Oil Prices Are Down but Gas Prices Are Skyrocketing With No End in Sight - Can We Please Imprison Oil Execs Now?
It's time to punish these vile anti-human corporations
I drive a Volkswagen Polo.
It’s like a Golf, but somehow smaller.
I just filled up…
And it cost me well over $100.
The US national average was $4.289 per gallon today.
In California, gas is well over eight bucks per gallon.
Over in the UK, analysts are predicting £3 per liter… a middle-class-crippling $17.86 per gallon.
Both the UK and Germany think they’ll have to implement diesel rationing within weeks.
But here’s the crazy thing:
There isn’t a shortage of fuel.
And crude oil prices are down.
Even when you factor in the lag from oil to gas, pump prices are still rising with no end in sight.
Why is this?
It’s because this isn’t a true fuel crisis — it’s an engineered criminal act against the commons by Big Oil to rob the working class while blaming it on the Russian war.
There is perhaps no class of human so wretched as fossil fuel executives.
They’ve destroyed our planet with drilling, fracking, ocean spills, tailing ponds, air poisoning, and greenhouse gases, leading to rampant planetary warming.
They’ve plunged us into countless wars.
They’re the first corporation to send an innocent man to prison.
And now, they’re making their final stand, robbing the public blind — and crushing millions of families in the process — before making their long-overdue switch to renewables.
Progressives are rightfully livid about the situation:
Remember, there’s more at stake here than it costing you an extra few hundred dollars per month at the pumps.
Never forget that the world still runs on diesel.
All those tractors plowing the fields.
All those trucks moving those crops.
All those tankers shipping that food overseas.
All those trucks moving packages to your grocery store.
When fuel prices go up, so do food prices.
And when food prices go up, thousands of our poorest brothers and sisters literally starve to death every single day.
There are embarrassingly easy ways to fix this
Everyone knows oil monopolies are leveraging a war to artificially inflate fuel prices, bankrupting and killing people in the process. This is predatory, illegal, immoral behavior. It is war profiteering, and oil execs should stand trial for it.
Politicians are slowly starting to respond to the fuel price crisis, and their solutions are not only pathetic but wildly corrupt:
Experts think the average UK household energy bill could increase by £4,000 by the end of this year. The Conservative government’s plan? A £200 loan scheme.
In California, a group of dopey Dems wants to send everyone in the state a $400 gas rebate.
I’m sure you see how idiotic this is.
Politicians are just creating new ways to subsidize oil profits.
Instead of dealing with the root issue of driving down fuel prices, they’re giving taxpayers taxpayer money to go spend on overpriced fuel.
The long-term solutions to this oil crisis are so stupidly simple that no sociopathic corporate-sponsored politician could ever get it done:
1. Ban exporting
Countries that allow their corporations to export oil while simultaneously importing oil from other nations need to force their domestic corporations to stop exporting. Not only will this halt overseas dependence on foreign oil, but it will save a huge amount of wasted transportation emissions.
2. Cap profits
Corporate profits are the ultimate inefficiency. Someday, workers will receive 100% of the value they create. The future is corporate-profit-free because efficiency always wins in the end. Plus, corporate profits just enrich the richest people on the planet, causing an ever-widening gap in wealth equality, and making the cost of living soar for the poor. For these reasons and more, we need a cap on oil profits. They get to keep the first 5%, and we-the-commons get the rest. This will force oil companies to either fork over money which we can then invest in renewables, or more likely, they’ll start aggressively investing in renewables themselves.
3. Separate oil and state
If we care at all about freedom and democracy, we need to ban Big Oil from funding political candidates, starting PACs to support them, or lobby-bribing them once they’re in office. Corporations are already anti-human entities whose legal fiduciary reason for existing is to extract value from the commons, and for oil companies, it’s to do so by hurting people and the planet. Why should they have any voice in our nation?
4. Jail the criminals
Just like Monopoly, we need to imprison any fossil fuel executive who breaks any of the above three rules.
(Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s cut the corporate socialism, end all fossil fuel subsidies, and force them to give back everything they’ve received by lobby-bribing corrupt politicians in the first place.)
If you need a handy infographic to share on social media, here it is:
What we can do
Of course, none of these four things will ever happen.
Big Oil is one of the major owners of Congress, and they’ll never let their sponsored politicians pass a bill that could hurt their profits. And the reality is that nearly every member of Congress is profiting from Big Oil via their investments and pension plans.
Instead, Big Oil is going to take us for one last ride, charging us as much for fuel as economically possible until we all switch to electric.
But by then, they’ll be sitting on a huge war chest of our money so they, too, can make the switch to renewable energy. (Just wait for the insufferable commercials Exxon will run when they reach 100% clean energy, preening like they’re the good guy planet-saviors we’ve all been waiting for.)
So what can we little people do?
Not much.
We can stop voting for Republicans and Democrats, that’s for sure.
The only other meaningful thing we can do is defund Big Oil:
Drive as little as possible
Working from home definitely helped a lot of people, but there’s so much more we can do to design a low-drive life, including moving. We’ve moved our life to mostly walkable. Because we now both work from home and live in a small village, we drive ~10 miles most weeks.Switch to biodiesel
If you live in a warmer state, find a local hippie who’s turning old McDonald’s fry oil into biodiesel. If you buy it in bulk, you’ll not only be defunding the oil industry, but you can typically save money, too.Switch to an electric vehicle
Assuming you get your electricity from renewables and not Big Oil — and that’s a huge assumption — going electric is another great way to stick it to Exxon et al.Ditch cars completely
The auto industry is one of the biggest false dichotomies in history. They’ve given us a choice: Gas/diesel car or electric car. But there’s a third option: Re-setting cities to their original plans — carless and walkable, with eco-rail for longer distances. If you can, switch to walking or cycling. I have several friends who’ve already switched to e-bikes and mopeds.Divest
If you own a 401(k), private pension plan, mutual fund, or index fund Robinhood robo-ETF-whatever, there’s a near-100% chance that you’re personally profiting from destroying the planet and robbing the poorest people in society. If you want to do the moral thing, sell every single share that’s invested in Big Oil. Otherwise, you’re just a complicit hypocrite, and I know that’s not what your heart truly wants.
I hope you’re furious every time you fill up your car.
I hope you’re taking daily steps to defund Big Oil.
Since we’re all forced to play the commodified global economy money game, we have to spend (and unspend) to actualize the world we want to live in.
I don’t know about you, but I want to live in a world where the monsters who see the murder of Ukrainians citizens as an opportunity to generate crisis profits end up bankrupt and in prison.
Let’s get to work.