What are we thinking? Or do we think at all? I drove to Portland this weekend to visit my daughter. Now I admit to being one of those hyper-mileage nuts. I own a hybrid and averaged 47 mpg. That's cool and I feel more lucky than smart. I used about 11.5 gals of regular on the round trip. It is all interstate and I admit I broke the speed limit in places....64 instead of 60 and maybe 72 instead of 70. You can see how daring I am.

What amazed me was, with rare exception, I didn't pass anyone! Just the opposite, I estimate that about 200 cars passed me during the trip and they bested my speed on average by 6 to 7 miles per hour. The average highway mpg for standard size cars these days is about 27 mpg. Now with my car, if I go 10% over the speed limit, I lose about 10% in fuel efficiency. So by my really crude calculation and a dangerous generalization, those 200 cars (many were trucks and SUVs which do worse) were wasting 2.7 mpg in efficiency by passing me. So what does that add up to? Check my math, but for a 540 mile trip, that works out to about 2.2 gals per car times 200 cars or 440 gals! You can do more multiplication and begin to realize the immense amount of wasted fuel across our country per day

You can say my assumptions are a bit fuzzy and maybe that number should be less and I might agree. And hopefully I won't be embarrassed by bad math. But the point is pretty obvious, and I don't intend to moralize. (After all I did drive to Portland). I think that we have given up critically examining our behavior as individuals and as a society. For all of the public discussion and publicity on energy, oil and climate, us road warriors in the ecologically aware Evergreen State are still going like a bat out of hell. Go figure.....and don't get me on the question of compact fluorescent light bulbs.