As GreenTech Media notes : ” President Obama and leaders from major automakers today heralded an agreement to raise the average fuel economy for light trucks and cars to 54.5 miles per gallon.” (Today they are at 28.3 MPG.)
–$1.7 trillion. (around 1,200 billion euros) That’s the estimated amount of money that Americans will save from 2011 through 2025 on gas because of the new rules, the White House estimates. “
I believe this is a good thing but I am still not satisfied. Indeed, American cars consume to date much more than their European and Japanese counterparts.
Even Chinese mileage requirements are more restrictive. As the New York Times noted back to 2009 :
The average fuel economy of family vehicles in China is already higher than in the United States, mainly because cars in China tend to be considerably smaller than those in the United States — and are getting even smaller because of recent tax changes.
Back to the original article, here is another stat worth knowing :
2.2 million per day. The total number of barrels of oil a day we won’t consume in 2025. The U.S. now consumes around 21 million barrels a day so this would represent a 10.5 percent reduction from today’s figures. The White House states that 2.2 million barrels of oil a day constitutes around half of the oil we get from OPEC on a daily basis.
For more interesting stats, please check out the full article.
Not so long ago, I noted that according to Environment America, a federation of US organizations, the country could reduce its oil dependence by 79 billion gallons per year—more than all of their imports from OPEC nations by 2030. These would save the United States 5 million barrels of oil per day !
Nonetheless, we can applaud President Obama who will save his country a lot of money on oil and avoid his country the emissions of 6 billion metric tons cumulatively…