Our Situation
The United States has been cursed and blessed in the business of transportation. Even with our current population of 300 million people, we still have far more land than we do people. Compared with most industrialized countries, our overall population density is fairly low. As a result, compared with those countries, we are much more dependent on transportation systems. That is our curse.
The United States was also blessed with an abundance of nearly magical substances called hydrocarbons that allowed us to lift our transportation curse for a short period of time. Coal, oil and natural gas, however, are substances that were created once, a long time ago. What we had was all we were ever going to have.
Instead of using these resources wisely and slowly, US business and political leaders chose to burn these resources as quickly as they could be gotten from the ground. We have stolen this one-time resource from countless future generations.
Oil production peaked in the US in the 1970s. North American natural gas production in North America is near or at peak right now. The US coal industry’s claims that we have a 200-year supply of coal in the ground is based on out-of-date calculations. While we have a significant amount of coal left, the quality of that coal is declining rapidly. Many analysts believe that in terms of energy content, US coal production is also at or near its peak production.
The result of peak production is not that coal, oil and natural gas will disappear. It just means that drilling and mining businesses, as they are now, will invest increasing amounts of money and find less and less coal, oil and gas of poorer and poorer quality.
Following the US peak of oil production in the mid-1970s, the US has become increasingly dependent on imported oil. President Carter declared that maintaining access to these oil imports would justify sending US soldiers to war. Since his “Carter Doctrine” speech, US policy makers have chosen to fight wars instead of eliminating the need to import oil. We should take Vice President Cheney seriously when he says that the US government is committed to fighting wars continuously for the foreseeable future.
What Can You Do?
As individuals, we experience all of these “big picture” events as the constant increase in the price of gasoline. Get used to it. Because all future oil production will be dramatically more expensive, no matter what politicians tell you, the price of gasoline and diesel fuel will rise forever.
We are now in a different world from all past price increases. People in the two most populous countries in the world, India and China, are buying cars at a furious pace. The world has never faced an increase in demand for gasoline like the demand we will face for the next 50 years.
In the past, oil producers have been able to cheaply increase gasoline supply to meet rising demand. This can no longer happen. Increasing supply is now very expensive and demand will gobble up whatever small gains are made in supply. We may see some temporary pauses in rising gasoline prices, but there will be no end to the overall increase in price. No one in government or the oil industry can stop rising gas prices, no matter what they tell you.
To put it bluntly, US government and business leaders have failed us. They have put their heads in the sand and insisted that there is no problem. In many ways, it is now too late for many of the solutions that could have helped us. US leaders still have done nothing to really solve our transportation energy problems.
So it is up to you and me to work with the tools that we have at hand. The basic plan is pretty simple – use less gasoline. If you don’t want to pay more for gas, use less of it.
Our government and business leaders have failed to invest in the technologies that would allow us to use more efficient vehicles or different fuels, so as individuals, our only real solutions lie in using less gas. Using less gas should be the first step that our government leaders take in solving the problem anyway. We the people are going to have to show them how to do it. We are the leaders on this issue.
The Plan to Use Less
To use less gas, we will have to change our behaviors. It sounds simple, but it will also be hard, because our behaviors were formed in a world with cheap gas. We have never had to think much about how much gas we were using. Now we do.
There are three main ways to use less gas:
1. Don’t drive your car as much. Car pool to work, if you can. When you are in cities, walk or take public transit. Combine errands on the same trip.
As simple as this is, it is the single best way you can reduce your spending on gas. If you can cut the time you spend driving your car in half, you will cut the amount you spend on gas in half.
2. Use your muscles not gasoline. Get off your four-wheeler and walk or bike. Get a push mower without an engine. Learn to walk or bike instead of driving on short trips. Guess what? You will also get stronger and healthier.
We have gotten used to burning gas to have fun or get work done. We do this instead of burning the calories that we eat every day. If you stop burning gas and start using your muscles, you will lose weight. You will also learn that using your muscles is not as hard or as painful as you thought. Un-motorized push lawnmowers are now much lighter and easier to push than motorized push mowers. And they are a lot quieter.
3. Change the way you use your car. Drive smarter.
Public transportation is the best way to create a more efficient system for getting people from one place to another. In our part of West Virginia, we have the Little Kanawha Bus Company (phone numbers: 304-354-9043 and 866-354-5522). They do a great job of moving people. Unless the Bus Company expands dramatically, public transportation won’t be an option for most working people in our area.
