Gasoline now costs a little more than $3 a gallon in the states, ranging from a South Carolina low of $2.77 to a high of $3.41 in Hawaii. Wow. We’ve got three dollar a gallon gas here in Arkansas, a little cheaper in the truck stops than in residential areas. The prices fluctuate daily, which leads some to explain that the market price for gas could NOT be due solely to changes in supply and demand of oil. There seem to be manipulations of oil prices going on, but I’m just going to talk here about buying gas.
Let’s talk about Exxon, Citgo, Chevron, and independent gasoline retailers.
The price of gas is the cost of crude oil to oil refineries, the cost of refining the oil, the cost of shipping the gas to your station, and the cost of the gas retailer’s overhead. Independent gasoline stations buy the leftovers from oil refineries, the exact same gas, after Exxon and others have bought their share. Since the independent retailers haggle over the price gasoline , they have an aggregate effect of lowering the cost over time. Support your independent gas stations. Exxon, Citgo, and Shell’s prices don’t vary all that much.
Ethical considerations are much more cut and dried. Exxon is the oil company with the worst record. A small list of charges will suffice. Exxon was one of the major players in the formulation of Dick Cheney’s behind-closed-doors (yes, a Charlie Rich reference) Energy Task Force meetings. Another coup for Exxon was Bush taking the U.S. signature off the Kyoto Protocol in 2000. It’s not only some politicians in Alaska who want to develop the oil fields, it’s also Exxon who paid their campaign contributions to members of the appropriate committees on Capitol Hill. For the 2000 cycle Exxon gave $1,375,250 to political campaigns. From 1990 to the present, Exxon has given over nine million to politicians and parties, currently 90% to Republicans. Exxon spends much more on lobbying for or against particular legislation.
Exxon has yet to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Also, Exxon is running the appeals process trying to avoid paying seven billion dollars in damages to those affected by the oil spill. Considering their record profits, that’s a big turn-off. There have been numerous oil spills into rivers and lakes around the world due to sheer negligence, simply not taking the time and spending the money to maintain and repair the thousands of miles of oil pipelines. It’s a typical corporate strategy of externalizing as much of the cost as you can to society at large. Overall Exxon is fairly typical for oil and gasoline dealers. The bigger they get, and they are the number one in gasoline in the states right now, the less responsible they become.
The second largest gasoline retailer is Chevron Texaco, created by a buyout in 2002. You’d think all these buyouts that leave us with fewer corporate entities would lower the gasoline prices by lowering overhead. Anyways, Chevron is being sued by attorneys representing rainforest people in Ecuador for making their lives more dangerous. Apparently Chevron has been dumping highly toxic waste created by extracting and refining oil for some 20 years. At a California Superfund site, Chevron and other polluters figured they could dump toxic waste on ground that already had toxic waste from WWII, and no one would be the wiser. In fact Chevron et al argued that the U.S. taxpayers should pay to have it all cleaned up. The cases of dumping in the oil industry just go on and on.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Chevron for adding to instability in already perilous political systems by giving bribes to officials in Equitorial New Guinea for oil deals. Oh yeah, and they love Arnold, the gasoline guzzler, need we say more? Clearly Chevron isn’t the big and nasty like Exxon, but they would be if only they were bigger.
Finally Citgo is the most interesting considering its owner isn’t a nightmarish dictator or warlord. Citgo hasn’t had all that many problems in terms of having to fix old equipment because of massive environmental damage. They are currently wrapped up in a Corpus Cristi case over the MTBE gasoline additive, and its deadly emissions, which is becoming illegal across the states. This is creating a frenzy for those Venezuela haters, but they forget that every major oil corporation has been attacked for the MTBE-treated, gasoline emissions, and rightly so. The stuff is deadly and gets into the groundwater. Check to see if your state has banned it in your gasoline yet. I either buy Citgo gasoline or gasoline from independent stations. The reason is that more of your dollar will be going to Venezuela, the owner of Citgo and a thriving democracy, versus the pockets of Exxon or Chevron executives and their partners in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and other places hostile to basic human rights. President Chavez of Venezuela has spent the last going on nine years promising and following through with well-funded social programs, paid for partly by Citgo oil and gasoline sales, that put our ‘grab the money and run’ economy to shame. Venezuela has also been sharing the oil wealth with neighbors by making low and no interest loans to other South American countries, at a time when other creditors force debt-holders to cut social programs and lower tariffs.
It doesn’t matter much where you buy your gasoline except to the people that run the gas stations. Honor those few stations that provide full service, even if they don’t carry Sun Chips. A small part of every dollar of gasoline purchased changes its destination based on where you bought. Some of the oil Exxon sells comes from Venezuela, and some of Chevron’s gas comes from Mexico, some of Citgo’s comes from Arabia. All the oils are mixed at the refinery.
So check out my links to pages that tell about the Fortune 500 companies and others. Know more.
