Posted by Epoxy (216.166.228.231) on November 27, 2002 at 14:05:28:
I read a bit below about SUVs. You know, up until about 3 months ago I was totally oblivious to the fact some people (typically urban liberals I guess) have this visceral hatred for SUVs. I was frankly astonished to discover this at first, and then amused. I have never been bothered by SUVs nor do I notice driving with them on the highway to be an irritant (I have a small car) any more than any other type of vehicle.
The arguments about their fuel efficiency may be correct to some extent, but the same arguments hold for any number of other vehicles which have been around for decades, from luxury sedans to sportscars to trucks - yet these are not the target of hatred the way SUVs are.
I think most SUV-haters are the same types of people who despise most anything that is "popular" or mainstream, since SUVs are at this point the most popular vehicles in America.
Nothing humans are doing is "killing the earth"...our pollution may eventually make the earth uninhabitable for humans, but life on earth will be here long after our species is extinct, so that argument doesn't hold water either.
So if the ultimate aim is to limit pollution, allow for human existence, and keep some semblance of "nature", then the problem is not SUVs or even fossil fuels, but rather human population growth. If the population had stayed steady at 2 billion then we could all drive around in coal-powered dump trucks and we'd be creating less pollution than a day's worth of volcano-eruption.
But with 6 billion people driving around, burning down forests, generating electricity, etc., yeah, we're creating a lot of pollution. I personally feel like limiting pollution is a great idea, but it's not going to make much difference when we have 20-40 billion people (in like 50 years). Heck, probably just *exhaling* carbon dioxide at that point will contribute substantially to global warming!
I think the SUV thing is just a pet-peeve for city-dwelling, Mac-using, VW Bug-driving, Salon-reading 4's who like to get excited about stuff like that. It's not a real issue at all.