Letters to the Editor

• Sorry Bill. You just lost me, and anyone who ever took high-school physics.

  [Read the article: Bill Richardson on greening SUVs]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  "We can make an efficient SUV engine..."

  The problem with SUV's isn't that their engines are inefficient. (They ARE, as are all internal combustion engines, but that's really beside the point.)

  The problem is that cars in general, and SUV's in particular, weigh ten to twenty times what their payload does. That means that for every unit of energy that goes into moving the driver (I'm assuming a single-occupancy vehicle, which is how a whole lot of them are used most of the time) ten to twenty units of energy go into moving the vehicle itself. In other words, even if the engine was 100% efficient, you'd still be spending 90% to 95% of the energy moving the vehicle itself.

  Look. My old Toyota Tercel subcompact weighed 1000 kilograms, or about 2200 pounds. That's a really small car. (Not as small as a SmartCar, but close.) I'm a fairly big guy, creeping up on 220 pounds. That means that when I drove that car, for every gallon of gas that went into moving me, another ten gallons went into moving the car itself. Engine efficiency (the efficiency with which the chemical potential energy in the fuel is translated into kinetic mechanical energy i.e. the motion of the vehicle) has nothing to do with it.

  And that's a very favorable payload-to-vehicle ratio, at least for a single-occupancy vehicle. A smallish soccer mom (110 lbs) driving an SUV (I don't know how much they weigh--easily twice what my Tercel did, say 4400 pounds or more) is burning forty gallons for every gallon used to move herself.

  These numbers get somewhat better if you carpool but let's face it, most people don't carpool.

  If you want to reduce your fuel consumption to a significant degree--I mean, by more than a couple of percentage points, which is what we're all gonna have to do in a few years--here is how you do it, in order of preference:

  1) Live in a location that lets you walk to work and shopping, and that has half-decent transit. (If it's a row house or an apartment condominium, that's even better--they're cheaper to heat per square foot.)

  2) Ride your bike to work

  -take mass transit to work (not once a month--come on, Bill!--but every day.

  3) Car-pool to work (this includes commercial ride-sharing systems like jitneys/collective taxis like they use throughout the Third World)

  4) If you absolutely, positively, must drive your own car to work, buy a very small car. I'm talking a compact or subcompact. A hybrid is just an expensive way of pretending you're saving energy.

  Now, those are your options. Those are really your ONLY options. No hydrogen cars, no biodiesel fleet, no fusion- and zero-point futuremobiles. Your options are those I have just laid out above. That is everything useful that you will ever learn about fuel efficiency. Everything is snake oil sold by people who see a buck to be made in exploiting your burning desire (ha ha) to keep driving your big, manly Americamobiles everywhere.

  Now, the fact that most of those options are not practical in America today, has NOTHING TO DO with the fact that these options are the only ones available to you. So your problem now is-- instead of bending over and spreading 'em while your leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, blow smoke up your ass about how you won't have to give up your unlimited personal automobility--rather, to get to work and start re-establishing mass transit and dense,walkable urban neighbourhoods and mixed land use. You're going to have to get over your pathological fear of living near black people (if you're white) and near slightly-less-affluent people (if you're affluent.) You're probably going to have to reform your public school system so that your children's education does not hang so precariously on the tax base of your neighbourhood and therefore on the income of your neighbours.

  It's a herculean task and you won't be able to accomplish more than a small part of it before global oil production starts to crash, leaving you (yes, you personally, you, the person reading this) stranded in your safe, single-use, income-segregated suburban enclave. But it must be done. Thirty-three years ago (the time of the first oil crisis) you would have had the option of doing this the hard way or the easy way. Now the easy way is no longer available--you pissed away your chance at the easy way by three decades of free-market Reaganoid and Reagan-lite-ism. Now your choices are:

  1) The hard way;

  2) The very hard way; and

  3) The unbelievably fucking hard,passing-a-kidney-stone-the-size-of-a-bowling-ball way.

  The only leader of national stature who was ever even close to this honest with you about the problem was Jimmy Carter. And you still make him the butt of jokes.

  So the next time someone tells you we can fight climate change and deal with Peak Oil without having to give up your cars--let alone your SUV's--it is your patriotic duty to smack that person, really really hard.

  Permalink Monday, September 3, 2007 06:24 AM