Pump Voyeurism - Do You like to Watch IT, or Do IT?
The heavy breathing is over…
The results of my unscientific survey on gasoline use for May 15 are in, and the results are interesting to say the least.
Here’s the good stuff:
92% were aware of the effort to reduce gas consumption yesterday. Wow!
62% said they were thinking of driving less. Good!
29% believed they’d actually drive less than usual yesterday.
So a large group of people understood the effort reduce gasoline use, but less than a third said they’d join in. Ho hum?
Does this mean that most of us are Social Voyeurs, peeking in on those who actually “do IT” versus just “talk about IT” or “think about IT”?
Maybe so. However apparently a lot of people thought about driving less. This is huge! And if the 29% who believed they’d actually drive less than usual did so, that’s quite a feat of social mobilization. If it could be replicated every week our gasoline prices and carbon emissions would be knocked way down.
How to do it?
The last question of the survey focused on working from home.
If you could work from home one day each week would you want to do so? 96% said yes!
So imagine if a portion of the commuting population could work from home for 1 day each week (Wednesday to prevent the potential of a three day weekend effect).
The amount of gasoline that could be conserved each year is staggering. From my previous Dead-Dinosaur-Juice blog entry I conservatively estimate a demand reduction for gasoline close to 1 billion gallons in year.
Seems that we need a “Work-From-Home” initiative. What do you think?
1 comment May 17th, 2007
