I hope I have not exhausted the scope of my commentary on the Gulf oil spill yet, because it is a subject of heartfelt interest for me — and a wellspring of personal vitriol. It solaces me in a way that could never be put in print to know BP’s quarterly earnings have spiked from $2.6 to $6.1 billion — all in a year’s work of despoiling some of our nation’s last wetlands and toxifying the coastal wildlife habitat far worse than anything the architects of Exxon Valdez ever dreamed up.And there is a filthy lucre still to be made from the disaster. But not for BP.This loot is for temporary spill-response workers, with the red “MC 252” stickers slapped on their masts. On Fourth of July weekend, a fleet of small motor boats filled with idling BP contractors sat docked in the wet slips of the Cypress Cove Marina, in Venice. The men aboard were fattening their pockets while waiting for the opportune weather conditions to begin their “controlled-burning” operations — this is pendent on caprices of nature like the strength of the west wind, and whether or not it will storm heavily on a given day. The fitful raining might die down later today or sometime tomorrow or never, for that matter. None of that is important with $20 per hour pay and a bulky government “per diem” check to take to the bank.So it is hard to dismiss anti-BP sentiments as the ravings of “fringe liberals” and all manner of other bleeding hearts too squeamish to cope with the harsh realities of what foulness is brewing in our Gulf of Mexico. Many individual petroleum consumers now believe that the best policy is to avoid fueling up outright at any place unlucky enough to bear the loathsome BP insignia. The advocacy group Public Citizen has gone so far as to call for a national boycott of BP — with the aim of crippling service stations across the country and dealing heavy financial damage to the oil giant.While their zeal is admirable, the folks at Public Citizen envision a boycott measure that would probably do little except put a damper on revenue for locally-owned gas stations — and result in only a paltry amount of lost earnings for BP — what basically amounts to “a round off error” in lost revenue for a multi-billion dollar oil conglomerate.This is in part due to the bizarre marketing process for commercially sold gasoline — Ron Lieber of the New York Times explains that “the gas in [BP’s] pumps may not be extracted, refined, or stored by the company and may just get a spritz of BP additives right before it ends up at the service station.” This peppering of additives contributes a few nickels to CEO Tony Hayward’s coffer and probably not much else. Conversely, every unmarked or independent convenience store is potentially a BP station in lurking, since they may purchase directly from BP-supplying wholesalers, but with no ominous skull and cross-bones hazard label to ward away leery customers.This could mean, given the apparently incestuous relationship between major oil companies in the U.S., that you’re liable to get a medley of different petrol derivatives for any particular “brand” of gasoline you buy. BP-extracted and refined crude could be ever-present, in some latent form or another, in every gasahol purchase inside the continental United States. It is a horrifying prospect with murky undertones of a corporate takeover.It is also a real tangle of thorns — especially confusing for protesters who are now unsure whether to sling an opened can of brown Sherwin Williams paint at the conspicuous BP station off the interstate or their own now-suspect neighborhood Kwik-E-Mart.As for myself, I have slowly come to grips with the fact that it is fruitless and probably mentally unhealthy to be laden with such a deep and long-stewing despondency about our country’s ultimate fate and the meaning of life — all because of some freak accident of a rig explosion 40 miles off Louisiana’s coast that no one but the Oracle of Delphi could have predicted.A spokesperson for the Petroleum Marketers Association of America confirmed the labeling process for the refined petroleum products: “It doesn’t become a brand of gasoline until it gets those additives.” And maybe that is a metaphor, in some jangled sense, for the kind of interwoven and complicit guilt that belongs to everyone with a stake in the oil industry. In this case, a crew of unwitting petroleum engineers aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig served as the “spruce of additives” that branded the catastrophe with the emblem of BP. And perhaps in some dark sewer of the human subconscious, there is a little bit of BP-refined crude trickling through us all.
—-Contact Trevor Fanning at [email protected].