OK, the tank of gas has been used up and i’ve got some results to share.
On May 1st, i filled up after having traveled 318.2 miles using 13.95 gallons of gas…roughly 22.8 mpg.
Since may 1st, i’ve driven more slowly and less aggressively. I can’t say i’ve always gone the speed limit (honestly, driving that slow will get you killed in this town…) but i’ve tried to keep it within 5 miles per hour of the speed limit and i’ve been setting the cruise control at 70 on the freeway, when possible. I also tried to coast up to red lights, stop signs and turns in neutral. Since i drive stick, it’s really easy to put the clutch in and slow down gradually without wasting fuel on acceleration when i’m just going to slam on my brakes a few seconds later. It’s really f-ing obvious when you think about it but when you accelerate, your car creates energy on the fuel it just burned. Once you burn it, it’s gone, you can’t get it back (million dollar idea: build a combustion engine with an after burner, or one that stores kinetic energy from wasted acceleration…). So when you accelerate and create momentum, and then hit your brakes or turn, you’ve just wasted all of that forward momentum that you had created. It’s quite literally a waste of fuel. Seems so obvious now.
So, with all that in mind, did it really make a difference?!? Let’s take a look.
Last night, May 11th, i filled my tank with 14.02 gallons of gas after travelling 384.8 miles…divide miles by gallons….carry the 1…i got 27.4 mpg. Defintitely not bad. Not bad at all…but it’s pretty close to my prior hypothesis.
I travelled 66 more miles on this tank and i filled up 2 days later than i normally would (allowing that i was out of town for 24 hours in the middle of that). If i fill up every 7 days for a year, keeping gas prices at $3.65/gallon and assuming that i buy 14 gallons per trip, that gets me a yearly gas bill of $2,044. If i fill up every 9 days, keeping the cost and quantity constant, my yearly gas bill would be $2,652. That’s not bad…i’m not sure saving $600 a year is enough to usually necessitate a behavior change for me, but in theory it sounds damn good. Seeing as though we’re getting a $600 “stimulus” check from our federal governement this year, maybe another $600 from saving some gas could really help the majority of this country out…i digress.
Environmentally speaking, here are the results…If i only have to fill up every 9 days instead of every 7, that would equate to 12 fewer trips to the pump per year (40, instead of 52). If i fill up 14 gallons at each of these trips, that would save 168 gallons of gas per year. Let’s say there are 200 million drivers in the U.S. If each of these drivers saved 168 gallons of gas per year that would be 33.6 billion gallons of gas saved. The U.S. consumes 146 billion gallons of gas per year…that would cut our consumption almost one-fourth…a pretty amazing number. And for fun, let’s take it another step. Assuming that a 42-gallon barrel of oil makes 19.5 gallons of gas (even though there is no standard for this)…that would reduce the demand for oil by about 72.2 billion gallons of oil per year. World consumption is around 120 million barrels a day or 43.8 billion barrels or 1.8 trillion gallons of oil per year…so if the U.S. managed to save 72 billion gallons of oil, not by driving electric cars or walking to work, but just by driving slower, we would reduce world oil consumption by 60%. (The world’s economy would fucking collapse, but that’s beside the point right?)
Pretty convincing numbers if you ask me. Color me surprised, but i actually am going to make an effort to drive slower and smarter. It’ll be good for my pocket book and good for the environment, while not having a huge impact on how i live my life. This is not a big or difficult change. I’m sure it will be easier on my car and definitely safer for myself and those around me.
I’m officially on that tank of gas…the one where i promised to drive the speed limit and consciously make an effort to see if that improved my gas mileage. On my last tank of gas, i did the math and received 23 mpg, not the 24 the i originally assumed i was getting. I’m interested to see if this will make a difference.
Then i saw this article in The Arizona Republic today and it just seems so obvious doesn’t it?
