Here’s a great idea: why not use extra fossil fuels to deliver fossil fuels to your fossil fuel-guzzling vehicle?
Yes, there are apps in the US — several of them now, in fact — where you can summon a car to fill your car with petrol. Not just in an emergency situation when you run out of petrol, NRMA-style. But for those times when you are too busy using the petrol you put in your car to actually stop that car and fill it with more petrol. It’s like Uber for lazy pieces of shit.
The promotional video for one such service, Filld, is like a Saturday Night Live commercial. Right down to the friendly teen in the baseball cap and the Henley who pops on over to fill up the tank for ya.
I’m not going to go into the myriad issues I see with leaving your petrol cap unlocked while you give a random person your credit card info and licence plate number and entrust they will fill your car with petrol at a fair price (plus $5 delivery fee!) while you’re not around. It’s more about the part where we’re paying trucks to chase us around our neighbourhoods attempting to stick spigots of future emissions into our car holes.
In an interview with National Geographic, Filld’s founder Christopher Aubuchon attempts to make an environmental argument for their service, claiming that they might be preventing drivers from making extra trips to petrol stations. But even if it might be somewhat detrimental to all the hard work that people are doing to fix decades of irreversible damage to the planet, rest assured, they are putting their best thinkers on the case:
If more people start getting gas from roaming trucks at a time when cutting greenhouse gases is key to fighting climate change, is that progress? Filld is commissioning research to answer the question, Aubuchon says: “It’s a very difficult problem to frame.”
But it isn’t really, though, is it?
[Nat Geo]