Chill to Fight Climate Change

There’s something you can do today to fight climate change. It’s effective, it’s easy, it costs nothing, it doesn’t require a lifestyle change, and most of you are going to hate it. You are also going to hate me for bringing it up because there is no rational reason not to do it. It is literally a crime not to. Literally.

 Stop speeding. Drive the speed limit. That’s it.

 Here’s the math. (If you don’t like explanations, speeding in the U.S. is responsible for at least 4.2% of our oil use, 1% of world oil use and 15,000 deaths annually)

 At highway speeds, most of your energy goes to pushing air out of the way.  Air drag increases by the square of your speed. Double the speed means four times the drag.  A small increase in speed ends up making a lot of difference in energy use.

 Compared to driving at 65 miles per hour, driving 75 mph will cost you 15% of your gas mileage and driving 80 mph will cost you 20%.

It’s hard to get an exact number on what percentage of drivers speed, and by how much. Study results vary. Generally speaking, about 75% of drivers speed, and about 80% of drivers surveyed think that driving ten to twenty miles per hour over the speed limit is fine. Absolute speed limit compliance is low. Biased self-reporting undoubtedly minimizes the problem.  It would be safe to say that 75% of drivers are losing about 15% of their mileage by speeding.

Road transportation accounts for 40% of our oil demand. Multiply it all out and about 4.5% of U.S. oil use is just due to speeding. The U.S. accounts for 20% of world oil demand, so speeding Americans increase world oil demand by about 1%.

Just an aggressive driving style, minus speeding, can cost drivers another 25%, so slowing down *and* calming down behind the wheel could cut world oil consumption by 2%.

We’d still have the other 98% of oil-based emissions to deal with, but it is free, it is easy, and it’s the law. When I say it’s the least we can do, I mean it’s the very least we can do.

If contributing to the survival of the planet isn’t enough to motivate you, consider the more direct deaths. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, speeding was a contributing factor in 9,478 deaths in 2019. An MIT study found that air pollution from vehicles causes 53,000 deaths annually. The inefficiency of speeding causes about 10.5% of those, or 5,565. If everybody slowed down, 15,000 Americans would not have to die prematurely. One of them could be you, or someone you love.

Cruise control is your friend, and a friend to nature. Set it at the speed limit. Cease worrying about speed traps. It’s really, really the very least you can do.

Driving with Putin

Right now a lot of us are in reactive mode. Trump, Kim Jong Un, Harvey, and Assad keep throwing sand in our faces and we spend all our time trying to wipe it off and move forward. Even with all this political chaos we should pause, stop reacting for a minute, and make proposals. The persuasive power of “not that” diminishes with repetition.

U.S. intelligence services have established within a reasonable doubt that the Russians interfered in our last election. The details of the extent and Russia’s success are yet to be completely uncovered, but we know our political parties were hacked, our voting records were hacked, and our social media were clogged by a deliberate propaganda campaign. It is probable that the Trump family/campaign and the Republican Party were both involved in Russian money laundering.

This raises an important and tricky question: How do we retaliate against a nuclear armed nation that is also the world’s largest oil exporter? The answer is in the question. They are the world’s largest oil exporter. We are the world’s largest oil importer. The imbalance in this relationship seems to give them an advantage, but it is exactly the opposite. They can’t afford to export less oil. If we do it right, it is no problem for us to import less. The price of oil and the state of the Russian economy hang in the balance. A fine balance it is.

Right now the international oil cartel OPEC is trying to restrict the output of its member states in order to bring the price per barrel above $50. Last November, OPEC and its allies agreed to cut output by 1.2 million barrels per day (mbpd) as of January 2017. That compares to world production of 98 mbpd and OPEC production of 33 mbpd.

The U.S. consumes about 19.6 mbpd, and 43% of that, 8.5 mbpd, gets refined into gasoline for cars, SUVs, and light trucks.

An average car in the U.S. gets around 25 mpg. However, that mileage goes down as driving speed goes up. The U.S. Department of Energy, on its fuel efficiency page, notes, “Aggressive driving (speeding, rapid acceleration and braking) wastes gas. It can lower your gas mileage by roughly 15% to 30% at highway speeds and 10% to 40% in stop-and-go traffic.” Slowing down from 75 mph to 65 mph would raise mpg by about 10%.

And we do go 75 mph. A study by the Insurance Institute for highway safety showed that on rural interstates anywhere from 7% to 49% of drivers were going at least 75 mph.  In some places over 10% of drivers were going over 80 mph.

I’m going to make a wild ass estimate and say that if, as a nation, we just chilled out and slowed down, we could raise our overall gas mileage by 15%. Our fleet gas mileage would go from 25 mpg to 28.75 mpg. We’d use 13% less oil for gasoline production. That’s 1.1 mbpd. (See the hard won 1.2 mbpd reduction, above) That’s a nightmare for OPEC and a nightmare for Russia.

In February 2016, before the OPEC reduction agreement, the price per barrel touched $30. It could go there again without much more of a glut. That would cut Russian government revenues by 25%, their exports by 25%, and knock about 10% off their GDP. Ouchski.

Now, I’m not expecting Americans to suddenly become Prozac nation behind the wheel. I did this thought experiment to point out what a close run thing the world oil market is. Slight wobbles in supply or demand cause dramatic price swings. Even the prospect of such changes makes the commodity markets jump. It wouldn’t take a lot for us to use the power of our demand to rock the world. I mean, I’m not asking people to donate a kidney. Actually, I’ll bet some people would donate a kidney in exchange for the right to speed.

I have another idea, more pragmatic, although politically a stretch, that would do this and more. I’ll get to that one next time.