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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (968)	7/25/2008 3:02:16 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

If we can double avg fleet mpg from 25 to 50, then we will have gone the majority of the way to oil independence. If you double the average default MPG of the cars people drive, than at the margin you increase driving, and decrease attempts to drive in such a way as to reduce gasoline use. You will still lower demand for gasoline, but gasoline is a fractional distillate of oil, you can adjust the percentage, but only to a certain extent. If you don't also reduce demand for diesel, heating oil, lubricants, petro-chemicals, etc. than you tend to have a relative over abundance of gasoline compared to those other products. So gasoline prices drop a lot more than the oil prices do, making it harder to double the MPG, or maintain that higher MPG standard. None of which means you won't reduce oil use, but its not so simple as you lay out, and you easily might not reduce it nearly as much as you think. To the extent you do noticeably reduce it, then a lot of the production that will be taken off line is the small wells across the US, and the production that won't go on line will be other small wells and also deep water pockets, or politically sensitive areas (perhaps ANWR), which will now lose the support that they had been gaining. The Middle East is full of large easy to access oil fields. They are the "base", much of the marginal production that we use is in the US. So the percentage that you reduce oil imports will be less, likely much less than the percentage that you reduce oil use. And all that ignores the very large cost and difficulty of doubling fleet MPG in the first place.