The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

For quite a while now it's been fashionable among the environmentally-minded to decry the ownership of SUVs. It occurs to me that this reveals exactly what is wrong with the conventional thinking of the progressive / green crowd.

Would the everyday environment in America be any better if it were full of high gas milage cars instead of honking big gas-guzzling Chevy Denalis and Ford Expeditions? I don't think it would make a damn bit of difference, really. We'd still be a car-dependent society stuck in a national automobile slum. The problem with America is not big cars, it's the fact that were always in any cars of any size so much of the time, and that cars of all sizes have such an overwhelming presence in our lives.

The anti-SUV mantra is related in spirit to the quixotic project by Amory Lovins and his Rocky Mountain Institute to design an environmentally-friendly "hyper-car." Such a high milage, low-emissions vehicle, they say, would help usher in a sustainable way-of-life in America. What horseshit. It would do nothing to mitigate the degraded public realm of Parking Lot nation. It would not lessen commuting distances or times. It would not reduce the number of car trips per day per household. If anything, the hyper-car would only provide moral justification for continuing to live in a drive-in dystopia. It would make suburban sprawl seem normative and desirable, instead of what it is: the most destructive development pattern the world has ever seen.

There's an interesting explanation for why they pursue this project so zealously. Environmentalists are keen on the culture of quantification. It's easy to count up the number of carbon dioxide molecules in a cubic foot of air, so reducing them makes you a moral victor in the jihad against air pollution. By the same simplistic reasoning big-cars-bad, little-cars-good.

In the age of austerity and global strife that is coming down the pike at us, we are going to need walkable neighborhoods, towns and villages and richly multi-modal transportation systems, including public transit. In the meantime, I really don't give a fuck whether Americans drive Humvees or Toyota Celicas. All of them contribute to make my everyday world a worse place.