Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 4:53 am Post subject: 4 x 4
6/7/2004
War x 4
Filed under: climate change
Any government concerned about global security and climate change should be banning 4×4s
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th July 2004
Financial Times, 3rd July, main section: “French road tax rattles gas guzzlers”. The French government is hoping to impose a tax of up to 3200 euros on new 4-wheel drive cars (4×4s), which are wrecking its cities and cooking the planet.
Financial Times, 3rd July, How to Spend It supplement: “Wet this baby’s head”. A new amphibious vehicle “will be the beefiest 4×4 on road or water”. It has a top speed of over 100mph on the road, and 30 on the water. The developer is holding down the price to “teach people to recognise it as the way forward”.
Now we can bugger up our rivers as well as our roads. This is what we mean by progress.
Neither the Financial Times nor the company’s website reveals how many miles per gallon, or gallons per mile, the Gibbs Aquada does, and the woman at the sales department told me she didn’t understand what I meant by “mpg”. (Perhaps I am asking too much of these people: the spokeswoman at the government’s Department for Transport hadn’t heard of carbon dioxide). But, in case you were wondering, the FT explains why you might need one: “This will take you on the school run and up the Amazon”. If your children go to school up the Amazon, in other words, it’s indispensable.
Or perhaps the inventor has developed the perfect business model. If the Gibbs Aquada takes off, global warming will accelarate. If global warming accelarates, floods will become more frequent. If floods become more frequent, you will need the Gibbs Aquada to get to school.
Tony Blair now identifies climate change as “the single most important issue we face as a global community”.(1) The main cause of climate change is the production of carbon dioxide. The fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide in Britain is transport: its emissions increased by 50% between 1990 and 2002.(2) Flying accounts for most of this, but another reason is that the market for large 4×4s more than doubled in this period. Every year, 150,000 British people now buy one of these monsters, mostly to drive around our cities.(3)
Officially, the biggest 4×4s can manage 12 or 13 miles to the gallon in urban areas. Unofficially, US journalists found that the Ford Excursion was doing 3.7.(4) Switching from an average car to a big 4×4, the Sierra Club calculates, uses as much extra energy in twelve months as leaving your television on for 28 years.(5)
Arguably, the war with Iraq was a war for 4×4s. As the former environment minister Michael Meacher pointed out in the Guardian on Saturday, the US could do without its oil imports from the Persian Gulf if the fuel efficiency of its cars was improved by an average of 2.7 miles per gallon.(6) Special tax breaks make 4×4s effectively free to US businesses,(7) with the result that they now comprise 46% of the private fleet.( Abandoning those tax breaks would remove a major incentive for war.
Our fashion accessories, then, are mowing down the people of Iraq, Bangladesh and the Sahel. They are also slaughtering our own. Because big 4×4s are higher and heavier, the occupants of a vehicle hit by one are 27 times more likely to be killed (according to the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) than the occupants of a vehicle hit by a normal car.(9) For the same reasons they kill between two and three times as many of the pedestrians and cyclists they hit as smaller cars.(10)
Obviously, therefore, as Blair now cares so much about global warming, the British government is about to follow the French by discouraging them. I’m joking, of course. “Industrial civilization,” Mustapha Mond, the controller of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, observed, “is only possible when there’s no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning”. This government intends to keep the wheels turning as we drive over the abyss. This is why the woman in the transport department’s press office used precisely the same words as the man from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. “It is up to people to drive whatever car they choose”. Taxing or banning 4×4s, she told me, would restrict people’s “freedom of choice”. The same argument, of course, could be made about the laws preventing citizens from carrying rocket-propelled grenades to work.
Given that just one in eight 4×4 drivers has ever driven his car off-road, and only two out of five have even taken their cars out of town, why do people drive these things? Why roll anything up to 7.6 tons of metal (the Hummer H1) onto the road, when a bicycle will do just as well?
Well, it’s partly because people are terrified of being mown down by 7.6 tonnes of metal. If giant 4×4s mangle ordinary cars, you’d better buy a giant 4×4, just as civilians in Mogadishu must buy an AK47 to protect themselves from civilians with AK47s. It’s partly too because we lead such humdrum lives. When you’re driving a “Defender” or “Explorer” or “Pathfinder” or “Cherokee”, you can place yourself, just like the adverts, on the wild frontier, without having to travel beyond Ealing Broadway. During the Iraq war, the New York Times reported that men in the US were buying Hummers (the biggest 4×4s) for “patriotic reasons”: the troops in Iraq were using the same vehicles.(11) (Logically, they should also have been demonstrating their love for their country by machine-gunning passers-by.)
And if the dullness of your life, or the size of your genitals, continues to trouble you, you can always take your truck to a green lane (until recently the tranquil preserve of ramblers and horse riders) to tear up some turf and find out what you’re made of. “In theory”, Auden wrote, “they were sound on Expectation/ Had there been situations to be in;/ Unluckily they were their situation”.(12)
But perhaps there’s more to it than ennui and insecurity. George Marshall, of the climate change network Rising Tide, suggests that the people who buy these cars in the face of both a developing global climate crisis and an impending global oil crisis are engaging in “reactive denial”. By showing that it’s possible to consume vast quantities of fossil fuel without an immediately discernable adverse effect, 4×4 drivers prove to themselves that there cannot be a problem.
If this is the case, then the only sensible response is to demonstrate that there are immediately discernable adverse effects, by stinging these people with a vast tax bill, or simply by banning their anti-social behaviour. It isn’t hard to do: the government could set a minimum average mpg for all new cars: say 30 to begin with, rising by a couple every year. This would shut the big 4×4s out of the market immediately (there could be a temporary exemption for farmers).
