Obama Pumps Up His Tire Pressure Hoax

Barack Obama attacked the McCain campaign for making jokes about his claim from last week that if only you and your fellow drivers would properly inflate your tires you would save as much oil as could be produced through additional drilling. His exact words were…

If everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper level, it would actually …probably… save more oil than all the oil that we’d get from John McCain drillin’ right below his feet there, wherever it is that he was gunna drill.

He went on to complain about the tire gages the McCain campaign has been passing out, and then bellowed:

[Republicans are] making fun of a step every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by three to four percent. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant!

Liberty Works has looked into Obama’s claim that tire pressure alone can “reduce our oil consumption by three to four percent.” We’ve done the research and the math so you won’t have to. We wanted to see who was “being ignorant.” We assumed Senator Obama would consider the folks at EPA to be “experts.” So we started with this bit of information from the EPA website

Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by 0.4%

for every 1 psi drop in pressure of all four tires.

From the Energy Information Administration we learned that about HALF the crude oil that enters the refinery system emerges as gasoline for cars and trucks. The other half becomes a variety of other products including aviation fuel, kerosene-type jet fuel, lubricants, waxes, and propane.

Nobody, least of all Barack Obama, knows how many of us are driving around with under-inflated tires. So any calculation has to be based on reasonable hypothetical assumptions. Our hypothetical assumption was

• Half of all gasoline is consumed by cars and trucks whose tires are under-inflated by an average of 5 PSI.

We believe this assumption probably overstates the problem, considering that professionally managed fleets of cars and trucks are driven many more miles, using many times as much gasoline as family vehicles, are checked often and kept at proper pressure.

Based on our assumption and the EPA’s formula above, half of cars and trucks would be wasting 2% of the gasoline they consume. Or, one-percent of all gasoline consumed by all cars and trucks would be wasted.

Because half of America’s crude oil consumption is in the form of gasoline, that would mean that approximately one-half of one-percent of oil consumption is wasted by under-inflated tires. Obama’s claim, 3% to 4% of all oil consumption is preposterous.

Is Senator Obama hoping we’ll believe that lifting all the bans on domestic drilling would produce a less than one-half of one percent increase in production?

Obama has tried twice to convince us that pumping up our tires would save more crude oil than could be produced through off shore drilling!

Since Senator Obama has chosen to repeat, reinforce and exaggerate his tire pressure solution to high gas prices, we assume we should take him seriously, and we challenge him to answer a couple of questions:

• Is he telling us that as President he would maintain the bans on additional domestic oil production until he was satisfied that we were all keeping our tires inflated?
• If so, how does he propose to force every driver to keep every tire fully inflated?

Perhaps President Obama would open a Department of Pressure Education & Enforcement (PEE), with enforcement officers to patrol the nations streets in a fleet of gas burning vehicles to hunt down you negligent slugs with too little air in your tires.