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Saturday, July 12, 2008
How to cut the price of gasoline by $1.15 a gallon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I just filled up the family car again - ouch. At $4.16 a gallon, it adds up much too quickly.
We’re all now fixated on that $4-a-gallon figure — reportedly approach $5 in parts of California — and for good reason. When we’re standing at the pump, that’s the number that gets our attention.
But in many ways, it’s not the number that matters. The number we should really care about is how much we spend each week, a month, a year on gasoline. Not how much per gallon, but how much in total.
We can figure that out using a multivariable equation: M/mpg x P = C; where M is the number of miles you drive, mpg is your car’s fuel efficiency rating and P is the price of gasoline.
C, of course, is how much cash you end up spending on gasoline.
So, if you put 20,000 miles on your cars in a year, that means you drive about 385 miles a week. The average mpg rating for an American vehicle is 25 mpg.
Plug those numbers into the equation — 385/25 x $4 — and you get a figure of $61.60 a week on gasoline. That’s about what the average household spends on gasoline these days.
But what if you want to lower that number? You can’t change the price of gasoline. That’s a variable out of our control. We could cut back the number of miles we drivie, and many of us have. If you cut your driving by 20 percent, you cut your weekly gasoline bill to $49.28, saving about $11.
But let’s change another number. Let’s boost that 25-mpg figure to 35 mpg. Plug in the numbers, even at $4 a gallon, and all of a sudden your weekly gasoline cost is $44. You save $17.60 a week.
In effect, increasing your MPG to 35 produces the same impact on your family budget as cutting the price of gas by $1.15 a gallon, bringing it down to $2.85 a gallon.
Where am I heading with all this?
For decades, environmentalists have been pushing to raise the MPG requirements for US automobiles, and for decades conservatives — with a lot of support from Detroit labor unions and Democrats like John Dingell — have refused to accept that change.
We were told to let the market work. Government regulation was always bad; the free enterprise system would always solve everything.
Well, look what that got us: Because we didn’t raise the fuel efficiency of the US vehicle fleet, we’re sending billions overseas for foreign oil, the automakers are going broke and the union jobs are disappearing. Oh, and the price of gasoline is killing our economy.
It’s stupidity. With more fuel-efficient cars, the impact of $4 gasoline would be a lot easier to take, both in the household budget and on the national economy. We blew it, and the question is whether we’ve learned our lesson yet.
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Obama woos NASCAR voters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Obama campaign has talked a lot about “expanding the playing field,” seeking votes in places that Democrats had previously written off, such as here in Georgia. Well, the folks over at SI.com report that the effort has taken an interesting turn.
“SI.com has learned that for the first time in history, a major presidential candidate may sponsor a race car in NASCAR’s premier series. According to sources, Barack Obama’s campaign is in talks to become the primary sponsor of BAM Racing’s No. 49 Sprint Cup car for the Pocono race on August 3. Details of the agreement are expected to be worked out over the coming days.”
I follow NASCAR — one of the highlights of my sporting life was renting an RV a few years ago with some friends and spending the weekend in the infield at Talladega. Boy Howdy. But hearing Darrell Waltrip talking about “the No. 49 Barack Obama Toyota” … well, this world sure is a funny place.
UPDATE: Well, not so funny after all. Looks like the deal’s off….
“The Obama campaign will not be sponsoring a car in the Sprint Cup series, though we will continue to look for ways to reach out to voters,” said Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman.
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