As noted earlier, when calculating the fuel benefits of proper tire inflation, I calculated a savings of two or three miles per gallon for every car on the road currently that is currently under-inflated, with the national average being 24 miles per gallon — 8.3 to 12.5 percent more miles per gallon.

Well, it turns out the Obama campaign itself is touting the savings… of 3.3 percent.

Retreat, guys.

According to the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service:

Scientists have found that seepage from one of the largest seeps known offshore Coal Oil Point ranged from 150-170 barrels per day.

Just by containing the natural seepage of oil from this one source off the coast of California, you would collect enough oil to generate, on the low end of the estimate, 2,940 gallons of gasoline. Per day.

To generate the same amount of savings in gasoline per day, you would need 19,216 drivers who currently have underinflated tires to inflate their tires.

On the high end of that estimate, that seepage would generate 3332 gallons, requiring 21,778 drivers who currently have underinflated tires to inflate their tires.

UPDATE: Somebody at Blue Hampshire doesn’t like my math, even though one of the reasons I showed each step and linking to the source of all my numbers was so that readers could draw their own conclusions. Instead, he insists there’s no point in making these calculations ourselves, because the government already does this – and links to a EIA report that, when calculating the time it would take for oil from domestic sources reaches the market, presumes that nothing happens in terms of exploration until 2012, and no production occurs until 2017.

I don’t know if the “we can produce oil in one year from rigs already in place in California” report is spot-on accurate or wishful thinking, but I think we ought to recognize that this ironclad seven year process our friends on the left keep citing isn’t quite so ironclad. As noted above, oil is leaking into the Pacific Ocean from natural sources already. Either way, it’s easy to say “this process will take many years” when your first assumption is that no one does anything until the final year of the next president’s first term.

He also laments that I use information from “private sources” – never actually providing any alternate numbers, just asserting that because U.S. News and World Report and RideToWork.org are private, their numbers of the average miles traveled per commuter per day and the number of commuters in the U.S. must be inaccurate.

I can’t help these people. I can’t make it any simpler.