I can’t wait to see this man try to explain this to a debate audience. He now claims that by inflating your tires and getting tune-ups, you could save as much oil as we’re talking about drilling domestically.

The transcript, via Ed Morrissey:

There are things you can do individually, though, to save energy. Making sure your tires are properly inflated — simple thing. But we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling — if everybody was just inflating their tires? And getting regular tune-ups? You’d actually save just as much!

Too bad there are little things like “facts” to get in the way of that logic. As Ed discovers:

Tire inflation could improve gas mileage by about 3%, which would relate to about 600,000 barrels of oil a day at the most absurdly optimistic extrapolation.

The Green River oil shale formation alone is expected to provide 20 million barrels of oil per day for the next century.

Update: Geraghty finds more data.

Survey information from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows that about one in every three cars has a significantly under inflated tire.

Let’s be generous and say a properly inflated tire gives a full extra three miles per gallon. So a commuter who had previously insufficiently inflated tires starts using 1.22 gallons per day. They’re saving .153 gallons per day.

This 2003 press release puts the number of commuters in America at a little over 129 million. So we have one third of those commuters – 43 million – saving .153 gallons per day, or almost 6.58 million gallons.

And the Green River location alone, if drilled, would give us 20 million barrels a day.

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