Driving
Into The Abyss
By George Monbiot
06 July 2004
The Guardian
Financial
Times, July 3, main section: "French road tax rattles gas guzzlers".
The French government is hoping to impose a tax of up to €3,200
on new 4-wheel drive cars (4x4s), which are wrecking its cities and
cooking the planet.
Financial Times,
July 3, How to Spend It supplement: "Wet this baby's head".
A new amphibious vehicle "will be the beefiest 4x4 on road or water".
It has a top speed of over 100mph on the road, and 30mph 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
Department for Transport hadn't heard of carbon dioxide.) But, in case
you were wondering, the FT explains why you might need this vehicle:
"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 accelerate. If global warming accelerates,
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". 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. Flying accounts for most of this, but another reason is that the
market for large 4x4s more than doubled in this period. Every year,
150,000 British people now buy one of these monsters, mostly to drive
around our cities.
Officially, the
biggest 4x4s can manage 12 or 13 miles to the gallon in urban areas.
Unofficially, US journalists found that the Ford Excursion was doing
3.7. Switching from an average car to a big 4x4, the Sierra Club calculates,
uses as much extra energy in 12 months as leaving your television on
for 28 years.
Arguably, the war
with Iraq was a war for 4x4s. As the former environment minister Michael
Meacher pointed out in the Guardian on Saturday, the US could do without
its oil imports from the Gulf if the fuel efficiency of its cars was
improved by an average of 2.7 miles per gallon. Special tax breaks make
4x4s effectively free to US businesses, 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 4x4s are higher and
heavier, the occupants of a vehicle hit by one are 27 times 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. For the
same reasons, they kill between two and three times as many of the pedestrians
and cyclists they hit as smaller cars do.
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 civilisation," 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 4x4s, 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 4x4 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 4x4s mangle ordinary cars, you'd better buy a giant 4x4, 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 4x4s) for "patriotic reasons": the troops in Iraq
were using the same vehicles. (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."
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, 4x4 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 4x4s 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.
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