“There are things you can do individually, though, to save energy. Making sure your tires are properly inflated — simple thing. But we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling — if everybody was just inflating their tires? And getting regular tune-ups? You’d actually save just as much!”

These are the words of Barack Obama yesterday as he pandered spoke to a crowd in Springfield MO. The crowd actually began to laugh as the Senator mentioned properly inflating your tires, before realizing that Obama was not making a joke. This led Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond to say “Rural Missouri is suffering a gas price crisis and the best thing Senator Obama can come up with is more hot air, this time for your tires”.

John at Powerline decided to do a little math and find out exactly how much energy we would actually be saving:

Just for fun, I did the math. Properly inflating your tires can improve gas mileage by 3%. Of course, many people already keep their tires properly inflated, and many more are at least close to being properly inflated. Let’s be generous and assume that one-half of the total possible savings would be realized if we all inflated our tires properly; that’s a net gain of 1.5% fuel efficiency.

Americans drive approximately 2,880 billion miles per year. If we average 24 mpg, we use around 120 billion gallons of gasoline in our vehicles. If, through perfect tire inflation, we improved our collective fuel efficiency by 1.5%, that would be 1.8 billion gallons. A barrel of oil produces around 20 gallons of gasoline, so the total savings available through tire inflation is approximately 90,000,000 barrels of oil annually.

Ninety million barrels of oil certainly sounds like alot, but when you take into account that the United States consumes roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day, it is less than 1 weeks worth of energy.

For the average person the savings is even more miniscule. With the average car getting 24 miles per gallon, a 3% increase would have that same car getting 24.72 miles per gallon. Assuming the car was driven 10,000 miles per year that would represent a savings of about 12 gallons, or $48 per year, less than $1 per week. Not quite the energy plan we can believe in Senator.

As a side note, I find it ironic that Obama said we could save oil by having more tune-ups, considering part of the tune up process is an oil change.

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Barack Obama, Election 2008, Features, Politics