How Can I Save Fuel on Summer Vacation Trips?

Hey Mr. Green,

Our family will take a long road trip by car this summer. Now don’t get on your high horse, Mister Know-It-All, and command us to ride bikes to our destination. Here’s the deal: I don’t give a damn if burning fossil fuel causes global warming, but I do want to save money on gas. How can I accomplish this? —Neal, in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin

Enjoy your trip, Neal, and keep the ol’ car radio tuned to your favorite right-wing global-warming-denial talk show so you can pick up some new rhetoric for blasting us climatological Cassandras.

There are a number of ways you can cut your fuel consumption. The first thing to do is to give your vehicle a tune-up if it hasn’t had one in awhile. Following are eight more ideas, with estimates how much they’ll save you, courtesy of the EPA and Car and Driver magazine. (The percentages have a big range because of wide variations in fuel efficiency and driving habits.)

1. Drive sensibly: Chill out, don’t stew about environmentalists or vent your road rage with jackrabbit starts, jamming on the brakes, changing speeds, etc. Aggressive and stupid driving can reduce fuel efficiency by anywhere from 5 percent to 33 percent.

2. Slow down: You can waste 30 percent or more of your fuel by speeding. For every 5 miles an hour you drive over 55, you use 6 percent more fuel.

3. Keep your cargo off the roof, if possible: Wind resistance can squander from 6 to 17 percent of your fuel on the highway.

4. Don’t idle excessively: Don’t leave the engine running when you pop into your favorite fast food joint. A minute of idling can cost 1–3 cents, depending on the type of  engine. You get zero mpg when idling.

5. Keep tires inflated: You can save up to 3 percent on fuel by keeping tires inflated to the recommended level.

6. Reduce air conditioning: You can waste up to 15 percent of your fuel by using the air conditioner. Although driving with windows open creates wind resistance and therefore reduces efficiency, the loss is considerably less than the loss from air conditioning. I once advised rolling up the windows when going over 45 mph. I hereby stand corrected.

7. Shed weight: You can waste 1 to 2 percent of fuel for every 100 extra pounds you carry. This includes human cargo. See my timely blog, “Does Obesity Waste Fuel?”  which cites a study indicating that moving overweight Americans in cars requires a billion more gallons of fuel per year than if we all weighed what health professionals recommend. 

8. Use cruise control except on steep hills, in heavy traffic, on roads that are winding or have sharp bends, or are slippery from rain, ice or snow.

If you want to go way, way deeper into saving gas, delve into "109 tips for Hypermiling.”  But beware, because some of this advice might lead to family squabbles, like “Let the most efficient driver drive,” or sound way too eco-trippy: “Drive like you ride a bike,” or be downright dangerous, like driving barefoot, coasting in neutral, turning off the engine to coast, or pushing your car instead of starting the engine when you’re only moving a short distance. - Bob Schildgen

Got a question? Ask Mr. Green!

 

READ MORE:

How Does Less Gas Become More Emissions? 

How Much Energy to Make a New Car?

Does Obesity Waste Fuel? 

New Fridge? Does Efficiency Outweigh Energy to Make It?

Hey Mr. Green,

I read your article on the amount of energy consumed by manufacturing a car with great interest. We hear constantly that we should scrap our old refrigerator, our old car, our old dishwasher, in favor of more efficient models. So, let's say I save 100 kilowatt hours (kWh) a year with my new fridge. How many years would it take to pay off the environmental debt of MAKING that new appliance?  Is there a place I can go to look up the environmental cost of making certain products? —Susan, Lakewood, New Jersey

Thanks for your kind words about reading “with interest.”

Manufacturing a refrigerator doesn’t demand as much from our dear old battered environment as you might think. A new fridge that saves you just 100 kWh a year will offset the energy used to procure its raw materials, manufacture it, ship it, and send it off to the afterlife in five years or so. One reason for this is that old fridges do have an afterlife: most of them get recycled.   

But the main reason for savings is the tremendous advance in efficiency mandated by the federal government, though you can be sure there are some philosophical wizards on the right wing who argue that this forced efficiency is an  intolerable violation of their sacred constitutional right to warm the globe to the boiling point.

