Obama Agrees With McCain, McCain is Part of the Problem

Senator McCain has recently been trumpeting that the current energy crisis “has been 30 years in the making” a comment that sparked this reply, from Senator Obama.

“You won’t hear me say this too often, but I couldn’t agree more with the explanation that Sen. McCain offered a few weeks ago. He said, ‘Our dangerous dependence on foreign oil has been 30 years in the making, and was caused by the failure of politicians in Washington to think long term about the future of the country,’ ” Obama said.

“What Sen. McCain neglected to mention was that during those 30 years, he was in Washington for 26 of them. And in all that time, he did little to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said. – Source

McCain meanwhile was giving out tire pressure gauges in an attempt to belittle Obama’s comment that properly inflating tires would save fuel. Perhaps someone should have shown McCain this excerpt from CarCare.org.

Proper inflation can also improve gas mileage by more than 3%, when maintained regularly. Keep this in mind: Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by 0.4 percent for every 1 psi (pounds per square inch) drop in pressure of all four tires.

Now multiply that 3% fuel savings times the approximately 140,000,000 cars in the U.S. (source) and you end up saving enormous quantities of fuel – virtually immediately.

Compare that to dangerous offshore drilling which won’t produce even 1 gallon of gasoline for about 8-10 years, and consider this:

“The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.” (Source

So it looks like those reporters who got the free tire gauges from McCain are likely to be the only Americans he benefits with his “fuel” strategy, at least the only ones not in the Oil Industry.

Update Even McCain’s top surrogates, Joe Lieberman, Charlie Crist, and Arnold Schwarzenegger all have supported “tire inflation” as an important energy saving measure. Seems like only McCain doesn’t get it.

Update 2 Time Magazine reports:

The Bush administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 barrels per day by 2030. We use about 20 million barrels per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage by 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone else did, we could reduce demand several percentage points immediately. In other words: Obama is right.

Spread it: del.icio.us | digg it | reddit