MarkChristopher's Blog

The 450 million vehicles on the road today account for half of the world's total consumption, generate nearly one fifth of greenhouse gas emissions, and have pervasive effects on land use and air quality. Personal transportation (i.e., home use) is responsible for 30 to 50% of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, 33% of toxic water pollution, and over 45% of toxic air emissions. In addition, fueling passenger cars accounts for more than one quarter of world oil consumption.

Building roads for all those cars also creates a lot of environmental problems, fragmenting habitat, consuming resources for their construction, and generating water pollution from runoff. In the U.S., roads and parking lots occupy one half of urban space. That much land, if dedicated to food production, could produce enough grain to feed 200 million people per year.

Light trucks and sports utility vehicles (SUV) are all the rage today, but have severe implications for the environment. The average new light truck or SUV gets lower gas mileage and does not have the same emissions standards as a new passenger car, meaning it will emit more pollutants than a new car.

Of course, there are ways to navigate through our daily lives with less environmental impact while still enjoying the open road- with smarter driving habits, one day our roads could indeed be much more open!

Buy Smart: 

Clean vehicle choices - separating the hybrid from the hype
There are lots of choices of cleaner vehicles to buy these days, but it’s important to remember that not all green cars are created equal. Many hybrid models, such as the Honda Accord, are known as “muscle hybrids” and use the electric motor to achieve horsepower, not efficiency. Others simply stop the engine while idling, accomplishing minimal efficiency gains. There are smart and affordable choices.

Another important consideration in choosing a new car is your driving cycle. Some hybrids, such as the Toyota Prius, actually get better mileage during city driving- perfect for commuters who spend time in heavy traffic.

Those who prefer to power their vehicles on something other than gasoline have options too, including the Honda Civic GX, which runs on Compressed Natural Gas and can be refueled at home or at the hundreds of public CNG stations.

In addition, most diesel vehicles can run on a biodiesel blend- others can be converted to accommodate purer forms of biodiesel fuel.

• Information on biodiesel fuel  
• Currently available diesel vehicle models

And don’t forget to consider buying a used vehicle- even hybrids and CNG vehicles can be found, saving you money and sparing the Earth the environmental cost of manufacturing another new car- about 27 tons of waste, 4 tons of carbon and 500 lbs. of other pollutants.

Drive Smart:

Even if you’re not in the market to buy a new car, there are things you can do to reduce your pollution impact no matter how you get around your world.

1. Carpool - There is so much extra room in America's 140 million cars that everyone in Western Europe could ride with them. If each commuting car carried just one more person, we'd save more than 18 million gallons of gasoline and keep more than 360 million pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every day.

2. Consolidate your errands –driving 15 fewer miles per week (bike, carpool, walk) eliminates up to 900 lbs. of CO2 per year.

3. Tune Up - clean oil and properly inflated tires eliminate up to 1000 lbs. of CO2 per year per car, and collectively, we can save up to 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

4. Liberate your driveway - Instead of keeping and maintaining a second vehicle for occasional recreational activities or traveling, rent one on those occasions. For commuting, consider enrolling in a car-sharing program such as Flexcar or Zipcar and give yourself the flexibility of access to a car when you need it and the freedom from it when you don’t. Check out the CarSharing Network for a program near you.

5. Check your right foot…playing Speed Racer is fun, but costly in terms of gasoline efficiency as well as pollution.

6. Tread lightly - Invest in a Terra Pass to offset the CO 2 impact of your driving by funding clean energy projects like wind farms, methane capture and more.

Help form the future:

Just as the last several years brought us hybrid vehicles, several promising automotive and fuel technologies are just on the horizon:

Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs) - Often described as “an electric vehicle with a safety net”, PHEVs offer the best of both worlds: the ability to use electricity for your daily commute, and a gasoline hybrid system for longer distances. Using this technology, vehicles will have the ability to achieve the equivalent of over 100mpg, and a PHEV with even 20 miles of electric range would reduce gasoline consumption by 60%.

While no automakers are yet manufacturing Plug-In Hybrids, innovative companies have created kits that will be available to convert existing hybrids to PHEVs. For more information, check out EDrive or Hymotion.

Flexible-Fuels - today, most of the fuel for our cars is petroleum-based, but there are several innovations with regard to ethanol and renewable diesel, both of which will eventually be made from waste products and can be integrated into existing fueling infrastructure and vehicle technologies. These fuels are currently being manufactured in pilot programs and will available in various cities nationwide over the next several years.

In order to see these technologies in a showroom near you, it’s important to ask our automakers to build better cars as well as vote for and support the policymakers that uphold your values.