Now if your old refrigerator was made before 2001, you can save a lot more than 100 kWh a year, because those ancient clunkers use almost twice as much power as the new Energy Star models. To find out just how much difference there is between antiquated models and new ones, check out the EPA’s calculator. You’ll find that some of the biggest of those ancient beasts were burning through more than 1,000 kWh a year,   which would cost you more than $150 annually at your present utility rate.   And by by next year, new Energy Star standards will improve efficiency by another 10 percent. 

It’s also important to note that SIZE MATTERS. You may have read my latest rant against the giantism of today’s new homes, which have bloated from an average of 980 square feet in 1950 to more than 2,400, despite the fact that families are smaller. We suffer from a similar megalophilia (love of the gigantic) with refrigerators. The proportion of bigger models has risen sharply, with the share of small ones down correspondingly, which maybe explains our obesity epidemic: The bigger the fridge, the more junk food it’ll harbor.   Like cars with low mileage, this trend eats away some of our total energy savings. For example, a 17.5 cubic foot Energy Star refrigerator-freezer takes about 380 kWh a year, while his behemoth 25-cubic-foot brothers are up around 580 kWh.   So if you do consider a new fridge, ask yourself if you really need a Goliath armed with all those gee-whiz automatic devices that you don’t really need. And keep in mind that side-by-side models are less efficient than those with the freezer at the bottom and that those with the freezer on top are the most efficient.

As for your question about where to find the environmental cost of a given product, your best bet is to search for “life + cycle + name of product.” If you really want to geek out on the topic, visit the International Standards Organization  and take a look at its body of life-cycle research.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: regarding the crazy notion of keeping the old fridge growling away in the garage just to chill beer for man-cave events or parties, take the damn thing off life support and send it to the recycler. You can greatly supplement your beverage supply with the money you’ll save. - Bob Schildgen

 

Got a question? Ask Mr. Green! 

 

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Ask Mr. Green: Should I Reheat My Home or Keep it Warm?

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Ask Mr. Green: Paper Towels or Rags?

Ask Mr. Green: Paper Towels or Rags?

Hey Mr. Green,

During a drought, is it better to clean the house with paper towels or with cloth rags that need to be washed? We have a Kenmore front-loading washer, which the Internet says uses 17.28 gallons per load. —Heather, in Redwood City, California

Because of the extreme variability in the personal use of rags and paper towels, and the many kinds of paper towels available, this question is impossible to answer definitely. But undaunted by impossibility, I forge on in search of ever-elusive truths.

Your washer has a capacity of 3.1 cubic feet. So I first selected a rag that was about 3 feet square (18 by 26 inches), loosely balled it up, and calculated its volume by the time-honored formula of V = 4/3 πr³. Allowing for space around each rumpled rag of this size, I figured that you could fit about 24 in a 3-cubic-foot washer. I then filled up my own 3-cubic-foot washer with a collection of these rags, and to my immense delight, I found that it could hold about the same number as indicated by my computation—not exactly as big a deal as finding the Higgs boson or calculating the gravitational force of dark matter at the birth of the universe, but gratifying nonetheless. So, dividing the 17.28 gallons by 72 square feet, I concluded that your machine would use about a quarter of a gallon of water per square foot of rag.

I then obtained a roll of paper towels that contained 53.2 square feet, put it on a kitchen scale, and found that it weighed a half pound. I consulted the American Forestry and Paper Association’s Sustainability Report which states that it takes 5 gallons to make a pound of paper, so my half pound of paper towels would’ve required 2.5 gallons, meaning that each square foot would’ve required about .05 gallons, or only one-fifth the amount of water as washing the rags.

But since it probably takes about five times as much footage of paper towels as rags to cope with the equivalent messes, the two are probably tied as far as water consumption is concerned. Which is to say, it looks like an, um, wash.

Far more important in the grand scheme of things is the fact that you have a relatively efficient modern washing machine. Washers that were made before 1998 use twice as much water as newer brands that meet federal standards, and three times as much water as today’s Energy Star models, which take 15 gallons or less per cycle, or 8 gallons less than non–Energy Star models. An Energy Star washer will use 27,000 fewer gallons over its lifetime than other machines and also consume far less gas and electricity.

Finally, if you do use paper towels, opt for recycled ones, because every ton of recycled paper saves an estimated 7,000 gallons of water, according to a report from Green Seal, an organization that certifies the sustainability of various products. —Bob Schildgen

 

Got a question? Ask Mr. Green!

READ MORE:

Ask Mr. Green: Paper Towels or Hand Dryers?

Ask Mr. Green: Garbage Disposal or Compost Heap?

