Nega-what?

If you’ve kept yourself abreast of the 2008 Presidential Campaign here in the States, you may have recently come across the newest “Obama Slam.”

Tire Gauge.

Obama is suggesting something radical, something so simple that it has found it’s place in the RNC in the form of fodder. He wants us to check our tire pressure and maintain our cars regularly; and this can and will increase our gas mileage. Most of us already get our oil changed when the odometer reading matches the number on that sticker in the upper left corner of our windshield. Also, a lot of newer cars have an internal tire pressuring monitoring system (TPMS) that alerts the driver if their tires drop below a predefined number.

Doing these two things, along with less speeding and acceleration, we can all increase our gas mileage by upwards of 20%!! You heard me right, 20%! And these aren’t some loosey-goosey-leftist numbers either, these are numbers that have been known to the automobile and fuel industry for decades. It’s the reason why the Federal Government put so much pressure on states to reduce the speed limit in the 1970’s to 55mph as all research showed that gas mileage is optimal at or around that speed.

So if the numbers speak for themselves, and the solution is simple enough (not to mention immediate and cheap), then why is the RNC (Republican National Committee) having such a good time with this? Well, Johnny and his crew have taken Obama’s approach to our oil energy crisis as a joke. They think Obama isn’t taking this crisis serious enough!
McCain has recently come out to support new offshore drilling which would increase our barrels of oil in the future and I believe it would increase our oil supply by 1%.

Hmmm, 1% increase in oil supply for the billions it will cost to drill for the oil, plus the environmental impact and general dangers of offshore drilling…

OR

20% increase in gas mileage by checking your tire pressure often, reducing speeding and acceleration and maintaining your car.

The decision would seem obvious to anyone who cares, or to anyone to is looking for an immediate reprieve from the ballooning gas prices. I know that once gas started skyrocketing, that I cut back on the excessive speeding and immediately saw a 20-30 miles per tank increase on the very same tank of gas. Now I’m checking my pressure often and driving intelligently and I’m getting upwards of 40-50 miles more per tank per week and it hasn’t cost me a cent. In fact, it has saved me plenty, I’m saving $30-$40 a month in gas!

Now let’s take my example and see how that impacts me and my personal gas consumption in the long haul.

I still drive my 1,000 miles a month (like most Americans) and previously I got about 375 miles a tank before , I was buying gas at least 3 times a month. Each time I filled up cost me (on average) $60 (15 gallons @ $4.00/gallon). Now I’m going 425 on the same tank. My cost per mile went from 16 cents/mile to 14 cents/mile. The same 15 gallons at 25 miles per gallon now goes 28 miles per gallon. That’s 3 extra miles per gallon I’m saving.

With my previous 25mpg it took me 40 gallons of gasoline to drive 1,000 miles (in one month). My current 28mpg takes me 35.3 gallons of gasoline to drive 1,000 miles (also in one month). Over a year, I’m using 56 less gallons of gasoline to drive the same distance I’m already driving! You see, it didn’t cost me a cent to increase my gas mileage by 12% and the impact was immediate. With nearly 70 million registered vehicles in the United States, if only 1 in 7 (for the sake of math) decided to take the same cost-free approach I did, the United States would use 560,000 less gallons of gasoline a year.

Now hear this. Each barrel of oil contains about 19.5 gallons of 87 octane gasoline – the rest is distillate fuel oil and jet fuel along with small portions of other gases and oils. It takes nearly 29 million barrels of oil (28.9 million to be exact) to produce 560,000 gallons of gasoline – or 79,340 barrels of oil less per day… at no cost to you. Keep in mind, this is achieved if only 14% of the country adheres to these standards.

If 25% adhere to these standards, we use nearly 139,000 less barrels of oil per day.

If 50% adhere to these standards, we use over 275,000 less barrels of oil per day, and this would trump the 200,000 barrels of oil per day increase we would be getting through offshore drilling (and we wouldn’t realize this for 22 years according to the McCain campaign. By then, we could use 2.2 billion less barrels of oil. And if you tend to think of things in terms of dollars and cents, that’s $450 million saved in gasoline purchases over that time frame and at $121.41/barrel (current as of August 4) that’s over $270 billion saved in crude oil purchases ($12.2 billion/year, $33.7 million/day – that’s 5 less gallons pumped per second in the United States). We need to start consuming nega-barrels, not consuming mega-barrels (“nega” was taken from Armory Lovins, an energy “guru” according to the Times).

It’s all too common for us to think that if we’re running low on something, that we need to find a way to increase that object. When we’re running low on money, we get a new job that pays more. So it’s not an absurd thought to think that since it appears we’re running low on oil, that we should do what we can to increase the amount of oil we have available to us! The fact of the matter is that the easiest, most cost effective and immediate solution to our oil “crisis” is to simply use less. You don’t have to buy a hybrid to use less, and you don’t have to buy expensive accessories for your car to use less.

If you simply check your tire pressure each time you get gasoline, track your mileage and gas usage in a small notepad kept in your car (this way you can identify issues with your car before they become major problems), and ease off the gas pedal once in a while; you can consume much less and do much more.