Republicans are having some fun with a remark by Barack Obama:
But we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling — if everybody was just inflating their tires? And getting regular tune-ups? You’d actually save just as much!Â
Which naturally leads to the RNC sending out tire gauges labelled “Obama’s Energy Plan.” Heh.Â
How silly is this statement? Doing the math, it looks like he’s off by about an order of magnitude. The DOE link says you can save 3.3% and U.S. consumption is 20.8M barrels a day, half of which is gasoline, so even if fully half the population is driving on very poorly inflated tires you’re talking about only about 165,000 barrels a day, a tenth or less of the millions of barrels a day we could add in production. Hell, the mean estimate for ANWR alone is 780,000 bpd.
Of course, Barack could easily defuse this by admitting he was wrong, but as with the surge he will not. This is why Barack Obama’s team is scared to death of any debate format that doesn’t rely on teleprompters: he’s a walking gaffe-o-matic and too arrogant to admit when he’s wrong — probably partly because the MSM scrambles to explain his mistakes away:
But who’s really out of touch? The Bush administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 barrels per day by 2030. We use about 20 million barrels 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 by 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone else did, we could reduce demand several percentage points immediately. In other words: Obama is right.
Catch all the shifting goalposts, flawed assumptions, and bad math there? “All the oil we could get from drilling” becomes “the increase from expanded offshore drilling,” and even then uses a number that seems out of step with published estimates of 250,000 to 1 million bpd. Then we casually more than double the tire-inflation savings by tossing in “maintenance.” Then we throw out quantitative analysis altogether by using the impossibly vague “many drivers.” Finally, we ball up our morass of bad data into a misleading conclusion, and for emphasis we state explicitly the one assumption we always regarded as unassailable: Obama must be right.
UPDATE: Okay, it looks like Obama did actually say “tune-ups,” so tossing that in is probably fair. Of course, most modern cars are designed to go 100,000 miles before needing a tune-up, and have sensors and computer chips that regulate air/fuel mix, etc.., and the estimates for underinflation are about 27%, considerably less than half. So, being generous, at most you could probably save around 3% total, or 300,000 barrels of oil a day, again less than half of the mean ANWR estimate.Â
 The other sleight-of-hand Obama does with this statement is conflate something that is very difficult to achieve and unlikely to happen, getting virtually everyone to do all proper automotive maintenance, with something that has a very high probability of achievement and only requires politicians to allow it: getting oil from new drilling, whether offshore, in ANWR, in oil shale, or in tar sands. The total from all new drilling is likely to be a few million bpd, vastly more than we’re going to get via the tire gauge plan.
In other words, we’re not going to inflate our way out of this, folks.
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"Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone else did, we could reduce demand several percentage points immediately"..this is a common fallacy in liberal & "progressive" thinking: If X would be good, just stipulate that everyone does X–problem solved. For example, peace is good, just decide that everyone will be peaceful–no need for military preparation.
In the case of tire pressure, how would you insure that everyone maintain the proper pressure. If the Democrats were serious about this as a key energy-saving initiative, they would be proposing a vast bureaucracy of tire-pressure inspectors…but of course, they’re not serious, this is a throwaway idea to distract from their lack of interest in real solutions.
Isn’t it rather dishonest to demand real world standards on one side of the ledger, when you aren’t so demanding on the other?
Oil companies already own lots of drillable land that they don’t drill on currently, either because they haven’t surveyed it for oil deposits or simply because they are getting the returns they think they need out of current projects, and too much more too soon would cost more than it would benefit against their competitors. Â
Thus, the current debate is essentially about giving them even more public money (in the form of sweethart contracts) and then hoping that they’ll do more than just sit on a good investment in return. Â But with little to no enforcement of their contracts with the government, there’s little reason for them to do anything other than what the market demands: which is what they are already, sensibly, doing. Â The idea that all that land goes instantly into production at once is pretty darn far off from the reality of how the industry works. Â
Making those sorts of assumptions basically allow you to make up big numbers out of thin air to put on the other side of the ledger. Â I don’t call that "doing the math." Â And it hardly justifies the mock "how dare people be so misleading!" outrage.
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Can you provide us with some kind of reference for the assertion that the oil companies are sitting on piles of land they could easily drill and make profitable, because they just don’t want to? That sounds insane, especially in an environment where oil prices have been increasing steadily for years.
The Time defense was lame, but the Chicago Tribune has gone one better/worse, claiming that the Bush-41 Administration had said “the same thing” in a 1990 PSA that said proper tire inflation could save a paltry 50,000 barrels a day. Apparently, numbers don’t mean a thing; all that matters is that Obama said proper tire inflation could save some oil, and golly gee, someone in a past Republican administration said that, too.
At this rate, it’s just a matter of time before Obama announces that an apple a day can extend your life expectancy by 200 years, only to have these media hacks claim he was right because some obscure bureaucrat in the Eisenhower Administration once said apples are good for you.
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Dave, Obama’s tire inflation and tune up solution has one big problem. The savings calculations are based on a static solution to a dynamic problem. Obama’s oil savings solution relies on the thinking that all vehicles to run in tip top fashion 24/7 and it is downright unrealistic. If one were to imagine (because I can’t show a graphic here) at Obama’s vehicle maintenance recommendations framed graphically to see the static distribution of the overall (all energy saving vehicle tips) state of US vehicle maintenance condition, one would see a bell curve. Breaking out each savings tip would also show bell curves.
