Flag-waving and Faux EnvironmentalismBy Jane Holtz Kay Is consumption the sincerest form of patriotism? What else accounts for our leaders' push to buy our way out of the Afghanian badlands by consuming U.S. goods? How else, more significantly, to explain the environmental push to purchase so-called clean cars? Is it the sight of our president and ex-president, mall-bound and pushing benefits to corporations that makes the green community so car-bound? The very notion of the "clean car" has been turning greens to gray for quite a while, of course. Consider, for instance, the mailing from Environmental Defense that landed at my door. "Finding the way that works," these advocates for a clean car declared, going into raptures on finding a new environmentally-friendly automobile. Ahhh, yes, a car that is good for the environment. "As much fun as a basket of kittens," the green group quoted the gush of this eco-enthusiast, the proud owner of a gas-electric hybrid Toyota Prius.
But it wasn't just the environmentalist's kittenish ecstasy over 55-miles per gallon. "It's fast," she enthused about her new way of life on wheels (with or without said basket of kittens, presumably strapped into the back seat of the vehicle lest they join the 121 Americans a day killed in car accidents or their roadkilled brethren and habitats). To be sure, the notion of driving guilt-free through scenic Appalachian highways or Northern redwoods and Yosemite park is attractive. Of course, the pleasure principle of consume without guilt is a message that goes down easily in what Worldwatch calls our "all you can eat society." Nor is it easy to say Enough (as the Center for the New American Dream titles their magazine) in a world where "enough" is never quite sufficient. But doesn't pleasure pass over the edge into frivolity these days when concern for renewable energy --from conservation to wind turbines --heightens as our labor to cut oil from hostile Middle East nations advances and our need to lessen nuclear power from vulnerable plants proceeds?. Clearly not. For the environmentalists who offered prizes of clean cars last Earth Day and promote promises of a brave new world of pollutant-free fantasies even now, they have yet to look at broader options or make any realistic assessment of the total impact of the automobile. For openers, even with the perfect emission-free engine, thirty percent of the car's resource and energy consumption comes in the making of the vehicle. The fuel and resources to complete its maze of body work and innards...the handles and windshield wipers...the seats and surfaces...the engine...and the complete kit of parts. At the least, isn't this deep-breathing for electric-hybrids on the paler shade of green? At the worst, isn't it a bit like becoming ecstatic when Bush "reduced" the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico or "only" took itsy-bitsy swipes at clearcutting or road-building in first-growth forests. Granted, it's not easy getting around without an automobile in a car-dependent society and a car-committed government spending its 53 billion transportation dollars on auto-age advancement. Beyond the government's post 9/ll bailout bailout to the airlines with 15 billion dollars, some 35 billion goes to highways and 12 to airplanes while Amtrak struggles for its virtual existence as a free market enterprise. So here we are with greens bowing to this bias adding to the 16,000,000 new cars we buy a year, joining the current fleet of 200,000,000-plus motor vehicles now on the road contributing 33% of our co2 emissions while we s-l-o-w-l-y, expensively, eternally, it sometimes seems, wait to change the fleet? Why do so many environmentalists try to change the trouble in the tailpipe rather than challenge the system? It is fine for Detroit to applaud its profit maker but it is California dreaming to think of a truly clean car as a possibility. What could an alternative vehicle do for a planet under siege? How could any miracle machine stop sprawl with its farm loss and wetland takeover, its road kill and ecological desecration? How could "clean" cars free the Americans now immobilized by auto-dependency spending eight billion hours a year stuck in traffic: help the 55 million school age children on bike or foot threatened by racing roadsters, the dependent elderly unable to drive, the 9 percent of our households -- the poor, women and minorities -- who can't afford a car, and the overworked America needing a ton of steel and wheel to buy a quart of milk? What would a dream machine do for quality of life and all the other road-related ills as we spin our wheels. It's no surprise, of course, when makers of electric or hybrid vehicles like the Honda Insight bedeck themselves with faux green statements, advertising that their merchandise is "just what you and the planet have been waiting for." "The new car for a new world," Prius puts it. "Careful you may run out of planet," says one unwittingly ironic automobile advertisement, my favorite. The surprising thing isn't that the auto guys are trying to catch a free ride through the environment, however. What's bizarre is this myopia from the green community. (do you think this is repetitive?) En route to something better, it is undeniably commendable to replace or reform the internal combustion engine. The Sierra Club and other groups have spent years fighting to put a mere study of CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) standards to get better mileage on SUVs and other gas guzzlers, and defending the "radically cleaner" car. By fighting this super-scale SUV, "the Joe Camel of the auto industry," they hoped to squeeze automakers into changing the product that earns $10,000-20,000 in profits per car. But is the SUV the only villain. And don't we divert real restructuring - better ways to move...and not move so much - by proclaiming our - uh-- "personal virtue" when we get better mileage? Just last June (200l), a coven of conscientious environmentalists held an anti-SUV rally at an auto sales company car lot in the Boston area where I live. The site in this transit-friendly town was barely accessible without a car. Come, but find wheels first, was the implied injunction. ("What Would Jesus Drive?" asked one of their members in a later article. A donkey, I presume; or better yet let the good lord take His or Her bike or foot or public transit for the rest of us.) An organizer of the event whom I chided e-mailed me that I should "have faith and remember the French Revolution. First SUV's, then mini-vans, then station wagons, full medium, compact, sub-compact, motorcycles, motor scooters, lawnmowers and then finally we can get back to tumbrels," he wrote. From an organizer's perspective, he continued, "we start with where the people are who are willing to protest. There is energy now against the suburban tanks." Maybe so, but is compliance not complacency? Why not direct this energy to securing alternate transportation? To advocating good land use planning? To centering around walkable cities? To driving less or not at all? To recalling that every mile you drive is like throwing a pound of CO2 into the overheated atmosphere. To augmenting biking and walking? Granted such work goes on but far less visibly and theatrically than the arguing that there is such a thing as a "respectably-sized" vehicle that deflects from the real work to end the Auto Age. When a New Hampshire spokeswoman made a presentation at the first International Climate Control Conference in Cambridge a year or so ago, she recognized the car's contribution of one third of our greenhouse gases. What did she point out as the solution? Her state's financial bonuses for buying personal and official "clean cars," buying more cars - i.e. consuming - was her plan to cool the planet. The Buy America approach should have made the most chauvinistic citizen blush. Again, altering the chemistry of the vehicle that causes one-third of our co2 emissions is fine. But how about acknowledging that another third of this energy consumption is spent in highway-bred building of 953,000 homes a year largely at the end of the road, in filling 60,000 acres of wetland and taking one million of farmland every year. Why adopt the car guys' detour? Why not challenge the chief polluter of our lives and landscapes? Clean consciences may put coins in some psychic (or Detroit-based) bank but they don't clean the environment. We need to give the red-light to highway-first policies. Printed in www.Oriononline.com as "No Such Thing As A Clean Car." November 200l
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