In my popular book Beat High Gas Prices Now! I offer many ways you can save $20 to $50 per month at the pump. Here are 11 of the easiest opportunities you have right now to beat higher gas prices– without buying a new, more fuel-efficient car or giving up driving altogether.

How to Beat Higher Gas Prices

⇒Drive Less

⇒Drive Smarter

⇒Get a Tune Up

Drive Less – The single best way to spend less money at the pump is by buying less gas. The best way to avoid buying gas is by not driving.

Note that I don’t say, use Uber or Lyft. If prices rise enough, car services and taxis will charge an “emergency surcharge” or some other fee to cover their own increased gas costs.

BONUS: Burning one gallon of gasoline generates almost 20 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2), a potent greenhouse gas that is causing climate change. When you drive less, you generate a lot less CO2, so not only are you saving money but you’re doing your part to stop climate change, too.

1-Telecommute -If there ever was a time to work from home, this is it. You’ll spend nothing on gasoline and save a lot of travel time that you can use for either work or leisure. If your company already has a telecommute policy, take advantage of it. If not, ask your boss if you can work from home a couple of days a week as long until the prices at the pump come down.

2-Car Pool – If you still need to go to a physical work location, find a couple of people to carpool with. Four people sharing a ride keeps three cars off the road, and shares the price of gasoline four ways.

The iCarPool.com mobile app makes it easy to find a ride to share. So do Ridefinders.com, eRideShare.com, and Waze Carpool.

BONUS: Carpool lanes are usually faster than regular lanes used by only one person per car.

3-Use Mass Transit – If your community has a decent subway, bus or light rail system, now is the time to use it. Subways and light rail systems are electrified, so fares should not be affected by higher gas prices.

4-Walk and Bicycle – I have been car-less for about four months now and have been surprised by how easy it is to walk to many places I used to drive to. If you want to walk to the grocery store, invest in a cart on wheels so it’s easy to get your groceries home.

Drive Smarter – The way we drive has a big impact on how much gasoline our vehicle uses.

You can get many more miles to the gallon if you do the following:

5-Drive the Speed Limit – In addition to being safer, driving the speed limit saves gas. How much? Every 5 mph you drive above 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.10 per gallon for gasoline.

6-Don’t be a “Jack Rabbit” – Hopping in and out of traffic, speeding up, slowing down and weaving from one lane to the other wastes gas because all that acceleration and deceleration uses the engine so inefficiently. Plus, it doesn’t really shave that many minutes off your arrival time.

7-Plan Your Route – People waste a lot of gas taking the long way to their destination or not knowing where they’re going in the first place. Use Waze or the GPS device on your phone or in your car to find the shortest route. When possible, travel during non-rush hour.

8-Stop Idling – “Idling” – when you sit in your car with the gear in “park” and the engine running, going nowhere – is another word for wasting gas. Just. Don’t. Do. It. You use a lot more gasoline idling than if you turn the car off for a couple of minutes then on when you’re ready to give. Skip long drive-through lines. If you go to pick someone up, turn off the engine while you wait for them to come out.

Focus on Your Vehicle – Maintain the engine, tires, and air filters to improve fuel efficiency.

9-Change Your Oil and Get a Tune Up – Improve gas mileage by an average of 4.1 percent by maintaining your vehicle in top condition. That may include changing the air filters and replacing the spark plugs.

10-Pump Up Your Tires – You can beat higher gas prices and improve gas mileage by around 3.3% by keeping your tires inflated to the proper PSI. If you don’t know what your PSI is, you can find it on the inside of the car’s front door.

Need a gauge to check your tire pressure? Here are some good ones.

11-Remove the Roof Rack and Extra Weight in the Trunk – A roof rack creates wind resistance, which means your car needs more gas to move forward.

Extra weight in the trunk also puts more strain on the engine to do its job.

Don’t treat your trunk like a storage facility, and don’t leave the roof rack on if you’re not using it.

No matter what the price of gas is, burning it is like burning money (except it has a much bigger impact on climate change).

Hurricane Harvey has reminded us just how dependent on gas we can be if we don’t get smart about how we use it.

The post 11 Immediate Ways to Beat Higher Gas Prices After Hurricane Harvey appeared first on Big Green Purse.

Hurricane Harvey is not featured in Al Gore’s important new film, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” Ten years ago, when the Nobel Prize winner made “An Inconvenient Truth,” his first movie about climate change, a storm the size of Harvey was still theoretical. And there still seemed to be time to reverse the catastrophic effects burning coal and oil causes by sending billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But as Harvey has shown, time is running out. And as Gore shows in this sequel to the original blockbuster, that’s not just true in the U.S., but all over the world.