Ask Mr. Green: What Are the Best Crops for My Backyard?

 

 --illustration by Little Friends of Printmaking

Ask Mr. Green: Are We Killing Too Many Krill?

Hey Mr. Green,

Krill oil is a new health craze because of its heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. But how will that affect the ocean's krill populations? I’ve heard that some Antarctic krill populations are already down, and krill is a major source of food for sea life. —Amy in Naperville, Illinois

Humans harvest less than 1 percent of the estimated 100 million metric tons of krill in the Antarctic each year, and only about 20 percent of that harvest becomes krill oil. The rest goes into fish food or—in one of the sillier, Rube Goldberg contrivances of agribusiness—into chicken feed to boost eggs’ omega-3 content. 

Not to let the krillionaires off the hook (or out of their trawler nets), but marine biologists warn that the biggest threat to these shrimplike creatures may be climate change, not health nuts. Krill’s major food source is the mass of microscopic plants and tiny sea animals living right below the Antarctic ice cap. So, shrink the ice, and the food supply could diminish. Krill may also be threatened by the rising acidity of the oceans, caused by carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion. And of course, less krill means less food for penguins, seals, and whales.

But I’d lay off krill oil, anyhow. We know that increased demand leads to increased harvest, which was four times higher in the 1980s, before the Soviet fishing fleet collapsed along with the USSR itself. Besides, there are plenty of other omega-3 sources: cheap fish such as mackerel and herring, and, for vegetarians, canola oil, flaxseeds, walnuts, and spinach. —Bob Schildgen

 

Got a question? Ask Mr. Green!

READ MORE:

Ask Mr. Green: Paper Towels or Hand Dryers

Ask Mr. Green: How Green Is Bamboo?

Ask Mr. Green: What Are the Best Crops for My Backyard?

 

 --illustration by Little Friends of Printmaking

Mr. Green: What Can We Learn from Other Nations?

Hey Mr. Green,

In your recent magazine column (Sierra, January/February 2014) you noted Americans emit about twice the rate of carbon dioxide per person per year as our friends in Italy, Japan, and the U.K. What are they doing smarter and less consumptive that we could replicate here?

—Ann, in Westlake Village, California

Thank you for reading that fine excursion into the realm of truth. Mainly it’s what these furriners don’t do that lowers their CO2 emissions, since they’re not so burdened by our all-American obsession with big cars, big houses, and Big Gulps in general. Not that they’re one bit more virtuous than us. They just started out with a lot less land and natural resources, so they didn’t have the wherewithal to sprawl and splurge on the hyper-consumptive U.S. scale. For example, despite the fact that we’ve already burned through trillions of gallons of oil, we still have about 40 times more proven petroleum reserves than Italy and way more than 400 times those of Japan. So, back when us Yanks were all laughing at movies and cartoons featuring oil-drenched dudes blasted into the stratosphere by stupendous oil gushers, the furriners had to make cars with much better gas mileage and drive them less. The Italians’ gasoline-powered cars were already exceeding 35 miles per gallon when we were stuck down around 22. Hence, to have any hope of matching them, it’s obvious that we must keep up the pressure to get U.S. fuel economy up to President Obama’s target of 35.5 mpg by 2016, and then go for broke to meet his goal of 54.5 by 2025.  

Ask Mr. Green: The Best Crops for My Backyard?

Hey Mr. Green,

I’m looking for optimal use of my backyard space, so I need to know the easiest to grow—least water usage, most drought tolerant, most productive per plant, that can be stored dry without freezers, electricity, or a lot of plastics (maybe grains or beans for example), least land damage, least pests, most butterfly/bee- and beneficial-insect-friendly food plant that will help save on grocery costs while being environmentally friendly and totally organic. I’m wondering if rice, beans, or amaranth would fit the bill as the greenest way to grow the most dry, storable food.

 —Connie, in Springfield, Missouri

I’d love to give you a nice, easy answer, but there isn't one, simply because of the hundreds of crop possibilities, the huge variety of local conditions, differing nutrient contents and fertilizer requirements. This sheer complexity is why I distrust most generalizations about food production put forth as gospel by foodies and armchair farmers whose knowledge of agronomy and nutrition is often very limited if not downright suspect.

How Does Less Gas Become More Emissions?

