It's Possible to Save Gas Without a Drastic Change in Lifestyle

Donklephant has posted ten suggestions for how to save gas. None of them involve major change in lifestyle, although some do require changes to your driving style (e.g. "Do not make hard stops and fast starts.")

The only one I partially disagree with is the suggestion to not use cruise control. I think one of the comments has it right: on flat stretches, cruise control improves gas mileage because the car stays at a constant speed, while on hilly stretches cruise control hurts gas mileage because it makes you go faster up hill than you naturally (and unconsciously) would if you were controlling the speed manually.

It would be great if people could cut their gasoline usage by large percentages, such as 10-20%. However, we should keep in mind that if we could even shave a couple percent off our gasoline usage, we would probably have significantly cheaper gas. I say this because the way markets work for a commodity like gasoline is that even a little bit of oversupply tends to foster competition that forces prices down. Only when supply gets very tight do the prices suddenly spike. A couple percent could make all the difference in this dynamic.

The great failure of the environmental movement, in my humble opinion, is the impression that many people have that solutions are all-or-nothing affairs. It is still helpful to reduce your gas usage by 2%, your electricity usage by 3% and recycle your aluminum cans, but otherwise keep the same lifestyle.

The movement as a whole, however, has tended to create the impression that people have to make wholesale changes in their lifestyles. The end result is that people do nothing. It's really a shame.