Oil Watchdog

08-28-07 by dugan

It’s Tuesday afternoon at the meeting of the National Conference of Weights and Measures, a humid Chicago day. Deep in the air-conditioned windowless meeting room, during this afternoon’s technical discussion of selling fuel that is compensated for temperature, the experts on the panel were interrupted.

Very well-dressed older man raises his hand and says, "Wait a minute. What’s going to happen to us when someone buys a temperature-adjusted gallon and sues us because it doesn’t come to a full gallon? Attorneys general all over the country will be after us! " He sounds like a little retailer who doesn’t really understand temperature compensation.

But No. It’s Tim Columbus, a top Washington lobbyist, winner of lobbyist of the year awards in the Capitol. He’s representing the gasoline wholesalers and distributors, and trying desperately to change the subject–from how to fix hot fuel to why we shouldn’t fix hot fuel.

Everything from milk to beer is sold by the gallon as measured at a certain temperature. Consumers don’t bring lawsuits about this, as the experts are telling Columbus. Now, he’s yelling, "Don’t interrupt me!" He’s eager to introduce the "consumers are too stupid to understand" argument into the record. It will be his mantra for the rest of this fight. 

In fact, if the gasline industry converts to temperature compensation, no one will get sued for selling a gallon of gasoline, whether larger or smaller than the current fixed gallon measure, as long as they all contain the same amount of energy.  

The presence of Columbus at this meeting is a demonstration of the stakes. Guys in bespoke suits with thousand-dollar briefcases don’t usually venture far from the halls of Congress, their natural habitat. That he would venture to this technical, provincial meeting specifically to disrupt the flow and change the argument is testament to its political importance. He’s like the leader of gang, the bold one who goes first and gets his allies to back up his argument–no matter how off the point it may be. 

Now the disrupter is the woman who runs the trade organization for large truck stop operators. She’s focusing on the "we need more data" argument, even though this meeting is already hip-deep in good data.

This morning, I put our a small stack of OilWatchdog’s "Hot Fuel Warning" stickers on the table where all kinds of hot fuel defenders had put their literature, some of it anonymous. I walked away for 15 m inutes and came back to find them gone. Another participant old me later that when the audience of trade group representatives saw them, they all but cursed out loud. And the stickers got deep-sixed. I looked in all the nearby garbage cans, to no avail. (We still have plenty to give to readers, just by clicking here.) 

These folks have plenty of complaints, but seem a tad deficient in sense of humor. But, we repeat. If they don’t want to sell temperature-compensated gas, even though that’s how they buy their wholesale gas, let’s just eliminate temperature compensaton at the wholesale level. Let the distributors and retailers lose a dime a gallon before it gets sold to us.