Want to defund terrorists and hold down gas prices at the same time? Try this spanky.

Where to buy gasoline and not support terrorism...actually is food for thought. Yisrael Medad of the Begin Center sent the following information.

Every time you fill up the car, you can avoid putting more money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia. Just buy from gas companies that don't import their oil from the Saudis.

Nothing is more frustrating than the feeling that every time I fill up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family and my friends. I thought it might be interesting for you to know which oil companies are the best to buy gas from. Major companies that import Middle Eastern oil (for the period 9/1/00 - 8/31/01):

All of this information is available from the Department of Energy and can be easily documented. Refineries located in the U.S. are required to state where they get their oil and how much they are importing. They report on a monthly basis. Keep this list in your car; share it with friends. Stop paying for terrorism!

DO YOU REMEMBER LAST MAY, WHEN GAS PRICES WERE THREATENING TO GO TO $2.00 PER GALLON? I ACTUALLY PAID $2.05 PER GALLON IN OHIO. WELL, THEY ARE TRYING TO DO IT AGAIN. WE E-MAILED EVERYONE IN OUR ADDRESS BOOKS, AND ASKED EVERYONE ELSE TO DO THE SAME. WITHIN DAYS, AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE GOT THE MESSAGE, AND GUESS WHAT? MYSTERIOUSLY, GAS PRICES WENT DOWN.

THE SOLUTION IS SIMPLE: WE JUST BOYCOTT EXXON AND MOBILE, THE TWO LEADERS IN THE INDUSTRY, AND BOYCOTT THE OTHER FOUR OR FIVE OIL COMPANIES THAT ARE BUYING OIL FROM THE MIDEAST, AND WE WILL AIM A DOUBLE BARREL SHOT GUN AT THE COMPANIES THAT SUPPORT TERRORISM IN THE MIDEAST, AND SIMPLY JUST BUY FROM THE OTHER FOUR OR FIVE COMPANIES WHO DON'T BUY OIL FROM THE TERRORIST-SUPPORTING COUNTRIES.

IT IS YOUR MONEY! SPEND IT WISELY! JUST SAY "NO" TO MIDEASTERN COUNTRIES WHO SUPPORT TERRORISM!

Check out the urban legends page at snopes before posting email stuff. This has been posted and debunked before.

Interesting, though: The Snopes page doesn't really contradict what the email claims. (It does cast some doubt on the ability for the published statistics to accurately reflect where all the oil originally originates from.)

But mostly it just tries to debunk the whole notion of a boycott. So according to Snopes this isn't an urban legend, just not a very good idea.

Snopes does like to interject their opinions sometimes, and they don't do a good job of identifying them as such. Sometimes you have to read their pages carefully.

Here are their arguments against the boycott:

The political naïveté that asserts "Middle Eastern" equals "terrorist," and that by purchasing gasoline refined from Middle Eastern crude oil you are "sending your money to people who are trying to kill you." Not everyone from the Middle East is a terrorist, nor does every terrorist hail from the Middle East. Moreover, groups such as the Al-Qaeda have built up financial investments and portfolios so complex and diverse over the years that they can operate quite effectively without receiving direct revenues from oil exports.

The notion that because a refinery purchases crude oil from a non-Middle Eastern country, they're not buying Middle Eastern oil. A good deal of the crude oil purchased from Russia, for example, is oil from Iraqi fields sold through Russian middlemen, but it still shows up in the refineries' books as having been imported from Russia.

The implication that most of the oil exported to the U.S. comes from the Middle East. According to the Energy Information Administration (as reported by The New York Times), the biggest exporters of oil to the USA in 2000 were (in millions of barrels per day):
Canada: 1.69
Saudi Arabia: 1.57
Venezuela: 1.52
Mexico: 1.36
Nigeria: 0.89
Iraq: 0.61

The shaky grasp of supply and demand evidenced by the proffered scheme. Oil refineries generally operate at close to full capacity; if everyone in the USA stopped buying gasoline from Shell, Chevron, Texaco, Exxon, and Mobil, and instead purchased their gas only from Citgo, Sunoco, Conoco, Sinclair, Phillips, or BP Amoco-supplied service stations, the companies in the latter group wouldn't be able to come close to satisfying the sudden increase in demand for gasoline, because their refinery capacity is limited. Their supplies would run out, and prices would skyrocket. And even if they could somehow come up with extra refinery capacity necessary to fulfill the increased demand, they'd almost certainly have to turn to Middle Eastern exporters for the additional crude they'd need to supply those refineries.

After crude oil has been pumped out of the ground, put in tankers, shipped around the world, refined into gasoline, and delivered to service stations, that gasoline can't necessarily be traced back to its point of origin. Nor do oil companies sell only gasoline to their own branded stations -- that a consumer buys gasoline at a non-Shell service station is no guarantee that the gasoline didn't come from Shell, or that it wasn't refined from Middle Eastern crude.

Don't be a buffoon who buys into this crap. Ever heard of "resellers"? In a free market economy, you cannot control destinatio :

"Once oil is in a tanker or refinery, there is no controlling its destination. During the 1973 embargo, for instance, OPEC oil that was exported to Europe was simply resold to the U.S. or ended up displacing non-OPEC oil that was diverted to the U.S. market. U.S. oil imports were no more disturbed at the end of the day than Soviet grain imports were disturbed by the short-lived and ineffectual 1980 grain embargo. Saudi oil minister Sheik Yamani conceded afterwards that the 1973 embargo 'did not imply that we could reduce imports to the United States . . . The world is really just one market. So the embargo was more symbolic than anything else.'

"But how does that square with the popular belief that the October 1973 embargo quadrupled world oil prices, spawned shortages, and sent the U.S. into an economic tailspin? Well, world oil prices did skyrocket. But it had less to do with the embargo than with the panic stockpiling triggered by tensions in the Middle East, tensions that broke into open war by October. While Arab oil production was cut by 340 million barrels between October and December, that cutback was less than the inventory buildup that occurred earlier in the year. There was still plenty of oil to go around. But few were willing to sell it given the fear of a future dearth."

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1018400976565737920,00.html?mod=opinion%5Fmain%5Fcommentaries

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