I recently partook in a discussion about how driving less or even driving slower might have an impact on the environment, our finances, and our dependence on foreign oil (not to mention bending over the guys over at Exxon just a little bit for their continual record profits). I made a pledge that on my next tank of gas i would drive within the speed limit, watch my acceleration and coast to red lights in neutral (i have a manual transmission), instead of racing up to the light and slamming on my brakes…and then take a good look at my MPG and see if it made a difference.
Now, i’m not a scientist but i do remember the scientific process from high school, so here’s my hypothesis before the experiment. Once i do it, i’ll let you know the actual numbers.
Currently, i get an average of 24 mpg, i have a 14.5 gallon tank, but i fill up when the light goes on somewhere between 13.5 and 14, so let’s say that i go 336 miles on one tank of gas and i use one tank of gas every 7 days. I use premium fuel to keep my rocket ship at peak performance and I usually pay about 3.70 for a gallon of gas…that’s about 60 gallons a month costing me $222 per month times 12 months which is $2664 per year on fuel. If my driving slowly and conservatively suddenly gets me 28 mpg (which is what i get on road trips typically) that would get me about 390 miles before i have to fill up again, about a 60 mile improvement, or about 2.5 gallons of gas further than normal…which maybe, just maybe gets me one or 2 more days of driving on a tank. So let’s say i go 8 days between refills instead of 7, that’s 3.75 refills a month, times 14 gallons per refill time $3.70 per gallon equals $194 per month or about $28 a month in savings or $330 a year.
In the end, $300 a year isn’t going to make a huge impact on my life. Yes, i’m a spoiled privileged white person but i also have a good paying job and i don’t live paycheck to paycheck. So $300 a year is definitely some extra beer money but all in all, not a huge impact on my overall life and probably not enough to reinforce those better driving habits…environmentally speaking, i would save approx 96 gallons of gas over the course of a year, or about 1 barrel. If everyone in America saved 1 barrel of gas, that would be around 300 million barrels of gas a year. The world currently consumes 120 million barrels PER DAY, so we would save the world approx 2.5 days of oil…a drop in the proverbial barrel. It wouldn’t have that big of an impact. Now if driving slowly all of a sudden got me 50mpg, then we’re talking. Sorry to play out all the figures in this post but i’ll be interested to see how my hypothesis compares to my experiment.
“It has to start somewhere, it has to start somehow. What better place than here, what better time than now?” – Zach De La Rocha-
Filed under: Whole Foods, environment, north pacific gyre, plastic, plastic bags, waste
Full Disclosure: I work for a company who is introducing a line of reusable bags into the grocery market. I took the job because i thought i could make a differenceand i’m writing this blog for the same reason.
Plastic is everywhere. From the second we’re born (diapers), to the minute we die (syringes, IV bags, diapers again) we’re covered in it. And to be honest, it probably isn’t entirely a bad thing. A lot of stuff in our lives is better because of plastic. Still our lives have become so good, so abundant with luxury that we’re getting ourselves into trouble because we depend on it too much.
Do i need a plastic bag full of individually wrapped frozen chicken breasts? No, that’s just ridiculous. I don’t mind my frozen breasts rubbing up against each other all that much.
At my office, instead of a water cooler, we have cases of bottled water that are free to anyone. We also have a polycarbonate product — including a water bottle — that we sell, yet most people grab a 16.9 oz bottle, drink it and dump it in the can…i will give us some credit though, we have a recycling program and the person who runs it (my dad) is an absolute tyrant. There isn’t a day that goes by when he doesn’t yell at someone for throwing something recyclable away.
Anyway, all this story telling is leading up to some absolutely raw horror that i have come across on-line while researching for this project. American’s use 100 billion plastic grocery bags a year. In the time it takes me to type this paragraph, we’ll use 100,000. The average bag is used for less than 12 minutes in its entire life span and less than 1% of them will be recycled. Even if they are put in a recycling can, there is a good chance that the city’s recycling center isn’t capable of handling them (Phoenix, for instance, cannot). So when a bag is recycled in my town, the city of Phoenix takes them out of their recycling equipment and sends them to the dump (where NOTHING biodegrades, if you didn’t know). Same goes for plastic bottles…in fact, when you finish a plastic bottle and put the lid on it and throw it away, it takes up more room because of the dead air inside of it.
