Last year I did something I never thought I’d do. Even a couple years before, I thought it would never happen. But it did.
I bought an SUV. I prefer to call it by its proper name, that being a CUV (Compact Utility Vehicle), but there’s no disguising that it’s one of those gas-guzzling behemoths that I used to rail against.
What did I have against them? As a student of environmental studies, I bought the David Suzuki line that “if you own an SUV, you don’t give a [bleep] about the environment.” (I’ve made this blog family friendly, by the way.) That line served me well as an owner of a Pontiac Firefly, my beloved 50 mile-per-gallon death trap. It served me well as an owner of a Honda Accord (four cylinder, of course), and it served me just fine as an owner of a compact Acura. They were all considered decent cars, by environmentalist standards. Not so the SUV. For some reason, once you become an owner of one of these monsters, you are no longer a friend of the earth.
There is some merit to the argument, of course. They do consume more fuel than a sedan and have higher emissions. They contribute to smog in large cities (thankfully Saskatchewan has nothing to worry about!) They contribute, in part, to higher fuel prices. If everyone was committed to owning a small compact vehicle in North America, the cost of gas and oil would be lower than it is today.
In my seminal attack on SUV owners (you can find it buried in a 2004 edition of the Valley News), I state that SUV owners are generally more reckless, selfish, and generally terrible people. That could be. I was a much nicer person when I drove a Pontiac Firefly.
So how did I get to this point in my life? Am I just getting older, therefore less idealistic and less “good”? I’d have to say it was a number of things.
The one thing I missed at that point in my life (and this is to justify my current ownership of an SUV), is that there’s more than just one boogey-man out there. You can’t just isolate one segment of the population. We all contribute, as a society, to bad things (whether it be environmental destruction, social injustice, etc). As my cousin commented, why do van owners get off so easy? Vans pollute as much as SUVs, but somehow they’re deemed “family friendly”. Boo on that (although I do like the look of the new Odysseys… but that’s a whole nother issue).
I also realize that people are driven by economics. If they aren’t going to spend their money one way, they’ll spend it another. They may not drive that SUV, but maybe they have a 5,000 square foot home. Or maybe they travel a lot. Flying, by the way, contributes way more to global warming than driving (and there’s no amount of environmental credits that can offset this impact, Al Gore!) Everyone makes choices, but they usually spend what they have, unless they’re extremely conscientious people. Even those who consider themselves “environmentally conscious,” I’ve noticed, make poor environmental decisions that are simply less identifiable as being environmentally destructive (once again, Mr. Gore and his private jet comes to mind).
And finally, on a more controversial point, I now recognize that climate change is not going away. As selfish as this may sound, my choice to drive a smaller car is not going to reduce the impacts of climate change, whatever they might be. Globally, climate change is a freight train that cannot be stopped. It has been projected that by 2020, China will be emitting the same quantity of greenhouse gas emissions as the United States. The world needs to reduce its emissions by an astronomical amount to reduce the impacts of climate change. Instead, emissions keep rising. Economies, particularly new emerging economies, depend upon greenhouse gas-producing energy. It is lifting people out of poverty, in many cases. As much as politicians campaign on this, reducing emissions by 50-70% is not going to happen without an outright economic collapse (post-Soviet Union style, which, as my wife will attest, was a horrible thing). While non-renewables can be part of the solution to reducing emissions, they certainly cannot replace current energy sources, nor prevent the changes that are to come. {End rant.}
So that’s why I am no longer anti-SUV. Plus it drives much better in winter.