The alternative is to do as the government is doing now: leave the world to be destroyed, in the name of that marvellous excuse for an absence of leadership: freedom of choice. There’s a simple and cost-effective means for Tony Blair to prove that he’s serious about climate change: drive these dangerous baubles off the road.
1. Tony Blair, May 2004. Article in Parliamentary Monitor, cited by Paul Brown, 27th May 2004. Officials try to hide rise in transport pollution. The Guardian.
2. Paul Brown, 27th May 2004. Officials try to hide rise in transport pollution. The Guardian.
4x4s are a prime example of short term local economic interests riding
rough-shod over the long-term interests of us all. As I understand it,
the boom in 4x4s in the US was initially down to the US import tariff
on trucks (as distinct from cars) favouring beleaguered US
manufacturers over manufacturers in Europe and Asia. Since 4x4s are
classified as trucks, it was in the interests of Ford, GM and Chrysler
to develop this new market, having essentially lost the battle to build
competitive cars.
Now we have the French response. It all appears to be very laudable,
but how many of these vehicles are French-produced? None. I suspect
that economic interests, rather than environmental ones, lie at the
heart of this decision. So I do not see the French government's plans
as marking some sort of vanguard of real ecological concern among
Western governments, but rather a simple variant on the economic
protectionism which created the 4x4 market in the first place.
Business as usual, then! And I suspect the transparency of French
interests, along with the economic interests of the US, UK and Germany
(all of whom produce these high-profit-margin vehicles), mean the
French initiative will have very little knock-on effect.
Far better, I think, to attack the misplaced sense of status that
attract purchasers to these cars, for example through direct action
stickers which could be posted on them, as I think is already happening
in the US. One of the funniest ones I've come across is "I'm changing
the climate - ask me how!"
At least the French are doing something - even if it costs their industry
nothing as they don't make 4x4s.
Car purchase tax should be much higher in this country (the UK). A good
proportion of the environmental damage of a vehicle is in it's manufacture.
Higher purchase price would reduce such damage by reducing sales. We have
just about the lowest car purchase taxation in Europe. Judging by this page
http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis.../policy_evaluat
ion/fiscal.asp
(for those of you who suffered wrap on that link here is the tinyurl:
http://tinyurl.com/3b3sz)
Denmark must have new car purchase taxes of between 30 and 40%! That's more
like it.
This will encourage reuse of cars rather than scrapping and purchase of new
ones. New cars will have prices so high that people don't want to buy them
and old cars will in turn have values so high that no one wants to scrap
them (because there aren't cheap new cars flooding the market).
The main reason for low car purchase taxes is to encourage domestic
industry - well, we don't have a great deal of motor industry anymore and to
be honest I'm not interested in protecting our own wealth at the cost of
others less fortunate than ourselves who will suffer more from global
warming.
I've got LPG on my vehicle. LPG, if not used is otherwise burnt off during
the production stage, leading to global warming with no benefit to anyone!
So LPG is almost carbon neutral in that respect!
------------------------------
From: Pete Philips
Angus Malcolm wrote:
> Far better, I think, to attack the misplaced sense of status that
> attract purchasers to these cars
I agree. My theory is that the 4x4 is just the latest in a
long line of pointless fads adopted by the well heeled to flaunt
their wealth at any cost. The 4x4 is completely impractical; unsuited
to both Britains congested city streets and it's narrow country lanes.
A small car costing half the price will comfortably out perform
most 4x4s. The killer feature, as far as the owner is concerned,
is that it only does 15mpg. While this may sound counter intuitive,
it is this very pointless display of wealth that the owner seeks.
The message is "I am wealthy enough to squander a scarce resource".
This trend has many precedents in history. Think of a time when
sugar was a scarce resource only available to the rich. It's
consumption an obvious status symbol. But how to flaunt that
wealth? Blackened teeth of course. Dumb but true.
More recently in times of famine the obvious status symbol is
food. This would be displayed in the copious bellies of the
monied classes of the day. Really stupid but it happened.
In this context, driving a completely impractical, slow,
difficult to park, polluting, mini-bus cum tractor, petrol
monster is entirely rational
----------------------------------------------
From: "David.R.SanDiego"
Malcolm,
I live in San Diego, California and sit on my porch in the evenings and watch the parade of HUGE useless SUV's stream by, none of which will likely ever see an off-road situation. It's all for status and show here. BUT, I hail from South West Texas and all my relatives are cattle ranchers. This is really poor land and takes an average of 30 acres to support ONE cow. So many, many acres are required which are crossed by narrow dirt roads. When it rains, these become bogs. Now here's my point: the vehicle of choice there is a 2 wheel drive pickup truck, but NOT 4X4. These cattlemen have learned that 2 wheel drive is better because 4X4's simply worsen the roads, tearing them up, deepening the ruts and perpetuating the need for MORE 4X4's.....a 'Catch 22', if you will. They frown on the assumption that 4X4's are necessary under normal ranching conditions and resort to them for only the most extreme situations. I find this very interesting. Any similar view points out there?
Joined: May 26, 2004 Posts: 1191 Location: Zoorope
Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 6:06 am Post subject:
WHAT?
No, please!
We must substitute our family car with a 4x4 if we buy that farm! No way to reach it with a normal car (we ended stuck in the mud last time we went!).
Of course, it will be a cheap little 4x4, small diesel engine going at 10 mpg. And planning to hide some seed oil to fuel it in the future... _________________ **no english mothertongue**
--------
Objects in the rear view mirror
are closer than they appear.
Joined: Apr 21, 2004 Posts: 508 Location: Republic of Texas
Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 7:50 am Post subject:
I building a peak oil 4x4 right now. I'm taking a 1969 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40 and converting it to either a 4 cylinder toyota diesel from Canada or a Cummins 4BT (4cyl turbodiesel). I expect the final product to get between 25 and 30 mpg.
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