These curves would not reflect the spectrum of maintenance attitudes of owners as much as reflect the dynamic cycle of maintenance. There will always be an x% of vehicles at the y% of out-of-tune vehicles, dirty air filters, or underinflated tires. Each of Obama maintenance tips, of course, have a different elasticity for improvement which should be kept in mind. Tire inflation is a simple item to control, rather unlike the elasticity of keeping your vehicle in tune which is much more dependent on schedule and cost, than it is on monitoring how far awhack it is from optimum.
We might be able, via moderate improvement in attention, to squeeze change the shape of the curve towards more efficiency, if it could be shown that the current level of attention significantly below a reasonable par now, but I think the degree to which the gallon or barrel savings numbers are bantied is way in excess of what could or can be effected.
Take for instance the Obama tire inflation recommendation. Realize that as soon as you leave the air pump and pull out of the gas station, your tires are on a downward spiral towards significant underinflation. It may be a tiny valve stem leak, or the pothole and sunken manhole cover you hit on the way home and the six you hit to and from work everyday. If you check your tires every three months, finding at least one to fit the "significant" category, you’re part of the Obama total gas saving solution, but that does not make you the answer to the full bbls per day savings solution, and tomorrow when your neighbor checks hers, she will not be either. In reality, if everyone increased their attention by a day, we would saving z bbls per day or if we caught by sight the signifcantly underinflated tire one day earlier than we used to, it would save some minute fraction of bbls/day. But on the whole I don’t think we’d be saving the amount that’s becoming the meme.
And note, as for the statistic on number of vehicles with underinflated tires suggests, only a fraction, 3%, of passenger cars estimated, via the study, to have all four tires underinflated. Remember that, ballparking, the 3% savings is when all four tires are underinflated, not one. Back to the study — 13% of passenger vehicles are estimated to have two or more tires significantly underinflated. This means that 87% of vehicles are estimted to have only one tire 8 psi or more below recommended. Now it is likely that the many of those tires on those 87% of vehicles having only one probably have another three underinflated tires, it’s just that those three are 4, 5 and 6 below. but a significant number probably only have one. In any event, what exactly is the inefficiency percentage for those, because it is certainly way below the 3% applied to calculate national bbls/day savings?
At this point, I’ll note two things. First, a simple kicking up of all significantly underinflated tires to recommended will not give provide the savings calculated. On the other hand, too, the attention put on this subject will probably increase the ballparked savings much more, for a short period of time, as we all scamble to check and pump up our 1, 2, or 3 psi underinflated tires. We might actually get the amount estimated for a week or a month, but the regimen to maintain this effort can likely over the long haul be moved from something like checking every two months rather than every three, meaning the savings is probably going to be much less than the static calculation.
Take the tune-up recommendation through the same review as I did for tires and I think you’ll realize that, in the dynamic view and because of the significant cost and time associated with both monitoring and servicing, the bbls/day savings thrown about is much more over estimated. Keep in mind not the 100,000 miles before service allowance you mention is for the newer models, but as, according to wiki, age of US vehicles range from "38.3% were older than ten years, 22.3% were between seven and ten years old, 25.8% were between three and six years old and 13.5% were less than two years old." It may be some time before 100,000 is the norm and that higher standard only helps with some of that 4% efficiency improvements.
I think the overall point is that in the set called national car operation, 100% is the maximum efficiency and it can never be attained, only approached, so the questions is what, like unemployment, is the reasonably acceptable national inefficiency, where are we in comparison to that, and what at what cost can it be improved voluntarily and also by tech improvements.
I had read that the 3% savings actually meant that vehicles with properly inflated tires would improve their gas mileage by 3%. In other words, a car that is getting 30 mpg with underinflated tires would get 31 mpg if the tires were properly inflated.
Is that the same thing as saving, or wasting, 3% of the 20 million barrels the US uses every day? I don’t think that it is. It strikes me that the fuel wasted due to underinflation would be a much smaller amount than that, since it’s a 3% impact on gas mileage rather than oil consumption.
Sorry, Wiki link is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States#Total_number_of_vehicles
Dave,
You have been ‘lanched. Congrats.
The oil companies have leases on 68 million acres on which they are not drilling (well that is the figure in the news).
Of course what if there is no oil on those acres? Or what if it is unprofitable due to the size of the reservoirs or other factors? One possibility – deep sea rigs are in short supply due to intense offshore drilling activity. More rigs would be built if the reservoirs are especially profitable and those very profitable reservoirs are probably not in those 68 million acres.
The idea that oil companies are screwing themselves makes no sense.
It also might be a bit unfair to include ANWR in the "real" numbers, because McCain is opposed to drilling in ANWR, and it is McCain’s desire to drill which would have allegedly been offset by airing up your tires.
McCain has said that he is "open" to drilling in ANWR. So it should remain in the calculation.
The story here isn’t the monumentally naive and ignorant statement Obama made, geez people should be used to THAT by now, the story here is the raving sycophantic press that leaps to defend him even if it means bending the facts so far that they are indistinguishable from fantasy. The appropriate reaction to Obama’s statement is amused contempt, which is exactly what McCain’s team offered. Good for them.
The best indication of how idiotic Obama looks on energy policy is how many people listen to Paris Hilton’s “ad” and say “You know, that actually makes more sense than Obama’s”.
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DaveS, I agree, which is why I argued that we should indeed exclude ANWR from the comparison. It’s a ridiculous claim, either way – made all the more ridiculous by the fact that it assumes we are all driving around on flat tires now.
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