Posted on 04/09/2002 9:49:19 PM PDT by PRO 1
Who knows. Maybe there is some merit to a net wide circulation to this idea.
I await your comments.
I don't know where ARCO gets their "juice".
1000 pardons.
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.
I'm indisposed tonite, so someone else will have to do the sleuthing...
This "story" is erroneous, on many levels.
Don't worry about the source of the gas you put in your car. But support Pres. Bush's initiative to increase our domestic production of petroleum and other energy sources.
"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
CITGO.
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