Slandering SUV drivers: Environmentalists go overboard with smear tactics

[Klaus]

Slandering SUV drivers: Environmentalists go overboard with smear tactics
Union Leader ^ | 1/09/03


Posted on 01/09/2003 2:41 AM PST by kattracks



THE ANTI-SUV division of the wacky wing of the environmental movement has outdone itself in its hysterical criticism of people who drive sport utility vehicles. Now they are running television ads accusing SUV drivers of financing terrorists, which is outrageous.
The ads were created by columnist and gadfly Arianna Huffington. She modeled them on the Bush administration’s anti-drug-use ads, which suggest that if you use narcotics you may be financing terrorism. The ads are so misleading that ABC’s New York affiliate won’t run them. An official from that station told The New York Times, “There were a lot of statements being made that were not backed up, and they’re talking about hot-button issues.”

If a connection between buying oil from the Middle East and funding terrorism exists, then everyone who buys petroleum products — from SUV drivers to long-haul trucking companies to Honda Civic drivers to people who grease their hair and dry clean their clothes — may indirectly contribute dollars to terrorists. But you would never see an ad suggesting that if you send your suits to the dry cleaners, you support terrorism.

In cities across the country, SUVs have been smeared with dog excrement, doused with acid and even burned by environmental activists. Yet no activists are attacking New England homes that use oil heat and are built with sawed down trees, or the owners of 20-year-old cars that get worse mileage and produce far more pollution than SUVs, or the owners of pickup trucks, which can get worse mileage than some SUVs and are better sellers.

If those in the anti-SUV crowd were rational, they would stop targeting SUVs and focus on retiring the fleet of aging gas guzzlers left over from the 1970s and ‘80s. These vehicles are much more damaging to the environment than are SUVS. But those old sedans aren’t driven by middle class and wealthy suburbanites, who are the real targets of hatred for the anti-SUV crowd. Can you imagine environmentalists shouting insults at a poor family in a 1978 Chevrolet or an old couple in a 1984 Cadillac? Of course not. But those people are doing more damage to the environment than a yuppie driving a 2002 Ford Explorer.

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Good stuff!

Klaus