(Picture: chrisjordan.com)
Furthermore, when these bags and bottles fly around on the streets, enter the storm drains or are barged to the dump (thus flying off or falling into the water) they enter the oceans where they litter every square inch of every ocean in the world. Plastic netting, bags, bottles, etc. have been found in the most remote islands of the world including on the ice of both poles.
Much of this plastic gets caught up in ocean currents and moved around the world…in the case of the North Pacific Gyre, it gets caught up in a vortex twice the size of Texas. View Animation Here
(Read more about the Gyre here, here, here and here)
Furthermore, the life cycle of plastic starts as a plastic pellet that is usually shipped somewhere for production.
When these containers of plastic pellets fall off ships into the ocean, when the trucks crash, when they become a biproduct of the process, they enter the soil and water. Plastic takes thousands of years to photodegrade in a natural environment (Biodegrade means something breaks down back into the environment. Photodegrade means it breaks into little pieces that may hide in the environment but never truly re-enter the ecosystem.) and so when they are ingested by an animal and that animal dies and decomposes, the plastic is placed back into the environment almost as good as new. It never goes away.
The good news now is that we’ve reached a tipping point of plastic awareness, at least in the plastic bag arena. In many cities around America, governments are discussing plastic bag legislation and many companies (Ie. Whole Foods) are stepping up efforts to eliminate plastic bags from their stores. China (China of all people?!?) has banned plastic bags under .30 mil thickness, many African countries have also stepped in, Ireland started in 2002 with a tax that has reduces usage by 95%!
Companies everywhere are starting to pay more attention (i hesitate to use the word “bandwagon” because it implies something that won’t last) to the environment. Recently, at the International Housewares Show in Chicago, i found major companies making legitimate efforts. Brooms and broom handles made of post-consumer bottles (things are post-consumer when they’ve been used by an end-buyer but not “recycled”. Recycled, by definition, means that an object can be turned back into itself. When a bottle is “recycled” but then turned into something that can’t be recycled, it’s called de-cycled.), Simple Green had a hopping booth because despite having been in business doing the Eco-friendly thing for decades, they’ve just now found themselves at the forefront of the movement. The best idea (and Simple Green didn’t come up with it) is for your household cleaners and chemicals to be concentrated into tablet form. Seriously, why is this just now happening? Think about it…when you buy Windex, you’re buying a bottle of water with a few glass-cleaning, non-streaking chemicals in it. This bottle started as powdered chemicals until Windex added water, packaged them up into a heavy box of other water-filled bottles, shipped a heavy truck-full (wasting gobs of fuel, space and energy) to your local store, where it took up valuable shelf space. Why can’t you own your own permanent spray bottle, add a tablet, fill with water and create your own Windex, Clorox, Febreeze, etc?? It seems so obvious, yet, i had never heard it mentioned before last week.
The effects of plastic bags on the environment may be slightly overblown, but if we can reduce harm to the environment in any way, isn’t that worth it? If we can take the burden off of our landfills, reduce the price of goods and our dependence on oil (plastic is an oil-based product, not to mention the shipping costs of such a clumsy, heavy product), why wouldn’t we want to try? What’s the harm in using less of it?
The bottom line is that we need to find ways to eliminate plastic in as many ways as possible. Think of the bottles under the sink, think of the bags at the grocery store, think of the packaging your clothes come in (especially at the dry cleaner)…there are plenty of ways to eliminate plastic in your life and it’s time to start.
Filed under: MIA, Monday Morning, Radiohead, Talib Kweli, alaska, anberlin, environment, more fucking stupidity, sports
Yup, still don’t have a good name for it…thanks for nothing loyal readers.