A full tank and an empty wallet — if you’ve got one, chances are you’ve got both. And with gas prices at record levels these days, you should probably get used to the condition.

This week, retail gas prices hit their highest levels ever — an average of $3.10 per gallon, according to the Department of Energy — and it’s unlikely that they’ll come down any time soon.

And they surely won’t come down today, which, as anybody with an e-mail account already knows is the day of the great American “gas out.” As such one-day boycotts have “exactly zero chance of having an impact on gas prices.”

So, what’s a road-tripping traveler to do? Make sure you’re getting the most out of every drop by driving smarter, maintaining your car better and knowing whose pumps have the best prices. You won’t take a dime out of Big Oil’s pocket, but you can save yourself hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per year. Here’s how:

Saving at the pump
Know before you go: Gas prices at nearby stations can vary by $.20 or more per gallon. Ways to find out the best deal such as FOX 35’s Pump Patrol, or various websites.

Use the card: Discover, American Express and other credit card companies offer cards that provide cash rebates for gas purchases. Most give rebates of around five percent, although there are often restrictions on where and when you’ll get the full discount.

Use the other card: Several grocery chains offer fuel discounts to shoppers who join their loyalty programs.

Use common sense: Do use the right octane — higher grades rarely provide any benefit. Don’t top off your tank — it only leads to increased spillage and evaporation. Whenever possible, pump your gas during the early morning or late evening when cooler temperatures prevail. The gas will be denser, which means more of it will end up in your tank.

Saving on the road
Turns out your parents were right — you should lay off the jackrabbit starts and skid-mark stops. According to the federal government, aggressive driving can cut your fuel efficiency by as much as 33 percent. You don’t have to drive like Grandma, but with the typical fill-up costing $30–$50, Mom and Dad’s old advice takes on new relevance.

Slow down: Gas mileage decreases rapidly at speeds above 60 mph. At 65, the average car loses five to seven percent in fuel economy; at 70, as much as 15 percent. Drive 75 at today’s gas prices and you’re essentially paying an extra $.60 per gallon.

Lighten up: Stop-and-go traffic will always be annoying, but you can minimize the frustration by going with the flow instead of racing and braking every time the line inches forward. You’ll also improve in-town gas mileage by up to five percent.

Lose the load: A little junk in the trunk is one thing, but an extra 100 pounds of gear can reduce your fuel economy by up to two percent. If you don’t need it, leave it in the garage. The same goes for the roof rack: If you’re not actually using it, all it’s doing is increasing aerodynamic drag and lowering your gas mileage.

Saving every day
According to the Department of Energy, keeping your engine tuned correctly can increase gas mileage by up to four percent. For most of us, tune-ups are best left to the pros, but there are some easy steps you can take that don’t require a trip to the mechanic.

Up the airflow: A clogged or dirty air filter can cut 10 percent off your gas mileage. Fortunately, most are easily replaced.

Get pumped: Keeping your tires properly inflated can improve your fuel economy by three percent or more. They’ll last longer, too.

Be oil aware: Clean oil improves performance by reducing friction. Using the right grade can also improve gas mileage by one to two percent.

Drive less: I’m not suggesting you stay home, but if you make your trips around town more efficient (combining errands, driving during off-peak hours, etc.), you’ll have that much more money to spend when you’re ready to hit the open road.

Have you heard of a proposed one-day "gas boycott" that has a goal of taking $2.3 billion in oil company profits on May 15th? Aside from circulating some questionable math, organizers of this event stand exactly zero chance of having an impact on gas prices!

Unfortunately, even if this boycott were to live up to the hopes of its organizers — including everyone who has forwarded this e-mail in the past few weeks (you know who you are) — it would have zero impact. But before we get to the reasons why, let’s do a little fact checking.

Let's start with the price impact of that alleged “gas out.” In the first week of April 1997, the average price of a gallon of gasoline nationwide was $1.248. By the end of the month, the weekly average was $1.24. If there was a one-day drop of 30 cents a gallon, it doesn’t show up in the statistics compiled by the Department of Energy.

Some of the other numbers in this widely circulated mail don't add up either. There are more like 200 million-plus Web users in the U.S., not 73 million. And the $2.3 billion daily revenue figure assumes everyone fills their tank every day, which they don't.

However even if these numbers were correct, it wouldn't matter.

The real problem with this idea is that — as some versions of this e-mail suggest —these "boycotters" simply top off their tanks May 14 or wait to fill them up May 16. All that does is shift sales from one day to another. Any money “lost” from lower gasoline sales on May 15 will be made up with higher sales on the days before and after the “boycott.”

