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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
big enough for three people over six feet tall and two others, plus three dogs, if one sits on a lap.
It's bullshit. The number of people who actually need an SUV is puny, and limited to those who live in distant locations without paved roads. Anyone else who "needs" an SUV is fooling themselves. More people need trucks, as hauling capacity is often important for work purposes, but it's still a tiny minority of those who actually own them.
Improvement over your Volvo isn't really all that convincing either. 20 city/25 highway is not good fuel economy. My 7 year old car gets better mileage than that. When you're buying new, you could do much, much better.
Let's face it, you don't need the space. You want it. You don't like being crowded when you're in the vehicle. You don't like the road noise that comes in smaller, lighter weight vehicles. The reality is that a family of 4+dog can easily get around in a hatchback. It's crowded, but it works. And how often do you really have more than 5 people in the car. I'd be willing to be it's sufficiently infrequent that your decreased fuel economy is not offset by other parents' saved trips.
It's a free country. You can buy an SUV if you like. But stop justifying it by pretending you need it. You don't. You value your in-car comfort more than you value polar bears. That's the reality, and you just have to face up it.
And you still haven't explained why you bought the highlander over the Ford Escape or Mazda Tribute, which offer car-like fuel economy while still fulfilling your desire for space.
Which works ok except when it's dark out.
Both propane and gas are sequestered carbon - its just a matter of how long you are willing to wait for them to form (ie. charcoal takes the lifetime of a tree and gas could take millennium)....
Therefore burning either is simply a matter of "returning carbon back to the atmosphere" -
but since the current problem is too much being released against a slower natural sequestration rate resulting in rising greenhouse gasses - both are environmentally negative (ie. not neutral)
Then when you consider the relative inefficiency of charcoal to gas burning, the huge expense of preparing and transporting charcoal vs gas and the huge amount of additional pollutants that charcoal produces vs. gas and you quickly realize that the enviromentalist should be gas grilling (or not grilling) - vegetables only - if you want to have any credibility.
But that being said - 99% of this stuff is pure nonsense anyway - if current models are to be believed - the difference of 10 yearly bbq of charcoal vs gas or a 25mpg SUV vs a 27mpg wagon wont make even the slightest difference.
You want to make a singular and meaningful difference? take mass transit to work everyday and live in an apartment (with scaled heating/AC) vs a private house. Everything else is mostly so small as to be meaningless
Well I don't have two kids and a dog, I have four kids and a dog does that earn me the right to drive an SUV? The point is that you have to look at your life as a whole and while some decisions you make are not doing to be as good for the environment but others will be. The point is to be conscious. Minivans don't get significantly better gas milage then SUVs and for the most part don't have the leg and head room that SUVs do (for those of us with bigger kids in our car pools) minivans also get stuck off road. (Boy that's fun with a truck load of 9 year old Cub Scouts)
We did the math and the best Minivan we found not only cost significantly more but the third row was too small for my older son and his friends, our second row is reserved for kids in car seats. Add to that the requirement for older and larger kids to be in five point harnesses the width of car seats is now make putting three cross in most mini vans very difficult. We agonized over replacing our stationwagon with a mini van or an SUV and the SUV won out. I am sorry to say that having now driven one for five years it has only endeared itself to me.
We consider ourselves to be extremely environmentally conscious. When we decided to have a larger then replacement number of children we choose adoption. We lived in Los Angeles without a car for several years and my husband commuted to work on his bike for seven years. Now that he works too far to bike he uses a van pool four days a week and he has moved to a work schedule that allows him to work only four days a week. When we chose a neighborhood we choose one where we could walk to everything they needed, movies, grocery, shopping, art galleries restaurants etc. We encourage the older kids to take their bikes or public transportation when they can (which is most of the time) and we carpool to school, sports and music lessons to reduce trips. We eat local produce (ok that one is easy and economical in Southern California ) We don't take resort vacations or destination vacation that require air travel we load up the kids (and their friends) in the SUV and go camping, hiking etc. We recycle, we bring our own bags, we live in a house with no heat source other that passive solar. Now with all of that, do we get a pass to not only drive and SUV but a full sized 4-wheel drive one?
The point of this rant is not to show how wonderful my family is but to say that taking one piece of someone's life, one decision or preference does not diminish their commitment to the environment. You don't know what that person in the SUV in their driveway is doing to balance that gas guzzler.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