Today’s links (and commentary):
I am a big fan of doing things that are easy and enjoyable for large sums of money. Recently, a friend’s dad was talking about how hard it was to find someone dependable to drive some small shipments short distances for his trucking company. I immediately volunteered. I love driving and i wouldn’t need a commercial license to do this for him. Friday night, he called and said he needed someone to go to Denver ASAP…i had just returned from a week in Vegas (for a trade show) and was a little too toasted to go 14 hours, but he had another trip to San Diego if i wanted it. I met up with him yesterday, jumped in his F-350 Super Duty (an absolute BEAST of a vehicle) and took off on a 5-hour solo jaunt to SD. I stayed with my brother last night and woke up at 6am this morning to drive the metal cowlings i was transporting to a jet engine factory right next to the SD airport. I felt very official and cool and the plant was amazing…there were forklifts the size of semi-tractors driving around with 747 engines on them like it was nothing. The drive gave me the opportunity to spend some time alone with my own thoughts (which i love) and also a time to listen to some new albums, but we’ll get to those in a minute. I hope i get another trip really soon.
We always hear about the proposed drilling in Alaska, but the Pebble Mine is an even more imminent threat that nobody seems to know shit about. And then the company tried to buy off the petition… That is my friend John in the video…he owns the lodge where i caught this:
The proposed mine will be an open-pit cluster fuck of a gold mine right above the confluence of 3 rivers that lead into Bristol Bay…for those of you scoring at home, Bristol Bay is the starting point to the spawning runs of about 9 million Salmon. That should be fun.
On the lighter side, i couldn’t watch the Packers – Giants game because i was driving, but this seems appropriate:
Keeping in the sports vein…after all the Imus bullshit, the talk of “lynching” Tiger Woods, etc…do you think this is appropriate? (Personally i think the whole lot of it is just out of control, over the top politically correct white liberal guilt, but hey, that’s just me.)
Today’s Albums:
Talib Kweli – Beautiful Struggle (fantastic album and one that i hadn’t listened to in a while. The lyrics are political, intelligent and poignant…the beats are great…the guest MCs are the cream of the crop. This album might break your heart.)
MIA – Kala (I downloaded this because it was on everyone’s top 10 lists of 2007…and i must have missed something because i thought it was terrible.)
Radiohead – In Rainbows (I also downloaded this absolutely free which is even cooler than picking how much you’d like to pay for it. And like every other Radiohead album i’ve ever heard, i listened to the first 4 songs and skipped through the rest…sorry, i just can’t do it.)
Anberlin - Cities (I saw them open up for Motion City Soundtrack and downloaded as many albums as i could find the very next day…it’s not often that i hear a band live and immediately like them but these guys are great. This album is a white-hot scorching pile of awesome. It’s everything i like about music…good hard-rocking guitar and drums, the lead singer has a great unique voice which is accented by perfect harmonies, the lyrics are great and totally catchy. Get this album now.)
Filed under: Vick, britney spears, environment, light rail, quickie, the office | Tags: britney, environment, friday morning quickie, kfed, stupidity, traffic, Vick
Since “Soundtrack Stories” really hasn’t come to fruition yet and i’ve been craving a set post, i’ve decided that i’m creating a Friday morning post called Friday Morning Quickie. Here’s why:
1. I’m usually either really hungover or still drunk at this point. That serves 2 purposes: I don’t want to do work, and i’m still thinking of random funny drunken shit.
2. Everyone likes slacking off and reading blog posts on Fridays instead of working (right? i mean, that’s what i do, so i’m assuming everyone does. Is that a fallacy of reasoning? I say, yes.)
3. Lately i’ve been posting some heavy shit and i feel the need to balance it by posting some seriously superficial and random shit. That’s what you can expect here.
Also, i have to give credit to Dan Shanoff (a very talented writer and sports blogger) for this style. Check him out.
And as always, these are the thoughts and ideas that kept me out of the really good schools. (and sent me here.)
We talk alot about the environment in this blog community so here are some thoughts on that subject. Instead of changing the world, how about some common sense? Here’s what i mean:
- What produces more pollution? A Hummer that gets 8 mpg but gets on the freeway, goes 75 mph, gets to where it’s going in 15 minutes and shuts its engine off? Or a Prius that gets stuck in traffic for 45 minutes?
