Green Gasoline and Other Miracles of Marketing

The other day I stopped for gas at the fancy BP gas station just south of Beverly Hills on Robertson. It's like fueling up at Pinkberry; the floor is really nice and kind of pebbly, everything is just so, aesthetically speaking. The lighting changes colors every couple seconds, there was peaceful music and the squeegee had an extra long handle so you don't have to lean on your car to reach the far edge of the windshield. The trash cans are futuristic like the pumps like the walls. There's a moist towelette dispenser in the wall. The cashier was a good-looking young blonde woman.

There was a woman at the next pump shrieking inanities into her cell phone while pumping gas, which is great only in that everyone within earshot was probably hoping that a spark in her phone would ignite the gas fumes and cause her to explode. I picked up some postcards that are biodegradable with flower seeds embedded in them.

The premise of this gas station is that it is eco-friendly. I read up on it, and apparently there are solar panels in the roof, the walls are made of recycled steel, the flooring is made of recycled glass, and fleets of seraphim form a protective angelic filter around the gasoline so it is non-polluting. Except that last part isn't true. Yeah, that's right, it's a gas station tarted up to make people feel super ecological and stylish about using gas.

Trendy environmentalism annoys the shit out of me. Environmentalism is not chic, folks. It's utilitarian and non-matching. It involves having less and using less. It involves washing it and using it again. Every ad I see touting a company's ecological consciousness has people wandering around in slomo through a rainforest, or an artfully composed shot of a sunflower, but they all involve the same aesthetic as this gas station: environmentalism equals clean. Are you kidding me? Chemicals equal clean. Environmentalism equals me not having AC and finding maggots in my trash can that I try to clean with vinegar but at a certain point say fuck it and clean with bleach. Environmentalism equals shoveling cow shit into your manure pile of hot rotting vegetables. Or hanging onto the same cell phone or computer when it is dinged up and ugly and parts of it don't work. Or flitering tap water instead of buying bottled. Or bringing your lunch to work in a jar. These things are not clean, they are not stylish and they don't make a much of a palpable difference to the environment, but that's what living ecologically actually is.

The danger of cool, clean, hip eco-friendly products is the same problem that Marie Antoinette had: you can run around and pretend to be a milkmaid all you want, but if the only savvy it brings you is to suggest cake-eating to cure the bread shortage, then you may find yourself out of game earlier than you had originally planned.