Green Options

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I’ve been taking the occasional punch to the kidneys here at Sustainablog. That’s okay. I’m not alone, and it’s par for the course for those who put their real face, real name and real, considered thoughts out to the public.

But some recent comments, especially about the Drive 55 campaign that has been in the general media again lately, have me thinking about some particular gaps in our common understanding and, therefore, overall communication.

Interestingly enough, I’m not even an advocate for a change in speed limit laws. I’m not against such changes. But I’m not pushing for them, either.

What I am is a facilitator of a discussion about the matter that is under consideration for the purpose of saving fuel, money, and lives.

In light of a recent post of mine here about a campaign to lower the speed limit to 55 miles per hour, I saw a weekend getaway as a chance to test the impact of speed-limit driving on fuel economy.

Going from St. Louis to Chicago, then up past Milwaukee before backtracking that route home, my wife and I drove our 2008 Honda Civic, a 5-speed which is rated to get 36 miles per gallon on the highway and 25 mpg in the city (29 mpg combined).

On three gas stops, our mileage figured to 40.25, 39.29 and 39.48 mpg.

That included city driving, traffic stoppages, and miles and miles of construction slow-downs and more stoppages.

Could it be that driving the speed limits, usually 55- and 65-mph on the highways and interstates we used, gave us that boost to get from 36 to 40 miles per gallon?

Once again, the idea of driving 55 miles per hour is out of the closet.

Once mandated in the 1970s — but eventually discarded for 65-75 m.p.h. limits handled by individual states — the concept has resurfaced as oil and gas prices have rocketed to record heights.

A news story published this morning in USA Today brought out the naysayers in droves. An overwhelming majority of the story’s commenters online booed and hissed at the notion that they should do any such inconvenient thing.

Some main complaints are being echoed throughout the comments chamber:

According to a survey commissioned by Cars.com during July, about 50% of US consumers don’t believe that Obama or McCain has a magic rabbit up their sleeve that will lower prices at the pump any time soon

Turns out, 50% of people in the US are wiser than I thought: there is no quick fix or simple solution.

Another interesting result from the survey: 48% of consumers don’t see McCain or Obama as having a particular advantage when trying to work with the auto industry to bring more fuel efficient or plug-in vehicles to the market in the future.

Watching the news is a dangerous enterprise for those of us trying to maintain a clear picture of this election season’s most important issues. Despite all the chatter, it seems relatively obvious that our most fundamental problem is American energy policy, or more specifically: oil prices and our dependence on cheap energy.

If you buy that premise, which I’m prepared to debate elsewhere, then this election should really only be decided by one evaluation criterion: which candidate has a better plan [...]

With a rapidly dwindling popularity rating, and under severe pressure from voters as UK petrol (gasoline) prices exceed $8 per gallon, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s labour government has recently canceled a proposed increase in fuel taxes.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain on Wednesday credited the recent drop in the price of oil to President Bush’s lifting of a presidential ban on offshore drilling. But the White House saw it a bit differently

One of the frequently repeated canons in the anti-nuclear catechism is that nuclear fission is irrelevant to any discussion about oil supplies or oil prices. The offered reasons for that dismissal is that nuclear fission is generally thought to be limited to large scale electrical power production, and oil is generally used as vehicle fuel. The problem with that notion is that it misses a huge, historical trend, and it also ignores the market reality in several remaining locations.

The US Energy Information Agency does a fine job of keeping statistical records of energy sources - though its predictive arm has had some real miscues over the years. The graph associated with this article provides a picture illustrates that the use of oil for electricity in the US may be small now, but that is because it was replaced by nuclear fission during the growth years in the 1970s and 1980s.

On Friday, the benchmark oil price increased by its largest single day total ever, nearly $11.00 per barrel to nearly $140.00. To put that into perspective, the trading price for a barrel of oil in 1998 - just ten years ago - was less than $11.00, Friday’s price change.

Though there are plenty of reasons to believe that oil will never again cost anything close to $11.00 per barrel, there is also a growing recognition that the current state of the oil market bears some resemblance to a number of other over excited markets like Dutch tulips, Internet stocks, and new home prices in Fort Myers or outside Las Vegas. The similarities include daily headlines, constant water cooler discussions, and fears of missing a big boat.

Unlike some of those other bubbles, however, the recent rapid increases in oil prices are painful for almost everyone but those involved in selling or transporting crude oil. Even though they bear the brunt of consumer anger, oil refineries producing gasoline and gasoline retailers are actually being squeezed as badly as most of the rest of us by high prices. The wide spread nature of the pain caused by rapid oil price increases was brought home to me on Sunday as I visited the Newseum in Washington, D. C. and saw that oil prices were front page news on at least half of the world’s Sunday newspapers.

Anybody here surprised? I’m not. Global oil markets, according to the Energy Information Administration, will remain tight with some hopes of backing off in 2009. How’s that SUV or Hummer running?

We’re nowhere out of the woods as far as oil prices are concerned, and you can read all about it in the EIA’s release.

My thanks for Jo-Jo-Loo on Flickr for the image.