Apart from understanding the forces – natural and man made – that turned Harvey into the worst storm America has ever experienced, “An Inconvenient Sequel” is worth watching for three riveting reasons.

Why “An Inconvenient Sequel” is Worth Watching

First, it lays bare the impact climate change is having on humanity.

See: How Climate Change Makes Poison Ivy Worse

In one of the most heartbreaking and powerful scenes in the film, workers in Pakistan, anticipating the hundreds and possibly thousands of people who will die from a coming extreme heat wave, dig early graves for the hundreds and possibly thousands of people who will die when the heat wave hits.

In another stunning clip, people in India can’t walk across the street without their hot shoes literally melting into the black top.

Footage of the spread of the Zika virus and the devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy all further illustrate that climate change impacts are no longer a matter of “if” but of “how bad?”

Second, the film depicts just how viable getting energy from solar and wind has become. Says Gore, “If you look at what’s really happening in the economy, the economic argument actually is very strongly in favor of the Paris Agreement,” the international accord that encourages every country on the planet, including the U.S., to voluntarily commit to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.

There are now twice as many jobs in the solar industry as in the coal industry, Gore reports. “Solar jobs are growing 17 times faster than other jobs in the U.S…. It’s one of the brightest spots in our economic revival.”

The single fastest-growing job over the next ten years, says Gore citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data, is wind turbine technician. “If you take the efficiency jobs and the renewable energy jobs and add them together, they’re significantly more numerous now than all of the jobs in fossil energy,” he continues.

What does the Pope think about climate change? See: Pope Francis Climate Change Message Calls for “Revolution” 

In the film, Gore visits Georgetown, Texas, “the reddest city in the reddest county in the reddest state” in the U.S., Mayor Dale Ross proudly reports. And yet, they’ve committed to going 100% renewable because it’s cleaner, more economical and the wave of the future.

Declares Mayor Ross, “The less junk you put in the air, the better.” Dohhh!

Third, Gore shows some of the inside workings that led to the unprecedented success of the Paris climate agreements. He does not mask his disdain for President Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from those agreements.

Gore credits one unexpected actor with having a particularly outsized role in helping to convince the public that climate change is real: Mother Nature.

“Mother Nature has entered the debate,” he says, which is obvious in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

“In the last seven years we’ve had 11 “One-in-1,000-year” downpours in the U.S. We have these floods, and droughts, and sea level rise events, and the melting ice, and tropical diseases. Every night now on the television news is like a nature hike through the book of Revelation.

“Even if some of the newscasters don’t connect the dots, people themselves are. People who don’t want to use the phrase “global warming” or “climate crisis” are saying, “Wait a minute. Something’s going on here that’s not right.”

“Mother Nature is persuading a lot of people who weren’t ready to believe what the scientists were saying.”

As Gore reflects on this, he projects the questions he expects future generations will ask:

“What were you thinking?!!”

“Couldn’t you hear what Mother Nature was screaming at you?”

An Inconvenient Sequel starts off a bit slowly, with a long focus on Al Gore himself and his day-to-day work networking, advocating, and the workshops he still gives to train climate change activists to carry his message into their communities.

There also could have been a much bigger focus on energy efficiency as another important solution to climate change.

While people argue about whether to use coal or wind, no one should be debating insulating their homes, pumping up their tires, or reducing the energy that’s lost when power is produced so many hundreds of miles away from where it’s actually needed that it needs to be sent along transmission lines that leak power all along the route.

But those are minor objections. Overall, this film does a terrific job showing the human impact of climate change while convincingly making the case for solar and wind to become the dominant sources of electricity.

Plus, its calls to action, though few, are eminently achievable. In “An Inconvenient Truth,” so many suggestions rolled across the screen that even my eyes glazed over. And besides, how many lightbulbs can one person change?

The recommendation at the end of “Sequel” is solid and unequivocal: Convince your town to go 100% renewable.

Yes. Absolutely.

Says Gore: “If President Trump refuses to lead, the American People will.”

So follow the recommendation of the film’s hashtag and “#beinconvenient.”

Al Gore – and Mother Nature – expect no less.

The post “An Inconvenient Sequel” Shows Hurricane Harvey Did Not Have to Happen appeared first on Big Green Purse.