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The Tire-Gauge Solution: No Joke


__Kratos__

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How out of touch is Barack Obama? He's so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups, they could save as much oil as new offshore drilling would produce. Gleeful Republicans have made this their daily talking point; Rush Limbaugh is having a field day; and the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled "Barack Obama's Energy Plan" to Washington reporters.

But who's really out of touch? The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.

Politics ain't beanbag, and Obama has defended himself against worse smears. The real problem with the attacks on his tire-gauge plan is that efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis — the cheapest, cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil, reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming. It's a pretty simple concept: if our use of fossil fuels is increasing our reliance on Middle Eastern dictators while destroying the planet, maybe we ought to use less.

The RNC is trying to make the tire gauge a symbol of unseriousness, as if only the fatuous believed we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil without doing the bidding of Big Oil. But the tire gauge is really a symbol of a very serious piece of good news: we can use significantly less energy without significantly changing our lifestyle. The energy guru Amory Lovins has shown that investment in "nega-watts" — reduced electricity use through efficiency improvements — is much more cost-effective than investment in new megawatts, and the same is clearly true of nega-barrels. It might not fit the worldviews of right-wingers who deny the existence of global warming and insist that reducing emissions would destroy our economy, or of left-wing Earth-firsters who insist that maintaining our creature comforts would destroy the world, but there's a lot of simple things we can do on the demand side before we start rushing to ratchet up supply.

We can use those twisty carbon fluorescent lightbulbs. We can unplug our televisions, computers and phone chargers when we're not using them. We can seal our windows, install more insulation and adjust our thermostats so that we waste less heat and air-conditioning. We can use more-efficient appliances, build more-efficient homes and drive more-efficient cars, preferably with government assistance. And, yes, we can inflate our tires and tune our engines, as Republican governors Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Charlie Crist of Florida have urged, apparently without consulting the RNC. While we're at it, we can cut down on idling, which can improve fuel economy another 5%, and cut down on speeding and unnecessary acceleration, which can increase mileage as much as 20%.

More of the article here: Link

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Every little bit helps...

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How out of touch is Barack Obama? He's so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups,

This is really one of the best idea ever presented by any candidate for office or any President. I can just imagine OPEC now so worried about the future of Oil.

I think I am for Obama now..... :rofl:

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The sad thing is, it's fairly common knowledge that you get more mileage with better inflated tires. I guess I wouldn't expect many Republicans, and particularly McCain, to know that; I doubt he's done any kind of repairs on a car within the last 20 years.

Obviously, this isn't a complete solution, but it helps. It's one of several possible "wedges" into reducing America's oil dependency. But conservation tends to be unpopular with most Americans once it actually affects their lifestyles, and even American environmentalism in general seems to have this trait, where we want to have our cake and eat it too in the forms of environmental "conspicuous consumption" (like buying a whole bunch of efficient lightbulbs for a house that probably wastes more energy in a month's worth of heating that is lost by inefficient lightbulbs over a year, and so forth).

Edited by Guardsman Bass
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This is really one of the best idea ever presented by any candidate for office or any President. I can just imagine OPEC now so worried about the future of Oil.

I think I am for Obama now..... :rofl:

Well even if we cut back on just 1% of our gas use that's around 120 million in loss to Exxon per quarter.

It saves you money as well because you fill up less and your car runs better.

I fail to see the downside to this...

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Well even if we cut back on just 1% of our gas use that's around 120 million in loss to Exxon per quarter.

It saves you money as well because you fill up less and your car runs better.

I fail to see the downside to this...

The thing is tire manufacturers always suggesting that and car tune up is basically a regular maintenance suggested by car manufaturers and sevice centers ever since car was invented.

Just make Obama sound like he has no better idea.

Edited by AROCES
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Where does this 200,000 barrel a day figure come from? That is not accurate, unless your talking about a few tiny wells.

Shell's Usa-Princess field over the past 10 years has produced over 400 million barrels. That is only one company in one zone, so all that stuff about 200,000 b/d is fabricated by the liberal Dems. Link

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Obama could be correct if everyone now currently drives around on totally flat tires.

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Where does this 200,000 barrel a day figure come from? That is not accurate, unless your talking about a few tiny wells.

I wondered that, too. It's in the OP source "article." Kinda calls into question the entire article's validity.

The pressure gauges are a humorous accent on BHO's vapid energy plan.

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Scenerio: Many Americans will now OVER inflate their tires causing them to wear out quickly. What are tires made of? A by product of what? Tires themselves are a petrolium product. More wear and tear on tires will cause the demand for tires to go up still not solving the problem entirely. Not only that, but old tires are difficult to dispose of so new environmental issues will arise from this idea as well.

I wonder if Obama has stock in Firestone or something?

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Where does this 200,000 barrel a day figure come from? That is not accurate, unless your talking about a few tiny wells.

