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Illustration by Jerry
Russell |
How to save gas and the planet
By Bill McKibben
If there is any place in the eastern United
States where one could justify owning an SUV, it’s probably
the Adirondacks. Winter’s long, roads are steep, mud is one
of the seasons—it looks like the kind of places that show
up in the ads for Explorers and Expeditions.
Driving around suburban Clifton Park in a troop transport with cup
holders is simply silliness; driving around Tupper in one makes
a certain kind of sense. Or at the very least a Subaru wagon, right?
But only, as it turns out, a certain kind of sense. Because of their
insanely low gas mileage, SUVs and other capacious auto/trucks have
become one of the driving forces changing the world’s climate.
Even as we were warned about global warming in the 1990s, Americans
managed to increase their carbon emissions by 15%—mostly because
they kept buying steroidal vehicles. And it’s precisely in
places like the Adirondacks that that will matter most. It’ll
be harder to tell in Clifton Park that the environment has gone
haywire—but in these mountains, according to the experts,
the best guess is that by century’s end we will lose winter
(six months of gray March) and fall (beech, birch and maple replaced
by drab oak and hickory) and sugar season.
Therefore, here are the results of a modest experiment I’ve
been conducting for the last 18 months. Is it possible to make do
at this latitude and this altitude with one of the new hybrid electric
vehicles?
In my case, that means a Honda Civic hybrid. It looks like any other
Honda Civic. And it drives like any other Honda Civic. You don’t
plug it in—the electric engine recharges as you drive, kicking
in to help the regular internal combustion engine accelerate and
climb hills. In essence, it’s a way to take a very small four-cylinder
gas engine and give it enough of a performance boost that it will
drive like the cars we’re used to.
In every way but one—it doesn’t have to stop at the
gas station very often. In these hills and back roads I’ve
been averaging about 53 miles a gallon in the spring, summer and
fall. (More on winter in a moment). That’s a lot—you
can drive from Johnsburg to Lake Placid, way over on the other side
of the High Peaks, on a little more than a gallon of gas. That still
means you pour about 22 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, but compare
that with the cloud of carbon trailing out behind an 18-mpg SUV.
If everyone in America switched to hybrid vehicles over the next
10 years, we’d soar right past the targets outlined in the
Kyoto accords on global warming even without doing any of the other
obvious things to stop wasting energy.
But what about winter? Don’t you need a big high-clearance
four-wheel-drive vehicle? In my experience, no—and I spend
the winter indulging my serious addiction to cross-country skiing,
which in turn means more than my share of back roads and icy climbs.
A good set of snow tires is more than enough to get me up the hill
to North River or out to Gore; I’ve owned four-wheel-drive
vehicles, and I’ve found them useful mostly for getting me
stuck into deeper snowbanks. (And my experience is not unusual—the
surest sign of the approach of winter in Warren County is now SUVs
with Jersey plates lying on their backs in the median strip of the
Northway above Glens Falls. On an icy downhill, a 4,000-pound sheet-metal
titan is a 4,000-pound bobsled. The accident data makes it clear
you’re no safer overall in one of these bruisers.)
Of course, a rugged pair of snow tires does cut mileage some—in
the winter, the gauge on the dash that constantly calculates my
fuel efficiency reports the disappointing news that I’m only
getting about 50 mpg. Still and all, I can live with it.
And I can live with the size of a Civic. We have a daughter and
a dog. And we also have an ungodly quantity of skis, canoes, backpacks,
bicycles. But that’s why God made Thule racks. Stick a pod
on the roof of a Prius or a Civic hybrid and you have yourself the
cargo equivalent of a station wagon. The drag from the rack and
pod may knock another couple of miles off your total, which can
be a little hard to take pyschologically—once you get into
the game of trying to raise your mileage as high as possible, every
little hit hurts. (There are Web sites where hybrid owners across
the U.S. vie for record efficiency.) But in effect you’ve
got yourself the stuffability of a Hummer.
Detroit keeps promising to introduce hybrids, but so far nothing’s
emerged—in fact, Ford said last month that the total fuel
economy of its SUV fleet was continuing to fall. Toyota is expecting
to introduce a hybrid SUV, which will get good gas mileage but nothing
like the small sedans. And a Japanese hybrid pickup is rumored to
be just a few years off.
In the meantime, you’ll pay a couple of thousand dollars extra
for the privilege of driving a hybrid—the Civic runs around
$19,000. It’s an investment that will pay back at the gas
pump over a few years, and that will pay off, at least a little,
in turning down the thermostat on these sweet mountains.
Bill McKibben, a resident of Johnsburg, is
the author of The End of Nature, which called worldwide
attention to global warming.
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