Green Cars: Oxymoron or Sign of Progress?
This change of heart comes after two decades of ‘bigger is better’, which saw the average fuel efficiency of vehicles on the road steadily decline, best chronicled by the Detroit bureau chief of the New York Times, Keith Bradsher, in High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV.
This change is driven by a combination of rising consumer concern about the environment, a desire to head off tougher pollution laws from government, and rising gas prices hitting gas guzzlers in the pocketbook, all of which make fuel-efficiency a much more desirable option.
On the one hand, paying smart engineers to figure out ways to burn less gas is a great thing, and infinitely preferable to paying smart lawyers and PR practitioners to fight against environmental rules (trust me – they’re very good at what they do). And since a big, heavy vehicle like an SUV will put out 4 to 5 times more greenhouse gases per kilometer than a gas-sipping economy car, switching to smaller, more efficient vehicles can have a huge impact.
For example, if we shifted the Canadian passenger vehicle fleet from it’s current average emissions (350 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer) to that of the Prius (about 125 grams per kilometer), then we’d eliminate about 58 megatonnes of greenhouse gases, which is greater than what all four Atlantic provinces put out combined, and is about one third of what we need to do to meet our Kyoto target.
On the other hand, it’s still all about car culture. Ultimately, we need to drive less. This means rethinking how we design our cities so that we stop urban sprawl, make the necessary investments in great (green) public transit and ensure that our streets are friendly to bikes and pedestrians. Not owning a car has to become a viable option for more than a few.
And I’m really not buying the idea of a green Hummer.
What is undeniably a good idea, however, is for our federal government to get behind the California Clear Car law – to find out how you can help make this happen go here.