Much Ado About a 20 cent Fee You Can Easily Avoid

I addressed the proposed 20 cent bag tax that Seattle finally ended up passing in July here. Since then apparently a petition drive has been organized by the Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax. To this end they have gathered over 20,000 signatures to get an initiative on the ballot. They need 14,374 valid signature to get on the ballot so with the 20K they probably have the buffer they need to get into the next election after the November 4, 2008 election. There has been a minor controversy about the use of paid signature gatherers that may be lying about the petition being PRO bag tax and not ANTI to collect signatures. The CtStSBT is apparently mainly a front for the American Chemistry Council which is the lobbying arm of the plastics industry. The ACC picked up most of the costs of the paid signature gatherers and the web site linked to above.

Personally I am kind of amuse by the hysteria of the CtStSBT and their frantic attempt to stop the bag tax from going into effect. It seems to me the arguments against the bag tax can be boiled down into:

1) Its an unfair burden on the poor. It will cost them $300 a year that they can't afford.
While its true that poor people can ill afford to lose $300 to a bag tax all they really have to do is invest $5.00 in some reusable bags that will last them for years. I'm pretty sure that Seattle is going to be sending out free reusable bags in the near future anyway.

2)The City's own research shows that 91% of Seattle's citizens reuse or recycle their bags.

Hey that's great. We Seattlites always have been good recyclers, it's good to know that we are really kicking ass on reusing/recycling our plastic bags. I don't know what percentage reuse as opposed to recycle but it would be better for the environment and more energy efficient for the recycled bags to never have been made in the first place. I reuse my plastic grocery bags as garbage bags and to scoop kitty litter but I'm not going to freak out if I have to start buying garbage bags or some other small plastic bags to use instead.

This next one I've seen in the PI Sound Off section a couple of times (go down a few comments) but not on any anti-bag tax web sites:

3) The bag tax is a health hazard.

Seattle bag tax is health hazard especially for low income families. When meat is carried home in a reusable bag one day (and it leaks) and then vegetables are carried home the next day you get cross contamination. With reusable bags, you create a breeding ground for bacteria which will quickly build up to extremely dangerous levels (especially if the bags are kept in warm areas between uses) which can also contaminate other customers food items. Since the poor are less likely to pay the 20 cent bag tax, they are the ones most at risk - as well as those who are buying groceries behind them.

Ok, I'm no expert on bacteria, or leaking meat containers but this argument just seems silly to me. If meat leaking on vegetables was a huge health hazard I think we would have heard about massive outbreaks of death by now. I have been reusing both paper bags and cloth bags for a while now and I haven't noticed any meat leakage or any bacterial growth so far. I also figure if I my cloth bags got messy I'd just, well... clean them.

Look, I'm not a huge proponent of the bag tax but it seems to be a step in the right direction. I mean how many more people recycle now that it is mandatory then when it was a voluntary program. Even when it was voluntary the city "encouraged" people to recycle by making the recycle pick-up fees cheaper than regular garbage. Sometimes people have to be guided into doing the right thing. The plastic bag tax is not incredible burdensome and all you have to do to avoid it is to bring your own bag when you go grocery shopping. I think its a small price to pay to take a small step towards reducing waste and encouraging people to step out of the "disposable mindset" we find ourselves in these days.

Oh yeah and I'm also pretty cynical about the involvement of the American Chemical Council who's motives seem to by quite transparent.

Intellectual Dishonesty or Just Dumb

I've seen a lot of conservative blog posts about how stupid Obama is because he said that keeping our tires inflated would save us "all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling?" Most of them seem to be based on this Powerlineblog post.

This post says:

Just for fun, I did the math. Properly inflating your tires can improve gas mileage by 3%. Of course, many people already keep their tires properly inflated, and many more are at least close to being properly inflated. Let's be generous and assume that one-half of the total possible savings would be realized if we all inflated our tires properly; that's a net gain of 1.5% fuel efficiency.

Americans drive approximately 2,880 billion miles per year. If we average 24 mpg, we use around 120 billion gallons of gasoline in our vehicles. If, through perfect tire inflation, we improved our collective fuel efficiency by 1.5%, that would be 1.8 billion gallons. A barrel of oil produces around 20 gallons of gasoline, so the total savings available through tire inflation is approximately 90,000,000 barrels of oil annually.

How does this stack up against "all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling?"

ANWR: 10 billion barrels
Outer Continental Shelf: 18 billion barrels (estimated; the actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since exploration has been banned)
Oil shale: 1 trillion barrels

So, on the above assumptions, it would take only 11,308 years of proper tire inflation to equal "all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling."

Here is a list of inaccuracies and problems I found with the post:

(1) The largest problem I see is that the author threw Oil Shale into his calculations. You don't DRILL for oil shale, you MINE it. Am I being nit-picky? I don't think so, Obama clearly states that he is talking about drilling for oil NOT all possible oil reserves. It seems to me that the author is just adding the oil shale numbers in to exaggerate his number for the years that it would take for proper tire inflation to equal "all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling?"

(2) The second problem I see is in his assumptions. He says blithely that half of all people probably keep their tires inflated properly. Well, in 10 seconds worth of Googling I found this story on MSNBC which says:

A RMA survey found that each month three out of four drivers wash their car, but only about one in five correctly checks tire pressure, while more than 80 percent of drivers do not know how to properly check tire pressure.

With the amount of research the author did on other numbers maybe he could have spent 10 seconds researching a number which would significantly change his results. (80% vs 50%)

(3) If you listen to Obama you will actually hear him say:

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!

Note that he said "regular tune-ups." If we go to the Federal government's Fuel Economy website we find that regular tune-ups improve gas mileage an average of 4%. We also find that regular car maintenance items like using the correct oil could improve mileage up to 2% and keeping your air filter clean could help up to 10%.

Lets do a little math now that we have cleared up some...lets call them overlooked items or mistakes. Pulling the numbers from the blog to keep things consistent we have:

Annual miles driven by Americans 2,880 billion
Average fuel efficiency 24 mpg
Give us a usage of 120 billion gallons of gas a year.
One barrel of oil = 20 gallons of gas
120 billion gallons of gas = 6 billion barrels of oil a year
Fuel savings for tire inflation 3% x .8 = 2.4% added to savings for keeping your engine tuned 4% x .8 = 3.2% for a total savings of 5.7%

6 billion x 5.7% = 342,000,000 barrels of oil a year.

That's quite a bit more than the 90 million the author of the post came up with. Now if we add the oil we can DRILL out of ANWR and the Outer Continental Shelf we have a total of 28 billion barrels of oil.

28 billion / 342 million = about 82 years NOT 11,308

To put this into further perspective we should look at how fast we can access ANWR and Outer Continental Shelf oil.

According to this article on MSNBC if we gave the oil companies the go ahead to drill in ANWR now oil would start pumping by 2013 and peak at 876,000 barrels of oil a day in 2025. Let me guess that if we will average pumping 500,000 barrels a day over the life of the ANWR oil reserves to that means we will be pumping oil for about 55 years until it is tapped out. If we assume a similar time line for the Outer Continental Shelf oil then the 82 year I calculated above doesn't seem like a crazy number especially since I didn't include any savings for using the right oil and clean air filters.

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Look, I'm no energy expert or petroleum engineer but I do have a mechanical engineering background and a pretty decent BS detector. You can take numbers, make grand assumptions and get any result you want especially if you selectively quote your source and then throw in "facts" that don't apply. I laid out my case and I think you will come to the same conclusion that I did. The Blogline poster is either intellectually dishonest or just plain dumb.