Not filling up won’t actually do anything

High gas prices make every­one’s budget tight.

Recently social media web­sites such as Facebook have been flooded with events calling for ev­eryone to boycott gas on a partic­ular day.

I have personally been invited to three such events occurring on March 11, 14 and 31.

Two of the three events had in its info section a success story of a boycott in 1997.

The story read “In April 1997, there was a ‘gas out’ conducted nationwide in protest of gas pric­es. Gasoline dropped 30 cents a gallon overnight.”

This message gives hope to those wanting to get cheaper gas prices.

Unfortunately, the claim is un­founded.

According to statistics compiled by the United States Department of Energy, the average gas price for the first week of the month and the average weekly gas price for the month was consistent at $1.24 a gallon.

If the gas prices did indeed plummet by 30 cents, no one re­corded it.

So, with no actual previous suc­cess story, all that is left are facts that can be found on the Internet.

According to the United States Department of Transportation, there are 255,917,664 registered highway vehicles. This includes buses, commercial trucks and passenger cars.

Let us imagine if every single car did not buy gas for one day.

Assuming that the average amount of gas bought for every car is 10 gallons, and that the price of gas is an even $3.50, in one day you will not give the oil compa­ny $8,957,118,240. That is a lot of money.

There are a few prob­lems with this, though. Most people do not buy gas on a daily basis.

I myself only buy once every two weeks.

Already this statistic is completely off.

Assuming this is true, the fact is you will just buy the gas the day before or day after. James Mues, a junior history major, agrees with this.

“It’s as if you decided to con­serve air, so you hold your breath. Eventually you will have to take another breath or you will die.”

So with having to buy gas, all protestors have done is switch the day on which the oil company makes a profit.

In the end, a day of not buy­ing gas in protest is useless.

So the real question is, what can people do to actually affect the oil company’s profits?

The only way to truly hurt a company is to use their product less.

So to damage the profit of the oil companies you have to use less fuel.