Most of us will still have to use our cars more than we would like to. We can still save gas and money by changing the way we drive. The next section will tell you how.
None of these solutions is complicated. They will be hard to do because we all grew up in an era of cheap gasoline. You can keep doing things the way you always have, but you will spend more and more money doing it. If you want to keep living as though gas was cheap, don’t complain to the rest of us about how much money you are spending.
Driving Smarter: 8 Suggestions
55 mph is the most fuel efficient speed for most vehicles. Speeding up from an average speed of 55 to 65 increases your fuel use by 15%. That’s a lot of gas if you are driving on interstates on a long trip. If you go 70 mph, the current speed limit on West Virginia interstates, you will use much more gas.
You will have to adjust driving times. This won’t matter so much on short trips, but will increase on longer trips.
Because you are slowing down anyway, traveling on interstates doesn’t get you there any faster. You can use varying and more interesting routes on two lane roads to get you to the same destinations. You will save more gas if you find the most direct route in terms of mileage instead of the shortest route in terms of speed. If you travel to the same destinations a lot, you can take different routes, because now the fastest route is no longer the best one.
The faster your engine goes, the more gas it is using. Always try to drive in the highest gear that will work for the speed you are traveling. Instead of watching your speedometer, watch the tachometer. Try to keep your engine running at 1000 to 2000 rpms if at all possible. There will be times when you have to run your engine faster, but the slower your engine runs, the less gas you are using.
All automatic transmissions come with at least one “overdrive” gear. If you have an automatic, try to drive in these highest gears as much as you can.
When you start driving more slowly, this will help you learn to use your brakes less. Because you are not going as fast, you will not need to use your brakes as much. You can improve this situation even more by anticipating stops. Take your foot off the gas or even shift into neutral (more about this below) when you know you are coming to a stop light or a sharp turn.
Why brake less? Because braking is one of the biggest fuel wasters. You use gas to make your car go faster. All the time that you are slowing down or stopping you are wasting gas, because your engine is still running but you aren’t going faster. Slow down so you won’t have to use your brakes and you save gas.
Whether you have a manual or an automatic transmission, you can use neutral to save gas. Instead of using your brakes or downshifting to slow down, shift into neutral. The weight of the car or truck will slow you down. You will have to get a feel for this, so don’t start doing this in situations where you may need to slow down quickly.
You can also use neutral to speed up or maintain speed when you are going down hill. Shifting into neutral on a downhill slope is the one time where driving the speed limit does not use more gas. When you shift into neutral, your engine speed drops to 1000 rpms or less because the engine is only working to keep itself running. You are running your vehicle at idling speed while you are driving at the speed limit. You should use your brakes to slow down if you are going too fast in neutral. Try to avoid putting your car back into gear until you cannot maintain your speed at the bottom of the hill.
Again, this is a skill you will need to teach yourself. Start off slowly in easy situations so that you make sure you know where neutral is on your gearshift and how to put your car back into gear smoothly.
Cruise control is a great invention for controlling your speed. Because we all grew up with cheap oil, we use the gas pedal too much. If you use cruise control more, you don’t get into patterns of speeding up and slowing down quickly, the big gas wasters. You can even use your cruise control to increase speed slightly instead of using the gas pedal. Using cruise control on two lane roads and in towns also insures that you won’t go over the speed limit in lower speed areas.
In the past, when gas was cheap, experts claimed that air conditioning did not have much impact on gas use. That was when gas was $1 a gallon. Those days are gone forever. Minimizing air conditioner use in your car will save you money. Experiment with your car windows, vents and driving to figure out the best way to keep your car cool without the air conditioner. Using windshield shades in hot weather will keep your car cooler when it is parked without using any extra fuel.
Fuel saving fanatics have two more tricks that you might want to try.
Inflating your tires to the maximum safe inflation instead of the medium recommended inflation will save you gas. Tires that are a little over-inflated have less rubber on the road at any one time. This means less gas is used to overcome friction between the tire and the road. Be aware that too much over-inflation can reduce traction on turns in wet conditions and can produce a “harder” ride. If you are going to try this one, go slowly and be careful.
