Obama on Energy

Nice speech by Obama addressing the recent immature reaction by the GOP regarding his advice about checking tire pressure as something every American can do immediately to help gas consumption.

Comments

[David Weber]

I was curious to see how many people were actually driving around with low tire pressure, so I spent a couple hours at my office complex reading the tire pressure of the cars in the parking lot. Only 2 out of 78 cars had low tire pressure (which I defined to be 3 psi < recommended), but 11 cars actually had 5 psi greater than recommended pressure. The other 65 cars were within -3 to +5 psi of recommended. Arguments should be made with facts that are supported by data. It seems that politics has diluted the reason of normally clear-minded people.

[Graham Glass]

Hi David,

While I of course agree that recommendations should be based on data, it's also very possible that your sampling is not statistically significant. For example, it's possible that urban professionals take better care of their cars.

Cheers,
Graham

[David Weber]

Hi Graham,

We should all keep our cars tuned for efficient operation, but to suggest that putting air in our tires will solve our energy problems is silly.

A better idea (IMO) is to provide incentives for businesses to enable/allow some of their employees to work from home. If we took 25% of the cars out of the daily commute, we'd reduce our energy consumption and our carbon emissions dramatically.

Of course, the US still needs to become energy independent if it wants any sense of security from rogue countries.

Cheers,
David

[Graham Glass]

Hi David,

Barack Obama never said that putting air in our tires will solve our energy problems.

He made his remark about tire pressure while he was outlining his overall energy policy and someone in the audience asked how everyday Americans could help the country to conserve energy.

I agree with you that working from home would help, but of course the long term solution as you point out is to adopt new clean energy sources.

Cheers,
Graham

[David Weber]

I think this concept has some potential:

http://zeropollutionmotors.us/

What do you think? Where do we get the electricity for it? Nuclear make the most sense to me! There's a lot of potential energy stored in chemical bonds.