What a marvel it is, the internal combustion engine; what a wonder is the oil that, in its refined and crude states, powers such an engine. For nearly a hundred years our world — to large extent and to great effect — the world, I said, has been powered, has been driven even, by the ICE that runs, day and night, up and down the arteries of our great cities and along its railroads and rivers, fueled by the remains of a transmogrified biomass millions of years old. Small irony, that acronym, considering the fact that the exhaust of the ICE has, we now know, contributed to the melting of the polar ice, to the ongoing process of the melting away of glaciers, ice shelves and permafrost. Greater irony that the fuel we burn — as we cruise along the highway, rushing headlong into the future like a juggernaut — fuel formed of the remains of the dead, may at long last contribute to the end of us… or, rather, to the end of our distant progeny, scions of the self-blasted family tree who may not know another branching or extension or flowering.

While certain untrustworthy politicos may talk about our “addiction to oil” as if oil is under the purview and jurisprudent oversight of the ATF and, as such, is some part of the “War on Drugs”, many of us still seem to be unaware that there is really any problem to be concerned about. I say this because the evidence speeds past me and clusters all around me every time I commute the 20 plus miles to work and the 20 plus miles back I have to five days a week. Hell, I can hear the freeway from here, and that sound — like white noise, like a work of industrial ambience — never stops.

But I am especially aware of it now, because now I am learning to hypermile (which is just a convenient and nifty space age way of saying that I am going a step above and beyond in my efforts to cut down on my car’s gas consumption).

Here are the bare basics to hypermiling:

1. Coast (in neutral) whenever possible, except in hybrids
2. Don’t exceed the speed limit
3. Be a conscientious, prudent and polite driver
4. Avoid quick starts (no gunning the engine)
5. Anticipate stops and slow downs in traffic to avoid them or minimize their effects
6. Try to time your arrival at traffic lights to avoid complete stops
7. Shut your engine off whenever you’ll be stopped longer than ten seconds
8. Keep your engine’s RPMs as low as you (reasonably) can
9. If available, use your cruise control
10. Run your tank down under a quarter full before refueling
11. Cut down on the use of the air conditioner
12. Get that junk out of your trunk and the rack off your back
13. Park farther out and ASAP; don’t circle around looking for “choice spots”
14. Keep your engine tuned and
15. Keep your tire pressure where it should be
16. Don’t drive if you don’t really need to
17. Use public transportation if you can
18. Ride share, car pool, buddy up; help keep someone’s car off the road
19. Drive a car with a manual “stick” transmission if possible, or
20. Get a hybrid if you are able to

You can read more tips and get beyond the basics here.

Ultimately, as you know, we use oil (petroleum, specifically) for a great many things. A good portion of a barrel of oil is used for non-fuel products, products ranging from heart valves to crayons, plastics to bubble gum. Your car is not only a consumer of oil, parts of it were made out of oil. It’s a no-brainer of an observation to say oil is a part of the economy from top to bottom, really. It’s practically ubiquitous, and not always obvious in its presence. But all you need to do if you want to see oil in action is hang out beside a freeway, or at an airport or sea port, or at a railroad yard. You can practically hear the sky wheezing from all the carbon dioxide (not to mention the “nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and unburned hydrocarbons” [source]).

So maybe we need to hypermile our lives, as it were, and consider everything we do and all the things we use in our lives that come from or involve the use of oil.

As it turns out, after I had begun composing this post, I had NPR’s Science Friday on while I was driving to a Taco Bell to pick up some foodstuff, and they were talking about the use of petroleum products. The host, Ira Flatow, was talking with author Bill McKibben (see his book, Deep Ecology). They were talking about how much oil is used in bringing things like imported bottled water to us. And it struck me with the force of an oversize interrogative made out of oil barrels: Do we really need imported bottle water? It takes a huge amount of oil per bottle of water to bring it to us. If the choice is between purchasing good water bottled at a local source versus good water bottled in, say, Europe or Fiji, wouldn’t it be better, more environmentally conscious, to buy the local water? That’s a no-brainer, isn’t it? Perhaps the best idea would be to get a water purifying setup for the tap at home, no? How much oil would be saved then? What other choices we can easily make might save oil? Well, of course there’s a page for that. But the thing is, I’m sure you can think of a lot of ways to help save oil on your own. It takes only a little thought. I hope you’ll join me and many others in thinking about what we’re doing, what we can do, what we ought and must do, and then doing something about it because, seriously, we don’t want people in the future to look back on us all with contempt, non-plussed by our self-centered thoughtlessness, stuck trying to muddle through the legacy of our errors. To get to the future in peace, we’re going to need to hypermile our way there.