know what you think,

Beth Riegger
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