From the Global Warming thread:
Why have I most often seen statements like this used negatively? Is it always bad to irreversibly affect the environment?
For instance, I hear about people sitting in trees to save them, but people are a living part of the environment too. Why shouldn’t I cut down trees (in careful moderation, of course) in order to serve humanity?
Personally, I think the root of our environmental problems is greed.
I think it’s common stupidity and misinterpretation/misunderstanding of what the few clever ones have to say.
greed really?
big rich men want the dollars and they do this by cutting down more and more forests, making faster dirtier cars and the list goes on.
Did you know that the electric car was invented something like 15 years ago and the design was bought out by one of the major car manufactures and we have not seen it since. everytime a new ‘clean’ car design comes out some fat cat with a car company buys it out and never uses it, because they are also the same people who own the oil companies and petrol stations and we wouldn’t want them to loose money now would we. They are only going to be dead in 30 or so years what does the planets well being have to do with them?
ooohhh…good point, phlegm. I didn’t think about that as I was writing that. Certainly the earth is meant to support human life, and certainly we can modify our habitat (as do many many animals) to help us survive. However, there comes a point at which we’re just greedy, you’re right.
No, it’s not always bad to irreversibly affect the environment, but the reason statements like that are often used negatively is because in many respects, we have gone too far (that is, our effects on the earth have been too far-reaching and caused too much damage to the ecosystem(s)) to fix…if/when we try to.
I think what he means is that we are the greedy ones, for wanting bigger, taller cars, not recycling most of what we use, and otherwise taking the easy path. Big business, for the most part, is trying to give us what we seem to want. I don’t want an SUV for instance, but it seems everyone else does. They hate it when I point out that my minivan has more room in it and generally more “utility” than any SUV unless you actually take it offroad…
The electric car was actually invented closer to 115 years ago. Today’s electric cars still have the same basic problems as those older ones, though they’re getting better.
There are electric cars on the market. Know why I don’t have one? Because sometimes I need to drive more than the car’s range in a day. Often enough that it isn’t worth it to own one and have to find alternate transportation on a regular basis. They work better for city-dwellers and people in multiple-car families, but still not well enough to be cheaper than driving a gas-powered car (or hybrid, which costs about the same).
Side note: Hey, I do live in a multiple-car family. Between my wife & I we could easily use one electric and one “something else” car. Except for much less frequent instances like this week, where she’s 200 miles away and I have at least one long drive to do. But we could work around most of that… We’re ready! 
The car companies know how to make electric cars. But they can’t seem to sell very many.
What’s missing is more emphasis on R&D for alternate fuels. To develop battery science and other ways to power vehicles renewably. The (American) car companies drag their feet because they know research is expensive, and it’s impossible to predict results. It costs them a lot less to make continued variations on the technology they have now. Also there’s a definite oil lobby in the mix, yes.
Non-gas cars are getting better, and the pace is quickening in recent years. Hybrids are very popular because they combine having an electric car with not having to be stuck while it charges up. People are finally taking non-gas cars seriously, which is creating a market for them that didn’t really exist before (at least in the US). Higher gas prices only help to accelerate this process!
In moderation it is fine…but that’s not how most people are. Haven’t you read The Lorax, by Dr Seuss? The Onceler did not moderate his cutting down of the Truffula trees to make Thneeds, despite the constant warnings of the Lorax…eventually, there were no Truffula trees left, and the Thneed factories polluted the sky so much it was constantly dark, and all the animals and the Lorax had to leave to find somewhere else to live. But then the Onceler planted a Truffula seed in hopes that maybe a new Truffula forest would grow and all the animals and the Lorax could maybe come back home.
Oh, the suspense is killing me!
Tell me, what happened next?!
