A Boycott Of Logic

So BP will be out of business next week then? No? Why not?  Are you perhaps thinking that the boycott of BP products and brands is about as pointless as asking Kim Jong Il to do standup comedy?  Me too.

The Boycott BP Facebook Group now has an amazing 725,000 members all solemnly pledging to kick BP’s oil soaked ass into the middle of next week. There is absolutely no doubt that the whole thing has been an ecological disaster of massive proportions, that BPs slimy limey ass does indeed need to feel the weight of a hefty boot and I have about as much sympathy for them as I do for drunk people who enter lion enclosures whispering “here kitty kitty”.

But here’s the problem in the thinking.

So we all get together and boycott BP, then go a quarter of a mile down the road to fill up at an Exxon outlet instead. Because hey, we still need to drive our cars, right? That’ll teach the oil companies. We’ll show em!  If you mess with us, we’ll get tough and fill up with gas somewhere else.

Spotted the deliberate mistake yet?

Exactly.  What use is a boycott of ONE oil company?  Next year it will be a different oil spill in another ecologically sensitive area with a different oil company in the firing line. Then presumably, we’ll have the Boycott ExXon Facebook Group and we’ll all be lining up to post another 5 million pictures of oil covered wildlife and black beaches. Will we consume any less oil?  I think you know the answer to this one.

If serious change is to come and these types of disasters are to be consigned to history then we need to move our collective stunted thinking from the use of oil altogether and move it towards clean energy technologies.

 If even half the amount of money spent on the cleanup so far was spent in research and development we’d have several new zero emissions / non-polluting prototypes within 18 months or less.

Less whingeing and more focus on R&D please, otherwise I will mobilise the waiting hoards with an aggressive bumper sticker campaign.

A Boycott Of Logic