Funny thing is Citgo's headquarters are in Houston, Texas. It may be owned by a Venezuelian company, but they didn't change headquarters when they bought it.

I've had too many friends and family memembers working for the Oil companies to know that where you purchase gas has little to no effect on them.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that I am more inclined to buy petroleum products that come from Venezuela than anywhere overseas...

Wouldn't not buying gas from companies that buy more oil from the Middle East affect the demand for oil from there? Would that not affect the price? I fail to see why you WOULDN'T start to get a price differential between oil produced in various parts of the world. "If you don't buy it, someone else will" is not an economic argument.

/"If you don't buy it, someone else will" is not an economic argument./

As amazing as it sounds, it is in fact the consensus view among economists. I don't entirely understand it all myself, but do a google search for "gasoline", and "fungible" and maybe you'll be able to make more sense out of it than I can.

Linus,

I don't entirely understand it all myself, but the consensus among ecomonists is that

I think this page (http://www.snopes.com/polit...) cleared this up for me a little bit. As I understand it, what they're saying is that even if sales go way down at a particular brand's gas stations, they can sell the other to another brand without taking a loss. This may be true, and of course, the more this goes on, the less consumers know about the circumstances surrounding the procurement of the gasoline they buy.

HOWEVER, opportunity exists to give consumers more information about the gasoline they buy. Organic certification for food is a similar concept, as are "conflict-free" diamonds. If the supply chain were made more transparent, this kind of choice has the opportunity to make a difference.

Linus,

The problem with gasoline (or any scarce, necessary commodity) is that "who" you buy it from is less important than that it is bought.

Imagine if you will three apples, and three people. Each person needs to be fed. One apple is Red Delicious, one is Granny Smith, one is Golden Delicious.

If you say that you don't like Golden Delicious and refuse to eat anything other than Red Delicious, you probably can get away with eating only Red Delicious - but the other two hungry people will eat the others. Your choice of which apple you ate didn't matter, because it was a zero-sum scenario; all of the apples had to be eaten, whether you personally ate a particular one or not.

Oil - being a scarce and necessary commodity - is the same. Yes, theoretically speaking, you as a consumer could choose to patronize only certain gas stations. Yes, theoretically speaking, the US could cut off buying oil from countries whose terror ties are pretty certain.

Would it hurt those countries? Likely not. In order to do so, the US would have to increase its orders from other countries. Those countries would then have to lower the amount of oil they sold to current customers, who would then go... straight to the terror-supporting countries. At the end of the day, the "who" of who bought oil from a given country changed, but the net result - that XXX barrels of oil were bought every day - did not.

That's the problem with the scenario. If you have a problem with (for instance) milk from hormone-treated cows, you can buy "certified organic" milk or whatever. There is a certain amount of milk that sits on the shelves, overproduced, and eventually expires unbought. Milk is not quite a "scarce" commodity in that sense, and indeed, it's likely the "certified organic" milk that sits on the shelves, since it's usually priced higher than the normal milk.

With Oil, you as the consumer have a choice on where to buy, but if too many people buy from one company then they'll run out, and the only alternative - since people have to get to their jobs and other places and rely on oil to do so - is to buy from the "less acceptable" places. So where you buy from doesn't matter, really; the only way for there to be major impact is for societal reliance on oil to decrease as a whole, to the point where oil ceases to be scarce as such.