How to Fucking Slaughter Big Oil: An Open Letter to Chain Email People who Lack Critical Thinking Skills

This post is an official social policy paper of the Church of the Orange Sky and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Mad Reverends.

Okay, so it's May again, and time for another round of a ridiculous chain-email urban legend about how everyone should boycott buying gas on May 15 to send a message to large petroleum companies that we don't like our absurdly high gas prices. This will "put it to the industry" or something to that effect. (My quotations are out of whack because I already erased my emails in a pique of disgust, then decided to vent my wrath here as well.)

(You may not have seen this email, but I get it every couple years or so. Even if you're not familiar with it, you may be familiar with similar measures. I know in my hometown we occasionally had people agree not to buy gas on one day to complain about the latest five-cent jump in the price or something like that.)

The logical problem with this one-day boycott scheme should be obvious to just about any idiot: even people who respect the boycott are simply going to buy gas on some other day. And then you get well-meaning complicit journalists like this dude saying that the real way to get around high gas costs is just to use less gas, by driving responsibly and so on.

Okay, so I don't drive and I don't actually favour more gas use, which means I'm landing on the wrong side of this argument on personal grounds, kind of like the pro-smoking-at-high-school rallies I supported as a (non-smoking) teenager. This is because as an anarchist I have an interest in fighting losing battles against oppressive companies and governments simply for the sake of fighting such battles.

So then, if you want a boycott, here's how it's done. Fuck this one-day bullshit.

Beginning on May 15, since that's the date in the email, every single Canadian automobile owner you can convince with access to a gas station other than one from Shell and its subsidiaries, declares that they will not buy another penny of gas from Shell until it cuts its rates across Canada by at least 10 cents per litre and confirms it has done so in a public press release. Once Shell does that, people resolve not to buy gas from Esso, until it does the same. Then Petro-Canada, then Husky, then Mohawk, and so on. Realistically we wouldn't have to move very far down the list, because once Shell buckled, everyone else would do the same. And Shell would buckle, because in the face of a real consumer boycott, not this one-day horseshit, companies would have to find ways to save money and cut costs. Then we make the same demand of Shell and start round the list again. The process continues until the price has dropped low enough that people see no point in continuing the protest.

The only reason to cut short the protest would be if Shell decided to close up shop in Canada as a result. This is a most unlikely event, and one that has to be avoided, since if we permit the enemy to further monopolize the industry, this boycott strategy will no longer be possible and we'd have to move to a full boycott of all automobile gasoline for non-business and non-mass-transit purposes, something I think actually should happen but which almost certainly people aren't willing to do, because they're too busy enjoying the convenience of their planet-destroying transportation "needs" and frantically trying to find the freedom and autonomy the car commercial on TV promised they'd get after signing the appropriate lease papers. Knowing all this, the first thing Shell will do is make ominous threatening-sounding complaints about the dim future of gas stations. Ignore these threats. Better yet, spread this protest to other countries and leave them nowhere to retreat to.

The alternative, which is equally feasible, is to work the process in reverse and declare that we will only buy gas at Shell until another retailer cuts its prices ten cents from what it was on May 15. At that point we switch to the retailer in question and only buy gas from them, then demand another cut. And so on.

The problem right now is that the retailers collude to keep prices high. The solution therefore is for consumers to collude to force prices low. Their collusion relies on consumers essentially seeing gas stations as interchangeable. Therefore, we must stop seeing gas stations as interchangeable.