Conversation with my father

[KarenRei]

For those of you who aren't familiar, which I imagine is most of you, my father is a president of an oil supermajor's US branch and a VP of its international branch. A good chunk of the money I'm going to be using to buy the Aptera is coming from gifts my parents have given me from my father's annual bonus, which I find beautifully ironic (oil money funding an electric car) (my parents are very generous that way; even when my father was still working his way up in the company and didn't make nearly as much as he does now, they always did all they could to support us in whatever way they could).

Well, I called him the other night to wish him and my mother a happy anniversary. We chatted for a while, and the conversation turned to the Aptera. Like me, my father is a geek at heart and loves to learn about and chat about new technology. And he had a surprising number of questions about the Aptera -- its range in different conditions, its safety features, its availability, its price, its power consumption, how cheap it is to operate, and on and on. He sounded quite interested in the fact that I'm getting this car, perhaps even a little bit excited. And at one point in the conversation while talking about the range, he actually commented on the fact that how much he drives in his daily commute could easily fit in the Aptera's range; the conversation ended on the subject of me letting him test drive it some when I get mine. I sensed a genuine interest, albeit low level and lacking in any immediacy, in the possibility of him eventually getting an electric car like the Aptera some day if mine works out well.

Now wouldn't that be just great -- an oil company president driving to work in an electric car? :)

[gg222]

Make sure he doesn't steal your reservation #. ;)

[IanO]

That got my imagination going...

"I liked the test drive of my son's electric car so much... I bought the company!"

Conspiracy theory version:

"...then sat on the patents, shut down production, and continued making oil profits off SUVs for decades!"

;)

[LQUAN]

I sense that there will be "Who killed the electric car?", part II...:rolleyes:

[KarenRei]

Actually, whenever I visit, my father and I usually have at least one joke about all of the oil company conspiracy theories out there:

Me: So, how was work today?
Dad: Oh, it was really busy. I had to buy off a couple congressmen, we had lots of meetings about how we could maximize our destruction of the environment, then we had to buy up and destroy all of the plans for a car that ran only on water...
Me: Did the assassination of the inventor of a 200mpg carburetor go okay?
Dad: No, that's been rescheduled to Friday...

(Usually something along those lines, followed immediately by shared laughter)

The reality of the oil industry is a lot less exciting than it is in the conspiracy theories. It involves a lot less guns and dark, smoke filled rooms**, and a lot more production data and market forecasts. From what I've overseen/overheard from father's job from work that he's done at home, a lot of it has involved things like what to do about a pipeline running under capacity or one nearing capacity, what feedstocks to buy and from where, and so forth. Lots of business trips (he accumulates frequent flier miles like they're going out of style). Venezuela and Egypt are two places he's gone to frequently, but also a number of places in Europe. They have this great picture in a guest bedroom of what looks like Moses preparing to part the Red Sea. It is the Red Sea, but the "Moses" is my father, he's wearing hotel towels and sheets, holding a broomstick instead of a staff, and to top it off, the picture was taken by his (then) boss ;)

But hey, feel free to conspiracy-theorize. They're used to it; it's not going to hurt their feelings or anything. ;) The only thing they worry about are radicals who might try to blow stuff up or attack people's families (and those who facilitate it, like publishing addresses of executives and the like).

** The oil industry in general, and especially the supermajor my father works for, doesn't even have a very large campaign and lobbying operation in comparison to its size. My father's company, with hundreds of billions in revenue and dozens of billions in profits, spent a paltry $3M on lobbying in '07. For comparison, the teachers union spent $9M in '07, and AARP a staggering $19.5M. The National Committee to Preserve Social Security spent $9.3M. The ACLU outspent my father's company, at $4.2M. Even MyWireless.org spent more ($3.5M). Bet you never heard complaints about lobbying from Big Wireless, though! The same goes for campaign donations. The oil and gas industry gave one tenth as much in election donations as, for example, lawyers groups. My father's company's PAC gave just over $100k in the last elections. That's chump change in the scheme of things. All data from opensecrets.org.

[Blur]

The first thing that popped into my head was that there must be an alternate universe out there where the chief exec. of a wind farm consortium is buying his son/daughter a Hummer H2.

Bill

[KarenRei]

Lol ! ; )