Guest Post by Morbo
A recent string of New Yorker articles on global warming has me alternatively scared and depressed.
Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part series laid out the threat in clear language and discussed some possible remedies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Kolbert traveled to places on the globe already being affected by global warming and talked to real people whose lives are impacted right now. No conjecture, no what-ifs. The message comes through: This is serious.
Kolbert’s final piece is the most alarming because it focuses on a sobering reality: America’s current leadership doesn’t intend to do a damn thing about the problem.
In her third story, which is not yet available online, Kolbert lays out our options. Ideally, the United States should have begun addressing global warming a long time ago. That did not happen, and under George W. Bush, the United States has made its preference clear: Business as usual.
With no call from government officials to change behavior, with no leadership from Washington on the issue, the American people by and large don’t appear to care much about global warming. Global warming skeptics, the creationists of climate change, call the tune in Washington, and now that no less an authority than Michael Crichton, an actual science fiction writer, has dismissed it all as, ahem, hot air, most Americans are happy to plant their heads right back in the sand.
Yet unpleasant facts remain. Glaciers keep melting, and the arctic permafrost is turning into a type of sludge. Kolbert’s tales about houses in Alaska caving in as the ground softens up sound amusing — but it’s no joke for what it portends.
The tragedy is, our personal choices do affect the issue. Kolbert quotes one scientist who lists two fairly simple things the average person can do to help: drive less frequently and buy a car that is twice as fuel efficient as the American average now.
That second one may raise eyebrows. Can we really double fuel efficiency? Yes, it can be done. Ask anyone who drives as gas-electric hybrid. For a moment, the situation sounds hopeful.
Then comes the next sentence, and we’re back to reality: “Since 1987, the fuel efficiency of passenger vehicles in the U.S. has actually declined, by more than five percent.”
I can’t help but think that SUVs have a lot to do with this. Cars accounted for 67.4 percent of the passenger vehicle market in 1991. They now account for 46.3 percent. The gap has been filled by SUVs and what are called “light trucks” — even though they are far from light.
My area is cursed with these behemoths; enormous gas guzzlers that get lousy gas mileage clog the highways — occupied usually by a solitary driver. When I travel to other states, I see the same situation.
Suburbans, Expeditions and Range/Land Rovers are bad enough, but at the top of the axis of vehicle evil is that monstrosity known as the Hummer. Why does this vehicle even exist? Why is it legal to own one?
I understand that some people need a vehicle that can carry several passengers. Suburban parents really do spend a lot of time acting as a taxi service for kids. Some people have big families Fine. Get a mini-van. I am also aware that some of the newer, smaller SUVs do better on gas these days. Some are even hybrids. That’s nice.
That doesn’t excuse the Hummer. It is the ultimate exercise in egoism, a massive flipping of the bird to the norms of a decent society where we at least try to understand that we’re all in this together. The Hummer says, “Screw you. Screw your kids. Screw the planet. I do what I want and leave devastation in my wake.”
No one needs a Hummer. I see no reason why these vehicles are legal to produce, market and sell. It’s akin to encouraging people to drive to the office and run errands on weekends in a cement mixer.
Hummers are so huge and weigh so much that they are exempt from fuel efficiency standards. You have to do a little digging to find out how many miles per gallon they actually get. The answer is about 10. Isn’t that special? (By the way, if you hate Hummers as much as I do, check out FUH2.com — but don’t visit if you’re offended by coarse language.) Fuel efficiency standards must be tightened until the production of such vehicles is impossible.
And please, let’s not have any of this junk about, “This is America, and I can drive what I want.” Your freedom does not include a right to hasten the demise of the planet just so vacuous people will think you’re cool.
On May 20, The New York Times ran a front-page article headlined, “A Love Affair With S.U.V.’s Begins to Cool.” I was excited until I started to read the story. The only reason the love affair is cooling is that the price of gas has gone through the roof. If gas were cheap again, Americans would still be snatching up SUVs. One 19-year-old out shopping for a vehicle told The Times, “If gas prices were cheaper, then I’d look into an SUV.”
It’s obvious most people could care less what these vehicles do to the environment. They don’t seem to mind that they are leaving their children a despoiled planet.
Yet the effect of gas guzzlers is clear. As The Times noted:
The growth of light trucks, a regulatory category that includes minivans, S.U.V.s and pickup trucks, has had broad effects on the nation’s oil consumption. The fuel economy of the average new vehicle sold fell to 20.7 miles a gallon in 2003 models from 22.1 miles a gallon in 1988 models. Regulations permit light trucks to consume significantly more gas than cars; the most recent Congressional effort to tighten the regulatory system was defeated in the Senate this week.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the idea of a civic good. We gave up on the idea that our actions and decisions might affect others and that the wants, needs and desires of our fellow residents of the planet were worth taking into account.
And no one will call us to account. No one has the nerve — no one in Washington, anyway. A demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles and a suggestion that people might want to drive smaller cars is seen as no better than communism, an attack on our very way of life. Cheap gas and giant vehicles are our God-given right. God took away our cheap gas, but we have faith it will, like Jesus himself, return some day. We just have to be patient.
I have a friend about my age who jokes with me occasionally by saying, “It looks like you and I will be checking out just as things get really bad.” We laugh nervously because we both have children. Yes, we’ll grow old and die — and leave our kids with rising sea levels, acidic oceans and an increasingly unstable climate.
Silly me. I had hoped to do better by the next generation.