Tuesday, August 05, 2008

For the Math-Challenged "O" Supporters

We'll try to speak slowly so you understand in this analysis of The One's "tire-pressure will save us all" crapola.

How silly is this statement? Doing the math, it looks like he’s off by about an order of magnitude. The DOE link says you can save 3.3% and U.S. consumption is 20.8M barrels a day, half of which is gasoline, so even if fully half the population is driving on very poorly inflated tires you’re talking about only about 165,000 barrels a day, a tenth or less of the millions of barrels a day we could add in production. Hell, the mean estimate for ANWR alone is 780,000 bpd.

…Catch all the shifting goalposts, flawed assumptions, and bad math there? “All the oil we could get from drilling” becomes “the increase from expanded offshore drilling,” and even then uses a number that seems out of step with published estimates of 250,000 to 1 million bpd. Then we casually more than double the tire-inflation savings by tossing in “maintenance.” Then we throw out quantitative analysis altogether by using the impossibly vague “many drivers.” Finally, we ball up our morass of bad data into a misleading conclusion, and for emphasis we state explicitly the one assumption we always regarded as unassailable: Obama must be right.

If you need more, or more slowly, then go to the link.

1 comment:

The Badgerland Conservative said...

The advocates of this nonsense have tried spamming my site with DOE links and other assorted "facts."

Guess where they wound up? The Akismet spam bin. Perfect place for them.

My spam filters usually catch attacks like that.