What If Gas Receipts Had Warning Labels?
Cigarette packs have the Surgeon General's warning. Alcohol bottles tell us not to operate heavy machinery while intoxicated. Doritos tell us their saturated fat content. What would happen if our gasoline receipts had disclaimers too?
"Pumping causes global warming, oil spills and may complicate foreign wars." Would that raise our consciousness about the dangers of fossil fuels?
I heard about this thought-provoking idea some weeks back at TEDxOilSpill conference in Washington, D.C, and since then it's been nagging at me. What would it mean if every time we went to the gas station, there was a not-so-subtle reminder about the threats our continued use of fossil fuels posed? A note about climate change, about oil spills, about worker safety and our health. It wouldn't have to be a guilt trip, since clearly most people don't have a lot of alternatives to filling up at the corner station to get to work. It could simply be informational -- just an FYI, really.
The idea comes from a conference speaker Lisa Margonelli, the director of the New America Foundation's energy initiative and the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank. In a New York Times op-ed awhile back, in the aftermath of the Gulf spill, she noted that every gallon of gas is indeed a gallon of risks, and that the spill is a unique opportunity to harness our political will to get "behind a sweeping commitment to use less gas — build cars that use less oil (or none at all) and figure out better ways to transport Americans."
Now, I don't think even she really believes her gas receipt warning label will actually come to pass. But it's an interesting thought experiment. Most of the time, Americans live in a state of willful ignorance about the risks of oil. Before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there was an oil spill practically every day in places like Nigeria. And as the coverage of the oil spill fades, and as this summer of weather chaos fades into the background, the urgency of those dangers will diminish -- as it always does (just look at what happened after Hurricane Katrina.)
For too long, climate advocates have relied on the latest disaster as a convenient way to nudge and urge and plead and cajole the public into a new awareness of the risks of fossil fuels. Disasters, after all, have been fundamental to the environmental movement's history. Yet it's turning out that even the Gulf oil spill might not be enough to put the American public over the edge: to demand, once-and-for-all, a paradigm change.
So what about instead a more constant nudge, an every day note as we fill up our tank, about what we are really filling up on? If our gas receipts had a warning label, I think our consciousness would slowly change. Maybe people would slowly start to make personal and political choices that reduce the nation's reliance on dangerous fossil fuels.
Just as calorie counts inform us what we are putting into our bodies, a gas receipt warning label wouldn't let us forget what we were really doing to our planet.
Photo credit: Fernashes, Flickr
Jess Leber
is a Change.org editor. She most recently covered climate and energy issues as a reporter in Washington, D.C
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