John McCain’s campaign sent out a little funny today, and it may actually be the most useful thing those pandering liars can do to help out with our energy crunch. If you send in a contribution of at least $25, they’ll send you a handy-dandy tire pressure gage that reads “Obama’s Energy Plan” on the side. I guess they’re all out of those pens that have undressing ladies on ‘em.

This is to continue their cute little “Dr. No” meme in which they claim that Obama is basically against everything under the sun that might do a dang thing for the average American as far as energy is concerned. You know, the one in which they repeatedly lie about Obama’s position on nuclear energy? And when I say “they” I include McCain himself, as he has been shown on CNN multiple times in the last week stating flat-out lies about Obama’s nuclear position, and CNN, desperately afraid of being accused of Obamania, refuses to say peep about the fact that they keep airing lies from the “maverick.”

Anyway. Back to his dipstick.

They’re using this prop to mock Obama’s claims about oil conservation and production last week. According to the McCain campaign email, “Senator Obama’s solution to high gas prices is telling Americans to make sure their tires are inflated.”

That isn’t so much a lie as an incomplete statement. What Obama actually said was that “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!” This ray of optimism naturally sent the idiots who think NewsBusters is news into hysterical fits bad science. (Hint: McCain campaigners seem to be just such idiots.) Let’s take a look at their bad right-wing analysis:

Just for fun, I did the math. Properly inflating your tires can improve gas mileage by 3%. Of course, many people already keep their tires properly inflated, and many more are at least close to being properly inflated. Let’s be generous and assume that one-half of the total possible savings would be realized if we all inflated our tires properly; that’s a net gain of 1.5% fuel efficiency.

Americans drive approximately 2,880 billion miles per year. If we average 24 mpg, we use around 120 billion gallons of gasoline in our vehicles. If, through perfect tire inflation, we improved our collective fuel efficiency by 1.5%, that would be 1.8 billion gallons. A barrel of oil produces around 20 gallons of gasoline, so the total savings available through tire inflation is approximately 90,000,000 barrels of oil annually.

How does this stack up against “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling?”

ANWR: 10 billion barrels
Outer Continental Shelf: 18 billion barrels (estimated; the actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since exploration has been banned)
Oil shale: 1 trillion barrels

So, on the above assumptions, it would take only 11,308 years of proper tire inflation to equal “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling.”

First we’ll dispense with the obvious right-wing lying action. The blogger quoted above brings oil shale into the picture, which Obama wasn’t addressing in the Q&A period. You don’t drill for oil shale, boy, you mine it. It’s also unlikely that Obama was even referring to ANWR, since all the hubbub lately has been about getting Congress to follow the president’s lead and open up the outer continental shelf to drilling. (McCain’s email mocking Obama probably isn’t talking about ANWR either, stating “John McCain believes we should lift the federal ban on offshore drilling, enabling you to decide where we drill for oil.” The argument at hand is offshore, not arctic.)

Next, the analysis is rather optimistic in its assumption that we’re getting, on average, 24mpg in our cars. That’s a good one! The Transportation Research Board puts it at closer to 20mpg, based on a composite of cars (22mpg) and trucks (17mpg). But this comes out in the wash, because some of his other assumptions are rather generous in the other direction. The TRB puts annual mileage at 2,600 billion instead of 2,880 billion. And the 1.5% fleetwide fuel economy uptick is rather optimistic; Pearce and Hanlon wrote in Energy Policy (2007, v.35 n.4) that the impact of underinflation ranged from 0.16-0.22 mpg lost in the city and 0.22-0.29 mpg lost on the highway, suggesting we should at least be able to save about 1% on fuel economy. In the spirit of compromise, we’ll split the difference: 1.25%, saving 1.5 billion gallons of gas or 75 million barrels of oil a year.

Right-wingers go off the rails when they assume that the earth will just open up a gaping hole and spew forth all of her bounty in unlimited volumes, reaching the conclusion that Obama is ignoring an 11,000-fold increase in gasoline production off the coast of the Carolinas. Let’s see what the actual Department of Energy has to say about increased production if we listen to the petulant whining of the “Drill Here Drill Now” crowd and open up the continental shelf to drilling:

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.

Subtract 4 years off those projected dates if the DHDN crowd immediately gets their way. Big whoop, look at that green line go. A whopping 0.2 million barrels a day from opening up the coastline and we come out to about…

73 million barrels a year!

Holy crap! That’s like, almost exactly the same number we just came up with in terms of tire pressure-based fuel economy savings! Saaaaaaay, you don’t think that’s what Obama was talking about in Springfield, do you? Nah, must be just a coinkydink.

Now just imagine how much oil we could stop importing if we just did something more aggressive with those CAFE standards.



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