Hey Mr. Green,

In Sierra's September/October issue, you said that "burning a gallon of gas emits almost 20 pounds of carbon dioxide." What? Since matter can't be created or destroyed but only changes form, how do we get 20 pounds of carbon dioxide out of just 6 pounds of liquid? All I can think is that the extra weight comes from the air used to burn the gas.

—Eunice in Menifee, California

Only God can make something out of nothing. Or, as we say in Latin, Ex nihilo nihil fit.

Your hunch about the weight coming from the air is right. A gallon of gasoline weighs 6.3 pounds—5.5 pounds of which is carbon. When a carbon atom burns, it hitches up with two oxygen atoms, producing CO₂. And oxygen atoms weigh 1.33 times more than carbon atoms do, which means those two oxygen atoms in CO₂ are 2.66 times as heavy as the carbon atom. So your original 5.5 pounds of carbon combine with 14.6 pounds of oxygen, theoretically totaling 20.1 pounds. The actual yield is 19.4 pounds, because some carbon turns into carbon monoxide and some doesn't combust.

Mr. Green's 10 Commandments for Eco-Evangelists

Hey Mr. Green,

How do I encourage people to live more eco-friendly (e.g. drive less, avoid disposable products, raise awareness of the hazards of industrialized farming) without offending them?

—Patty, in Carbondale, Illinois

After being Mr. Green for nine years, I’ve enjoyed a bit of success in fostering eco-friendliness, though I can’t claim to have mended relationships and saved marriages like those famous Anns and Abbies. Nor do I take credit for last year’s 3.8 percent decrease in carbon emissions. (In any case, that dip was probably more the result of good weather and bad economy, because it’s already climbed back up 2.6 percent this year.)

So, in light of this considerable experience in eco-friending, here are my 10 Commandments for Environmental Evangelists:

1. Walk the talk: If you actually take green actions yourself, it’s a lot easier to get others to listen up. Being Mr. Green, I gotta be tuned in to this. Example: One day I’m in the back yard, hanging out the laundry. So strange has this custom become, that my neighbor asks me what I’m doing. “Well, now, if I don’t make a convincing display of solar drying, somebody could bust me and tell the world I’m a closet energy-waster. And anyhow,” I add, “with all the fuss about vitamin D deficiency these days, a few minutes outside hanging up the clothes might be healthy."

Ask Mr. Green: How Much Energy to Make a New Car?

Hey Mr. Green,

Approximately how much energy (measured in equivalent of gallons of gas) does it take to manufacture a new car? My old car meets my driving needs and averages 32 miles per gallon, and I use less than 100 gallons per year. If I get a more efficient car, would it benefit the planet, or would the resources used to build the car be more than the savings in energy usage?

—Judy, in Oakland, California

It takes roughly the equivalent of 260 gallons of gasoline to make the typical car of around 3,000 pounds, according to an exhaustive study by the Argonne National Laboratory. (And I do mean exhaustive. These guys have factored in darn near everything but the calories consumed by the assembly-line workers.) A hybrid car takes about 25% more energy than a regular car, or around the equivalent of 325 gallons because it requires more juice to make the batteries.

Ask Mr. Green: How Can I Find Sustainable Wood?

Hey Mr. Green,

We are preparing to replace the planking on our deck, and we want to use a sustainable timber product. Bamboo does not seem to be sufficient for our needs, so we have to look elsewhere.

—Paul, in Downieville, California

The Forestry Stewardship Council is the best source for finding sustainable wood and paper products, and is favored by forest groups. It’s not perfect, says Sierra Club conservation director Bruce Hamilton, but it’s the most credible source. Look for FSC-certified lumber at a local retailer or visit FSC’s website to find a dealer nearest you. FSC’s site is rather confusing, intimidating even, but an FSC representative tells me a more user-friendly system should be in place in a few months. 

Do not fall for any certification from the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, as they were set up by the timber industry itself, and are governed and financed by the industry, warns Jim Ace, of Forest Ethics,  who says SFI approves of clearcuts, lacks adequate wildlife-protection provisions, and allows the use of pesticides to suppress weeds and trees in order to protect new timber plantings. “They deceive consumers and businesses,” he says. And it’s not just about timber, but even items like 3M’s Post-its. Forest Ethics is wrangling with 3M because 3M uses SFI certification. The company claims that SFI is “a comprehensive system of principles, objectives, performance measures and indicators that integrate the perpetual growing of trees with the protection of wildlife, plants, soil, water and air.”