A reader wrote in late yesterday, arguing that my math was wrong when calculating how much gasoline would be saved if the country could somehow get the entire country traveling on properly inflated tires. The problem in this reader’s calculations was that he was applying the per-car savings to every car in America, while I applied it to every commuter in America. Since not every car is used to travel every day, by applying the fuel savings to cars that travel 0 miles on a typical day, this reader was somehow getting these cars to burn less than zero gallons of gasoline on a daily basis.

Anyway, I went back and re-ran my numbers in the process of looking over that missive, and found something fascinating. Under my exceptionally generous assessment that full national tire inflation compliance would save each currently underinflated commuter an extra three miles per gallon, and thus 6.6 million gallons of gasoline per day, Americans would have to have 100 percent tire efficiency for every day for 664 years in order to save the equivalent of the 1.6 trillion gallons of gasoline in the Outer Continental Shelf. (This isn’t even including ANWR.)

1.6 trillion gallons of gasoline in the OCS / 6.6 million gallons = 242,424.24 days, or 644.17 years

Of course, I can picture some Obama supporter saying, “ah-ha! So Obama was right that tire inflation can save as much gasoline as offshore drilling! We just have to do it for about two-thirds of a millennium!”