It comes from the U.S. Department of Energy:

The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017. Total domestic production of crude oil from 2012 through 2030 in the OCS access case is projected to be 1.6 percent higher than in the reference case, and 3 percent higher in 2030 alone, at 5.6 million barrels per day. For the lower 48 OCS, annual crude oil production in 2030 is projected to be 7 percent higher—
2.4 million barrels per day in the OCS access case compared with 2.2 million barrels per day in the reference case
(Figure 20). Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.

linked-image

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The Democrats Resist Logic -- and Politics

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, August 8, 2008

Let's see: housing meltdown, credit crunch, oil shock not seen since the 1970s. The economy is slowing, unemployment growing and inflation increasing. It's the sixth year of a highly unpopular war, and the president's approval rating is at 30 percent.

The Italian Communist Party could win this election. The American Democratic Party is trying its best to lose it.

Democrats have the advantage on just about every domestic issue from health care to education. However, Americans' greatest concern is the economy, and their greatest economic concern is energy (by a significant margin: 37 percent to 21 percent for inflation). Yet Democrats have gratuitously forfeited the issue of increased drilling for domestic oil and gas. By an overwhelming margin of 2 to 1, Americans want to lift the moratorium preventing drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, thus unlocking vast energy resources shut down for the past 27 years.

Democrats have been adamantly opposed. They say that we cannot drill our way out of the oil crisis. Of course not. But it is equally obvious that we cannot solar or wind or biomass our way out. Does this mean that because any one measure cannot solve a problem, it needs to be rejected?

Barack Obama remains opposed to new offshore drilling (although he now says he would accept a highly restricted version as part of a comprehensive package). Just last week, he claimed that if only Americans would inflate their tires properly and get regular tuneups, "we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling."

This is bizarre. By any reasonable calculation of annual tire-inflation and tuneup savings, the Outer Continental Shelf holds nearly a hundred times as much oil. As for oil shale, also under federal moratorium, after a thousand years of driving with Obama-inflated tires and Obama-tuned engines, we would still have saved an amount equal to only one-fifth the oil shale available in the United States.

But forget the math. Why is this issue either/or? Who's against properly inflated tires? Let's start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. ("Inflate your tires. Victory or death!") Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both.

Do everything. Wind and solar. A tire gauge in every mailbox. Hell, a team of oxen for every family (to pull their gasoline-drained SUVs). The consensus in the country, logically unassailable and politically unbeatable, is to do everything possible to both increase supply and reduce demand, because we have a problem that's been killing our economy and threatening our national security. And no one measure is sufficient.

The green fuels the Democrats insist we should be investing in are as yet uneconomical, speculative technologies, still far more expensive than extracted oil and natural gas. We could be decades away. And our economy is teetering. Why would you not drill to provide a steady supply of proven fuels for the next few decades as we make the huge technological and economic transition to renewable energy?

Congressional Democrats demand instead a clampdown on "speculators." The Democrats proposed this a month ago. In the meantime, "speculators" have driven the price down by $25 a barrel. Still want to stop them? In what universe do traders only bet on the price going up?

On Monday, Obama outlined a major plan with mandates and immense government investment in such things as electric cars and renewables. Fine, let's throw a few tens of billions at this and see what sticks. But success will require not just huge amounts of money. It will require equally huge amounts of time and luck.

On the other hand, drilling requires no government program, no newly created bureaucracy, no pie-in-the-sky technologies that no one has yet invented. It requires only one thing, only one act. Lift the moratorium. Private industry will do the rest. And far from draining the treasury, it will replenish it with direct taxes and with the indirect taxes from the thousands of non-subsidized new jobs created.

The problem for the Democrats is that the argument for "do everything" is not rocket science. It is common sense. Which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, surveying the political rubble resulting from her insistence on not even permitting drilling to come to a floor vote, has quietly told her members that they can save their skins and vote for drilling when the pre-election Congress convenes next month. Pelosi says she wants to save the planet. Apparently saving her speakership comes first.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...8080702900.html

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Until the greenies develop a windmill or solar cell that I can mount on my truck and propel me down the road, I'm stuck with using gasoline. So do whatever it takes to bring the price of it down.

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Until the greenies develop a windmill or solar cell that I can mount on my truck and propel me down the road, I'm stuck with using gasoline. So do whatever it takes to bring the price of it down.

That's what we've been trying to point out, though - that all this new, vaunted drilling, should it ever get underway, won't bring it down in price - you're looking at an extra 3% in the supply of oil after at least 10 years.

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You could trade in your gas guzzeling truck for something more efficient. Take public transportation. Ride share. Walk. Work from home. Trip plan. Tune up your engine. Inflate your tires. Grow your own. Recycle. All stuff you probably don't want to do but have to do out of necessity at some point.

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There is some merit to this. Although it won't solve all your problems.

The RACV states...

If your vehicle is running correctly, it will use less fuel and be more reliable.

# Keep your vehicle properly tuned and serviced in accordance with the owner's manual.

# Check engine oil and coolant levels weekly.

# Check tyre pressures, battery electrolyte and the fluid levels of automatic transmission, brake, clutch, and power steering monthly.

# Check for uneven wear of tyres as incorrect wheel alignment will increase the amount of fuel you use.

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There is some merit to this. Although it won't solve all your problems.

The RACV states...

So, Senator Obama has stated the obvious. Great.

Hence, the campaign to send out air-pressure gauges, since the very concept is so elementary.