- What helps the air quality in Phoenix more? An HOV (carpool) lane on the 101 that approx. 18 people will use or just another regular lane that relieves congestion and helps people get where they’re going and turn their cars off faster?
- And while we’re on the HOV lane topic, how much pollution is caused by the thousands of semis, bulldozers, diggers, pavers, work trucks, etc. — not to mention the increase in traffic during construction – it takes to build the stupid fucking lane? Enough that the opening of this lane will counteract the damage already done? I think not.
- My mom recently told me that a Phoenix think tank (I have no idea which one, nor do i have any concrete evidence of this being true, but my mom said it. Would you argue with her? I wouldn’t.) recently reached the conclusion that the new Phoenix light rail will actually do nothing to relieve traffic or pollution here because, aside from nobody ever using it, the train will run on the street and stop traffic when it is running. Those cars sitting and waiting for the train to pass will cause more pollution just sitting there than the cars of the people riding the train will alleviate.
- Ethanol — the love child of the ”green” movement — causes more damage to the environment than gasoline. You can produce ethanol using a lot of different plants and vegetation material, but in typical U.S. fashion, we’ve let the Corn Lobby (and there is such a thing. Believe me, i was surprised too.) decide that we’re using corn and corn only to produce it. Corn is one of the most environmentally harsh vegetables to mass produce (Get it? Produce? Corn? Damnit, that’s a double pun! You didn’t think of it.). It takes more pesticides, more water and more land to produce than almost any other vegetable. We’re damaging the ground water, screwing with natural water tables, polluting rivers and streams, damaging delicate rural ecosystems and only using the actual corn, instead of using the stalk and the leaves like we could. Leave it to humans, we’ll fuck up anything that had good intentions.
More thoughts on driving:
- I saw a fuel truck rear-end a Hummer H2 this morning. IRRONNNYYYY. I think they were trying to achieve something along these lines:
- Don’t you love it when some punk ass kid in a fast car (read: me) races through traffic at 85-95 mph, weaves like Evander Holyfield in a boxing ring (or just simply walking…for those of you who don’t know that, the guy can’t really walk straight or talk because he’s been punched in the head so much…i digress), cuts people off, passes you in the exit lane and generally drives like an asshole and yet ends up getting stuck at the same stop light as you 5 minutes later? Boy is that embarrasing.
- This morning at 9:30, i was in dead stop traffic on the 101 north. Not stop and go, DEAD STOP. The reason? A construction truck, working on the aforementioned HOV lane, was driving down the fast lane, with the “Merge Right” arrows on, going 25 mph and making everyone go around it BUT DOING ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING! Just out for a drive, no purpose that i could acertain, but stopping traffic entirely all the same. Genius.
Other random, superficial thoughts:
- We shouldn’t worry about Britney Spears’ kids as much as we do. First off, there are a lot of kids with worse problems. Second, there are a ton of mothers who love booze, drugs, pork rinds and not wearing underwear a lot more than their own children and we don’t worry about them nearly as much as Sean Preston and Billy Bob, or whatever the fuck the other one’s name is… Third, these kids DNA and genetic makeup came from Britney Spears and Kevin fucking Federline. They were fucked in the womb. Let it go.
- Speaking of K-Fed, there are two people who were previously just destroyed in the media as being complete jokes as human beings, K-Fed and Marcus Vick. Recent events (Britney and dog fighting, respectively) have caused them to both look like geniuses/suitable fathers. This blows my mind.
- Is it funny that when i spell check this post, the word “blog” isn’t recognized? I think so.
- I’m absolutely in love with Pam Beesely from The Office. She’s the fictional girlfriend i’ve always wanted. And she’s quickly gaining on Mandy Moore and Jeniffer Aniston in my Actresses That I Think Would Be Just Like The Characters They Play In Real Life list.
- Strippers are actually really cool people. Too bad they’re so expensive to get to know.
