Green Future?

First of all, if you haven't checked out www.worldchanging.org stop reading this right now and go. Go on. Ok. There's a rant that I've been mostly internalizing for some time, but I think here is as good a place as any to let if loose.

Personal Transportation and the environment, especially hybrid vehicles.

Hybrid vehicles are bad. In some ways they are worse than SUVs, but especially because it reinforces a simplistic, and non-comlete answer to a mounting problem. Here's the stripped down logic: SUVs (and cars in general) are bad. They cause air pollution, and use up oil which leads to war. If we are environmentalists we should by the car with the best mileage, which is a hybrid.

Now, I'm all for effecient vehicles, but there are some problems with hybrids, and that route of thinking that is in many ways more dangerous than not giving a shit and driving a giant SUV. I'll start at the top of the hybrids and move on down to the list to the dangerous root of the problem.

When thinking of hybrids most people only calculate the impacts of the usage of that vehicle, not the production, repair, or retirement of it. Hybrids hold an huge amount of embodied energy (the amount of energy per vehicle the factories had to use to create it from raw elements) in their unique batteries, motors, and management systems. This energy is greater than "standard" vehicles, while the mileage gains are not impressive enough to offset them. I usually drive old crappy cars, but I've had a few cars in the 80's that got tremendous mileage (30's to low 40's), my girlfriend at the time had a Honda CRX with over 220k miles that still got in the high 30's around town, and better on the freeway. Her mom had a Toyota hatchback that regularly got that kind of mileage. And all of these cars were 10-15 years old at that point. Cheap to run, simple to maintain, and cheap (energy wise) to produce compared with modern cars. Most of the reports have come out now that hybrids have not been getting the mileage they've advertised, but even if they did they are less energy effecient (from a life-cycle perspective) than a cheap econobox of 20 years ago. Hybrids are not a solution.

There are other problems I forsee with increasingly technological solutions to personal transport. Long-term, do we know how these systems will hold up? Not yet. Are there mechanics that can service these systems? So far, only at the dealerships. What about the cost and toxicity when these vehicles are in an accident? Think about how much faster a insurance company will write off a hybrid when it has been in a slight accident that damaged thousands of dollars of hi-tech batteries. That' car is no longer repairable and another car (maybe hybrid, maybe not) will have to be produced to replace it. These points are the dark side of hybrids that no one (especially Toyota/Honda) want to talk about.

The "green" car (I know, it's an oxymoron) is one that uses the least materials (I'm talking no a/c, no power windows, no digital gauges, etc), and or the least toxic materials (natural fiber carpet maybe? Cellulose derived panels?) to get the best mileage/lowest emissions. So far no one makes such a car for sale in the states. The VW Lupo is pretty close, as are some other small diesels in europe.

Ok, so hybrids aren't the answer, but the bigger problem is that even if there was such a thing as a green car, it couldn't be the answer either. Why? Because the biggest problems with personal transport are not the oil they burn, or the emissions they spew. It's their impact on landuse. Cars do more to determine how we live, and what we think we can do than any other law, object, social-norm, or emotion. It's creepy when you stop to think about it. Humans are..I was going to say that humans are an after-thought in landuse decisions, but that's not exactly right. It's that cars are so integral that we barely even have to think about them. Check out any medevil city in Europe. You can tell exactly how big that city was when cars became common because all land planning from there on out shifted to accomadate the car. It's harder to see in California because almost all the cities didn't really start to grow until the car became ubiquitous.

Any technology that makes cars easier, cleaner, and less guilt-inspiring to drive will cause us to continue to build large ineffecient urban sprawl. Bigger areas of impermeable surface (parking lots) which deprive our aquifers of water, and create polluted runoff..etc etc...YOu've all heard the rants before.

BUt think of this, most complex problems can't be solved with a simple solution. Ecological decline can be..almost. There's actually a set of solutions, but here's the deal, they are hard to live with because they tell us to do with less.

Stop making so much stuff. Stop using so much land, do less. work less. eat less. You've got to, because it's a full-world and it's getting more crowded every minute.

You want effecient living? Don't look to the Rocky Mountain Institute, look at New York (which is currently considering a ban on the creation of new parking spaces! can you imagine any other jurisdiciton in the country doing that?). If we are going to succeed on becoming less of a cancer to this planet and to ourselve we need to change our view of what green living is supposed to be. It ain't driving a shiny new car with hi-tech batteries. It will be living in a dense urban area and walking. That's effecient.

Rant off. For now.