Let's adopt hypermiler creed

"Hypermiling" is more than the word of the year. It ought to be the model for how we fix our economy.

This week the Oxford dictionary picked hypermiling as 2008's signature word. It means going to extremes — in changing your habits as well as your technology — so you can max out your gas mileage.

You've probably seen hypermilers around town. They are those Mr. Magoos going 45 on the freeway (because lower speed means less wind resistance equals higher mileage.) Or "ridge-riding" — driving on the white line at the side of the road, to keep their tires out of friction-heavy traffic grooves.

Yet hiding beneath that annoying pokiness is a restless energy. These are the eco-freaks for whom hybrids were not green enough. So they got inventive, home-rigging their cars to plug in to the grid. Or brewing their own biodiesel from restaurant waste.

Remember the chants of "drill, baby, drill?" Barack Obama boringly said we could forestall all that thrilling drilling if we'd just remember to keep our tires properly inflated.

That's hypermiler-speak. Pragmatic yet creative. Our first hypermiler-in-chief.

At least he could be. Except right now he's talking about bailing out the creaking, gas-guzzling auto industry. Or mailing out yet another absurd round of shop-til-you-drop stimulus checks.

That's not change. That's the old hyperconsumption way of doing things.

Instead we should ask: What would a hypermiler do?

A hypermiler wouldn't give the Big Three carmakers $50 billion, even if it saves jobs. A hypermiler might give that money if the companies pledged to make their cars dramatically more fuel efficient.

Adapt or run out of gas. It's the hypermiler creed.

No way a hypermiler would send out checks to try to stimulate debt-ridden Americans to go buy stuff we don't need, like flat-screen TVs.

But a hypermiler might say: Invest if it makes the country work better. By building mass transit. Solar arrays. Wind farms. Natural-gas cars. New energy grids. Anything that transforms the economy as it boosts it.

There's a company in Seattle, on Green Lake, called AltaRock Energy. I heard about it in Denver at the Democratic convention. It has a way to pump water deep beneath volcanoes to capture the earth's heat. There is believed to be enough geothermal potential just in the south Cascades, near Mount St. Helens, to generate electricity for a million people.

Instead of bailing out GM to save jobs building Hummers, why not create jobs building geothermal plants?

Instead of mailing us more checks so we can prop up Circuit City, why not try hypermiling the economy?

The eco-evangelist Van Jones is in Seattle talking about what it would take to make such a "green-collar economy" (tonight 7 p.m. at U Bookstore, or Thursday 12:30 p.m. at Garfield High School gym, 5:30 p.m. at Benaroya Hall.)

If it doesn't work? Runner-up for Oxford word of the year is "frugalista" — a person who's somehow as chic and fabulous as he or she is tightwad cheap. Plan B is we all try that for a while.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.