We as in us, or we as in you? I recycle all recyclable rubbish and the rest goes in the bin, not the ground. As for cars, well i drive a little 4 cylinder and out about 10 dollars of petrol in it a week in order to get to work and back. As for SUV i have not seen one in Australia yet but apparently they are on there way. Please do not bring my generation into this. We cannot afford the SUV’s, our generation did not begin using the plastics, we did not invent the petrol engine. I do realise that if you guys didn’t do it, we probably would have, yet we did not get a chance.
As for the cars, i new it was years ago, but did not want to put down heaps and heaps because it could be wrong and to say 100 and it be 20 looks worse than saying 20 and it be 100
I meant “we” as in all of us. We all want more stuff that we don’t really need, don’t we?
This is what i dont get, everyone wants all this stuff, all this material stuff. I have friends that have loans for $20,000 + cars. friends that spend over $100 a week on there nobiles and get phones bills up around $1000. Friends that can justify one hundred bucks for a T-shirt, yet i do not know how they do it. my mobile was $20 from a friend and i have not put credit on it since the 8th of september my car gets used about twice a week and that is to drive to work. My clothes come from vinnies (op-shop) or i make them (but they fall apart 
). I know this sounds like i am trying to talk myself up and get out of the ‘ruining world group’ but i am only telling it how it is.
I admit that everyone does their part in ‘destroying’ world yet “greedy” i am not, the most expensive thing i have bought by far is a unicycle.
not that i am out there trying to make a difference… :s
I’ve tried to tell people this before. There’s actually a simple reason why the U.S. has so many SUV’s.
It’s because the SUV drivers are the ones who in days past would have been sold a station wagon.
In the US there are laws about efficiency of cars. These laws have two important features.
One, they are based on the mean vehicle efficiency marketted by the auto company.
Two, they seperate cars from trucks.
What this means is that while a car company can sell a few gas guzzler cars, they have to be made up for by selling more super-efficient cars.
The laws don’t pay in mind the weight, etc. of the car, all they count is whether the vehicle has fuel efficiency of X.
It can be hard to get the market to absorb more subcompacts; there’s a lot out there and a lot of people don’t find them to have the capacity and such that they want. Plus, the people who buy subcompacts are often happy to buy used.
This cuts into the car companies’ ability to sell larger cars, such as station wagons, without breaking the law.
There is a definate market for station wagon type vehicles, however, common in families. So what do you as a car manufacturer do?
You take your station wagon and put it on a truck chassis and re-image it as an SUV. Now, instead of crimping your fuel efficiency averages as a heavy car, it is a benefit to you as a high-efficiency truck. You win twice! Now you just have to sell people who want a seven seat etc. vehicle on the virtues of an SUV.
I don’t really recall seeing many advertizements for station wagon type vehicles in the US. It’s all “The rugged new Terrain-verb! Seats seven, lots of space in the back, etc. to fit your family while we show pictures of it driving over implausible landscapes.”
Also, I don’t remember seeing very many station wagon type cars on the road.
Hmmm… Maybe the hatred toward SUV’s is a bit misplaced.
I’m not disagreeing, but where’d you hear this?
I’m a transportation planner, it’s my job to know all these laws and trends and such.
I’d have to look back to see if it’s ISTEA or TEA-21 that has the relevant limiting laws, since i’m in Australia right now and those are American federal laws, as well as the fact that my current research is on comparisons of LRT and BRT on seperated ROW’s and so auto efficiency laws don’t really come into play, so that information is in one of the books I left in storage because it wasn’t relevant.
I stopped understanding you after here. 
Thanks.
Your arguement is pointless because the auto-manufacturers are just circumventing the law rather than working to make more more efficient vehicles.
The technology exists for cars to be more fuel efficient. Look at the vehicles that come from every other corner of the globe. Yeah it loses some horsepower and has slower acceleration, but for 90% of the vehicle use in this country that would make zero difference.
People drive SUVs because they’ve been programed as consumers to think SUV = cool/better/what I need. In reality it’s not what they need it’s what they think they want.