To have a real financial impact, you’d have to figure out how to get people to keep their cars off the road for the whole day — cutting actual consumption. Of course, you’d also have to shut down ambulance services, police cars, fire trucks, delivery vans, etc. And don’t forget all those other gas-powered devices: Every landscaping crew would have to take a holiday on one of the busiest days of the year.

But suppose that, through some magical force of nature, you managed to shut down every gasoline-powered vehicle and device for one day. Let’s look at how much money would be involved and what would happen to it:

Based on current demand of about 386 million gallons a day, at $3 a gallon, the total value of gasoline sold daily in the U.S. comes to almost $1.2 billion. But that’s the total retail value — the pot of money that’s divvied up along a chain of oil producers, pipeline operators, refiners, wholesalers, truckers and retailers. Let’s follow the chain and see who gets to keep what.

Crude oil
The biggest chunk of change — about 53 percent of the pump price of each gallon of gasoline — goes to pay for the crude oil used to make it. So in theory, $624 million of the “boycott” would “hit the pockets” of oil producers, whether domestic or foreign.

The problem with this part of the boycotters’ plan is that, just like drivers topping off their gas tanks before and after May 15, refiners work off stockpiles. So if all U.S. refiners bought $624 million less crude oil on Tuesday, they could just buy a little more on Wednesday to bring their stocks back up. Even if they somehow canceled delivery of oil they’d already contracted to buy, any oil not delivered to U.S. refiners would be sold to other customers.

True, if you suddenly took 10 million barrels of oil off the market for a day, you might knock the spot market price of crude down a notch. But much of the oil sold every day is priced under long-term contracts. So if your 10 million barrels went undelivered for 24 hours, you wouldn’t change the price that a refiner had already paid for it. Even if, for some reason, that 10 million barrels went unsold, it would still be sitting in the ground with an oil producer's name on it, ready to be sold later — possibly at a higher, and more profitable, price. 

Taxes
About 19 percent of the pump price of each gallon represents taxes. So the next big chunk of cash from a day’s worth of unsold gasoline — about $228 million — would come out of the budgets of federal, state and local governments, not oil industry profits. Since that money is used to pay for programs and purchases that have already been approved, you’d have to make up the difference by raising other taxes, or cutting spending, or some combination. 

Refining
Now comes the part that makes most would-be boycotters see red: the refiners' cut. Another 19 percent of our $1.2 billion in daily gasoline purchases pays for the cost of making the gasoline, including the refiners’ profits. That money also goes to pay refinery workers’ salaries, new equipment, maintenance and all the other costs of running a business.

So just how much goes to “line oil refiners’ pockets?” According to researchers at the investment firm Friedman, Billings and Ramsey, the average profit margin for converting a barrel of crude oil into gasoline in the first quarter of this year came to $15.75 — or about 37.5 cents per gallon. (In the oil patch, there are 42 gallons in a barrel.)

With gas prices at $3 a gallon, that's about 12.5 percent margin, or about $150 million a day — not a bad profit for a day's work.

But how does that compare to what other companies make? Google and Bank of America recently reported net profit margins of 29 percent; handbag maker Coach Inc. had a net margin of 24 percent and Coca-Cola reported a net margin of 21 percent. Of the 200 largest companies in the S&P 500 index, 82 had profit margins higher than 12.5 percent, according to figures from MSN Money.

Wholesalers and retailers
Though retailers bear the brunt of pump price rage, they actually get the smallest piece of your gasoline dollar. About 9 percent of the retail pump price pays for distribution and marketing, which includes the cost of shipping gasoline to wholesalers, who take a cut and then ship it to your local gas station.

Very little of the retailers' cut goes back to oil companies. Something like 80 percent of the gasoline consumed in the United States is sold by 112,000 convenience stores, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. Even though they may display an oil company logo, less than 3 percent of U.S. gas stations are owned by a major oil company. After factoring in all expenses, including credit card fees, the average retail profit per gallon is roughly 1 cent, according to the NACS. Some stores lose money on gasoline to boost foot traffic to the store and increase sales of soda and chips.

An alternative fuel boycott
Still, if it makes you feel better, go ahead and drive by the gas pumps May 15. But don’t kid yourself into believing that it will do anything to “stick it to Big Oil.”

Why not, instead, make May 15 “Fuel Economy Awareness Day” — urging drivers to check the mileage they’re getting and review suggestions for improving it? Better yet, make May 15 “Shop For A Higher Gas Mileage Car Day.”

Because the only way we’re going to have any impact on demand — and price — is to reduce the amount of gasoline consumed per person. And the best way to do that is to improve the efficiency of cars on U.S. roads. If you doubled your average mileage, you would cut consumption in half.

Now that would put a big crimp in gasoline sales and almost certainly send pump prices tumbling!