If you are doing a lot of stop and go driving in cities, you might want to try turning off your engine. Experts say that it pays to turn off your engine when you are stopped more than 1˝ minutes. In central West Virginia, we don’t have many traffic jams or rush hour traffic, but if you are stopped for road repairs, it will pay to turn off your engine.
Use your trip meter to calculate your gas mileage every time you fill up your gas tank. Many of the newest cars have built-in gas mileage calculators. If that option is available, get it when you buy a new car. After market parts dealers are now selling add-on gas mileage calculators that can be installed on your car or truck.
Calculating and tracking your gas mileage helps you realize how much money and gas you are saving. You need this kind of positive feedback to keep you feeling good about the changes you are making. It will also help you evaluate what changes have the best impact on your mileage.
All of these fuel saving tricks will save you real money if you use all or most of them. Most people who use them report that they reduce fuel use by at least 20%. Some fanatics, called “hypermilers,” report fuel savings of up to 50% with unmodified cars with gasoline or diesel engines.
You don’t have to be a fanatic to take advantage of these tricks. Try a few. Change your behaviors slowly. This is a learning process. Don’t take chances doing things you feel are unsafe. There may be times when you need to go a little faster because you didn’t estimate your travel time correctly. You can still run the air conditioner when it is really hot or humid out. The great thing about changing your driving habits is that you can get great improvements no matter what kind of car or truck you are driving whether it’s a hybrid or a Hummer or a Chevy Nova.
Be aware also that every change you make will help our country become more secure by reducing our need to buy oil from people who don’t like us.
Myths
Ethanol and bio-diesel will save us. We have already seen the results of this mythology and the “alternative fuels” industry has just started. Both ethanol and bio-diesel require more energy to produce than they generate. And that’s probably the best thing you can say about using them to replace gasoline.
Hydrogen fuel will save us. Hydrogen, because of its chemical properties, almost always takes more energy to produce than it can generate. Hydrogen gas can be produced from water, but that requires electricity. The best we can hope for is that hydrogen fuel will generate the same amount of energy that it takes to produce it. Hydrogen fuel is a great way of storing solar or wind energy and releasing it at a constant rate, using it like a “battery,” but hydrogen fuel is not a useful source of energy.
Technology will save us. This may have been true 20 years ago when we had time to develop and invest in new ways of producing electricity and running cars and trucks. The US car industry and our political leaders decided to do other things. Now it is too late. Toyota, Subaru and Volkswagen are currently selling high mileage hybrid, diesel hybrid and diesel cars, mostly in Europe. Ford and GM are just starting to develop and sell hybrid cars. Electric cars, after having been eliminated by Toyota and GM in the 1990s are coming back in the next few years. The problem is that in five years, the increase in fuel prices will cancel out increases in gas mileage gain. If you can afford to buy a new fuel efficient car, it will help you as an individual for a little while, but it won’t stop the rise in fuel prices. We will just be using new technologies to run in place.
Electric cars will save us. Maybe. Eventually. Electric cars do a great job of eliminating our need for oil. They get their electricity from our electrical power grid. Which gets its electricity from? Primarily coal, increasingly natural gas. Both of these sources are (1) increasingly expensive and (2) gone once they run out. Only if you can recharge your electric car from solar or wind energy will you have a really independent and inexpensive electric car system.
Other resources:
Books –
The End of Oil by journalist Paul Roberts is an excellent history of energy use and includes a clear discussion of our current “peak oil” situation.
The Long Emergency by professor James Kunstler provides a clear picture of what is and is not possible in the current energy situation. Kunstler takes a hard look at the choices we need to make right now to avoid energy disaster in the next ten years.
Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy by Matthew Simmons is another excellent discussion of the impact of peak oil on the world economy. Mr. Simmons is the leading advisor to major investment banks on the world oil industry.
Internet –
http://www.hypermiling.com provides links to articles, discussions and current media reporting on fuel saving techniques.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/03/11/100-count-em-suggestions-for-hypermiling/ is a blog posting with 100 hypermiling suggestions.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/king_of_the_hypermilers.html is a magazine article about extreme hypermilers.
http://www.wisebread.com/maximize-your-cars-efficiency-with-hypermiling is another blog posting with some useful links to hypermiling Web sites.