No, because my argument is that it isn’t SUV owners that are the problem. Trying to pin the blame on SUV owners - who are essentially normal americans who need a large capacity vehicle for their family etc. and are sold an SUV - is just trying to find a convenient scapegoat in order to avoid having to actually work at the core problem itself.
If you really wanted to help, you’d quit going on about SUV’s and lobby for better mass transit, to repeal parking minimums, and for better sidewalks and bicycle awareness.
The next part…is up to you.
Just a picture of a human impact. This is northern Madagascar seen from the Space Shuttle. The red in the picture is eroded soils from deforested areas choking the river mouth. The deforesteation is driven be economic demand. See those nice cheap “hardwood” (read tropical hardwood) chairs and tables at Walmart and Target? Think Indonesia, the Philippines, and Madagascar…
You guys are both right. But I think ThisGuy is a little bit righter. I grew up around the American auto industry in Detroit. My dad is an automotive engineer and I’ve watched developments over the last 30 years or so from the inside and the outside.
The automakers don’t tell the public what kinds of cars to want. It may look that way to a certain degree, and new car model development cycles take several years, but the car companies are in business to try to outsell each other. That means making the cars people want. That is why Porsche, BMW, Cadillac, Mercedes and a ton of other companies are making SUVs for the American market that would not have existed otherwise.
Though part of the attraction to larger vehicles is about safety, that’s not the major driving factor. That factor is style, and style has been the major force dictating the cars Americans have bought since the 1940s if not earlier. If Americans wanted station wagons, believe me they’d still be on the market. Nobody wants them because they aren’t cool. The minivan has replaced the station wagon as the “useful vehicle of uncoolness” for those few people who didn’t buy SUVs. Small station wagon/hatchbacks are still popular here, though, for a minority of people who put fuel economy before style, or like ease of parking.
The ISTEA or other federal rules regarding fuel economy quotas have definitely encouraged the switch to SUVs, but you can’t sell the public vehicles they don’t want. I believe there is supposed to be a “rebalancing” of those regulations in the near future, but you many know more about that than me. The “technical” differences between cars and trucks have been made meaningless by those rules and the car companies’ bending them, so they need to be redrafted.
But ThisGuy says we’ve been programmed to want them. That’s called marketing. It’s hard to say the exact source of certain marketing concepts, but in this case it’s probably enough to say that the ball is rolling, and now the market wants their SUVs. It will be really cool if Hybrids or other alternative-fuel vehicles replace SUVs as the new “cool.” All it will take is continued rising gas prices…
Stepping to the side of the topic for a second: The thing that makes SUVs attractive to American car buyers has something to do with the American press’ attraction to mountain unicycling. We want to be perceived as “extreme” or rugged.
Just to get in a response from me, yes I mean us as in homo sapiens. as a group. Some of us are way greener than others; you seem to be a great role model in this respect, but there are others who would rather be lazy, even if it means refusing to acknowledge global warming even when their living room is flooding.
You have to buy the next book to find out. And, uh, Dr. Seuss is dead so that could be a problem. Allow me to extrapolate: The new trees were cut down by poor poachers to feed their families. And then there were no more seeds. 
People don’t go looking saying “I need a station wagon”. They say “I have a big family and I need something with a bunch of seats and cargo room…” Once upon a time, that meant a station wagon. But now, if you give those requirements to the dealer, they point you toward an SUV. Then they point you at their SUV because it’s cool and “extreme” and badass and you can pretend you’re still hardcore while there’s an argument between a bunch of children behind you.
Also a reason why sneering at car companies for making SUV’s is silly.
It’s a lot like bicycle helmets. If you see a lot of bicycles and you want to be seen as supporting safety for them, there’s two routes you can take - you can try to increase awareness of bicycles, help provide better facilities, ration parking, and make numerous adjustments in public life to encourage bicycling… or you can slap out a law to require bicyclists to wear helmets. One is solving the problem, the other is warding off a straw man scapegoat of just enough effectiveness to be able to claim that you are taking action.