What's next? Brush your teeth and wash behind your ears? Because BHO sez so? Good advice! Brilliant! Vote for Barrack!

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So, Senator Obama has stated the obvious. Great.

Hence, the campaign to send out air-pressure gauges, since the very concept is so elementary.

What's next? Brush your teeth and wash behind your ears? Because BHO sez so? Good advice! Brilliant! Vote for Barrack!

Apparently it wasn't obvious enough to most of the population, but then, Obama never presented it as the pinnacle of his energy plan; it was simply good advice. I forgot, though, that Conservation and Prevention is Un-American.

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Apparently it wasn't obvious enough to most of the population, but then, Obama never presented it as the pinnacle of his energy plan; it was simply good advice. I forgot, though, that Conservation and Prevention is Un-American.

Au Contraire! Conservation and prevention are hallmark qualities, and well worth recommending. Yet, they can't be the end-all and pinnacles of Obama's plans. As mentioned in the Krauthammer editorial previously posted, "The green fuels the Democrats insist we should be investing in are as yet uneconomical, speculative technologies, still far more expensive than extracted oil and natural gas. We could be decades away. And our economy is teetering. Why would you not drill to provide a steady supply of proven fuels for the next few decades as we make the huge technological and economic transition to renewable energy?"

I've yet to see anyone dismiss speculative, innovative technology. It seems we're all in favor of such. Bring it on! But to place all one's hopes and resources into unproven, futuristic technologies isn't wise, in the least. Is it? Is it unwise to expand American drilling by American companies? Is it necessary to confine American drilling to sites far off-shore, ensuring increased costs? Why shackle American efforts?

Is it better to continue to pour American funding into countries unfriendly to American interests? I have to wonder, since Representative Pelosi has dismissed the Congress for an extended holiday. Evidently the travails of the American citizenry can take a recess, too.

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Au Contraire! Conservation and prevention are hallmark qualities, and well worth recommending. Yet, they can't be the end-all and pinnacles of Obama's plans. As mentioned in the Krauthammer editorial previously posted, "The green fuels the Democrats insist we should be investing in are as yet uneconomical, speculative technologies, still far more expensive than extracted oil and natural gas. We could be decades away. And our economy is teetering. Why would you not drill to provide a steady supply of proven fuels for the next few decades as we make the huge technological and economic transition to renewable energy?"

That's the problem, though; it isn't a steady supply of fuels. It's a marginal addition to overall US oil supply which will come ten years from now and be eaten up by growth in US oil consumption (unless we get real destruction in demand for fuels), and which isn't guaranteed to stay in the US anyways; oil is very mobile, and that could easily go to powering Chinese cars. The advocates of drilling keep trying to promote this as some type of stopgap, which is why Obama mentioned that you'd probably save more gas keeping your tires inflated, but it really isn't that. Not unless you want to spend tens of billions trying to get large quantities of oil shale out of the ground (at exorbitant prices), which would then have to be subsidized to compete with simply importing more foreign oil.

Is it better to continue to pour American funding into countries unfriendly to American interests? I have to wonder, since Representative Pelosi has dismissed the Congress for an extended holiday. Evidently the travails of the American citizenry can take a recess, too.

Domestic drilling won't change the above, since it is so minuscule. You'll be almost just as dependent on foreign oil in ten years as we are now.

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That's the problem, though; it isn't a steady supply of fuels. It's a marginal addition to overall US oil supply which will come ten years from now and be eaten up by growth in US oil consumption (unless we get real destruction in demand for fuels), and which isn't guaranteed to stay in the US anyways; oil is very mobile, and that could easily go to powering Chinese cars. The advocates of drilling keep trying to promote this as some type of stopgap, which is why Obama mentioned that you'd probably save more gas keeping your tires inflated, but it really isn't that. Not unless you want to spend tens of billions trying to get large quantities of oil shale out of the ground (at exorbitant prices), which would then have to be subsidized to compete with simply importing more foreign oil.

Domestic drilling won't change the above, since it is so minuscule. You'll be almost just as dependent on foreign oil in ten years as we are now.

ah yes ........ facts... too bad so many are unwilling to look at them.

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His statement is being taken completely out of context. He was asked by a citizen what he could personally do in regards to the gas crisis. Obama told him to inflate his tires. Then Obama said that if every American did this we would save more money than drilling in the shortrun because drilling won't help us for roughly eight years. This statement has been completely twisted by conservative propagandists.

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His statement is being taken completely out of context. He was asked by a citizen what he could personally do in regards to the gas crisis. Obama told him to inflate his tires. Then Obama said that if every American did this we would save more money than drilling in the shortrun because drilling won't help us for roughly eight years. This statement has been completely twisted by conservative propagandists.

What short-term solutions did BHO put forth?

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What short-term solutions did BHO put forth?

No clue. Never said I support him, I simply hate the propaganda people spread.

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No clue. Never said I support him, I simply hate the propaganda people spread.

So, are you a Ripley fan?

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So, are you a Ripley fan?

I vaguely recall someone by that name posting 30 topics a day filled with propaganda... ya... big fan.

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