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May 05, 2005
Oil
Have you ever wondered where that gas money of yours goes? It’s a lot of money these days, and it’d be nice if the money you put in your tank wasn’t bankrolling terrorist regimes. Unfortunately, it probably is. You’ve probably bought hundreds of gallons of oil from Saudi Arabia, terrorist breeding ground par excellence. Sure, there’s plenty of other oil-producing countries, including stable democracies, like Britain and Canada. And we even produce some oil right here at home. But when you fill your tanks you have no way of knowing whether that gas is coming from Oklahoma or the Middle East.
Isn’t that odd? Gasoline is one of the few commodities you consume on a daily basis without country-of-origin labeling. The coffee you drink. Is it Columbian? Check the can. The clothes you wear, are they Chinese? Check the tag. The car you drive, is it American? Check the brand. But the gas you put in your car, is it American? Who knows.
It’s time gasoline came with labels telling us where it came from. Ask for a sticker on the pump to tell us who we’re buying that oil from. It’s not that hard to do. It’s good policy. And it’s time Democrats everywhere demanded it.
Oil labeling is good because it permits consumer choice, and consumer choice is a good thing. In domestic policy we’re already the consumer party. Even better, on a macroeconomic scale it frees the American oil market to encourage countries with good relations with the United States and a good public image here (like Britain or Norway) and discourage countries with a poor reputation (like Saudi Arabia or Iran).
The federal government cannot intervene directly in the oil market to encourage the consumption of oil from certain countries and not others. To slap a tariff on Saudi oil and a rebate on Russian oil would incite OPEC. But though the government can do precious little to end our dependence on Middle East oil, with country-of-origin labeling individual Americans can.
Given the choice, I would buy Russian or Venezuelan gas before Saudi gas and American gas before both. So would other people. I’m not suggesting a boycott of Saudi oil. The Saudis control too much of the market for that. But if we let the free market reward some producers and punish others, we can lessen our dependence on particularly unsavory regimes, if not outright end it.
Of course, oil labeling will do nothing to alter the world’s total oil supply. We will still have to pump gas in our cars, and some of that gas will inevitably come from unsavory places. But country-of-origin labeling would encourage the development of additional production capacity (as the world oil market continues to expand, production capacity will expand to keep up) in reserves in more popular places. That is, it won’t make all that oil under the Saudi desert go away, but it will encourage less new drilling there and more new digging in Canada. With time, this will change the makeup of the world’s oil producers and lessen our dependence on Middle East oil.
Label our gas and we’ll vote with our wallets on Middle East oil.
Posted by James Fichter at May 5, 2005 12:34 PM
