Klaus
05-01-2003, 10:38 AM
BROCK YATES
Save the earth! Drive an SUV!
May 2003
Ravaged by guilt, I was about to cancel my order for a new three-ton, fly-yellow, 300-jillion-horsepower, gas-swilling Hummer H2 and spec out a Chinese-built, 20-speed mountain bike. But whoa! Wait a minute! I'm keeping the Hummer in play, and while I'm at it, ordering a set of Bridgestone Blizzak snow tires, with studs, and an Everest-level parka from Cabela's.
Just as I was completing my conversion to a Green Giant, politically correct, anti-global-warming fanatic comes word that the world is about to get colder, not warmer. Club Med is canceling its plans for a Spitsbergen resort, and Steve Wynn is rethinking his Prudhoe Bay Mirage Hotel and Golf Course as a new claque of Chicken Littles, led by one Raymond W. Schmitt Jr., a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, sounds the tocsin.
According to Schmitt, he and his buddies have discovered a mass of rogue fresh water in the salty North Atlantic that has been expanding for the past seven years. Fifteen million square miles of invading H2O that, if it continues, could slow down, dilute, or even divert the Gulf Stream current and all its cozy warm water that tempers the climate on our East Coast and in northern Europe. A nose-dive in Fahrenheit from 5 to 10 degrees is possible, meaning last December's ice storm that made Charlotte, North Carolina, look like the ice palace in the most recent James Bond thriller will repeat itself every Fourth of July.
The United Nations resists backing off its current hysteria associated with global warming and makes assurances that any such freeze-up in the climate is unlikely before 2100. But Bob Gagosian, the head man at Woods Hole on Cape Cod, is still fretting. In a recent paper on the subject, he warned, “In just the past year, we have seen ominous signs that we may be headed toward a potentially dangerous threshold. If we cross it, the Earth's gears could shift very rapidly, not gradually—into a completely different mode of operation.”
Wait a minute. “Ozone Al” Gore has been telling us for the past 10 years that we'll all be living in microwave ovens, perhaps even before his approval ratings begin to rival Al Sharpton's. Every environmental nut between Marin County and the Club of Rome is screaming about being crushed under a woolly blanket of CO2.
But now we're back to the future of the 1970s, when other meteorological visionaries such as the late Carl Sagan were baying at the moon over the prospects of a nuclear winter and a new Ice Age. Talk about a shift into “a completely different mode of operation.”
So I've bagged the bike while planning to plow the Hummer through the 12-foot snowbanks expected to block Interstate 95 as I chug southward toward a new artificial ski slope planned for Disney World. Consider the monster storm that attacked every city in the nation east of Yuma, Arizona, in early February. Fifty inches of snow on a single day in Maryland? Gotham looking like International Falls, Minnesota?
You've got to take this whole thing seriously, especially when hospitals up and down the East Coast put out panic calls to sport-utility-vehicle owners to help transport patients. Aren't those the same sociopaths who drive devices that the elites in the national media have been comparing to nerve gas and rat infestations?
So what do we do about all of this? Says one expert, “Any human effort to control this trend would be like standing on a track trying to stop a train.”
Huh? Weren't we supposed to be able to head off global warming simply by excising the earth of sport-utility vehicles, those rolling blast furnaces spewing overheated, filthy gases into the atmosphere? Wasn't destroying the internal-combustion engine the solution to the whole mess, at least according to Ozone Al and his fellow Savonarolas?
Now every nutcase in the nation is trying to get into the act. First, a few wack jobs from the religious right stepped onstage to speculate whether Jesus would drive an SUV. Then that noted political philosopher and mental giant Arianna Huffington hit the headlines with a truly idiotic ad campaign that implied suburban housewives hauling their kids to soccer practice were in fact closet operatives for al-Qa'ida and concubines of Osama bin Laden.
But that was nothing compared with the fulminations from our man Keith Bradsher and his anti-SUV polemic, High and Mighty: SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way. Poor ol' Keith went to the edge of sanity as he accused the homicidal maniacs in Detroit's executive suites of plotting to kill millions of innocents (including their own customers) by selling them bulldozer-size machines that, in a light breeze, flop over like pup tents.
Then came Gregg Easterbrook in the January 20, 2003, issue of the New Republic, breaking ground in the anti-SUV hysteria. He said about machines such as my Jeep Grand Cherokee: “These Godzillas are instruments of death” (wow!) and called them “pharaonic contraptions” (whoa, Gregg!). And all the while I was celebrating the evil old beast for helping me navigate the snowbanks that have blanketed the entire East Coast since Thanksgiving.
Based on what I'm seeing outside the window of my study, which looks a lot like the Siberian walk-around scene in Doctor Zhivago, I'm beginning to wonder if Schmitt and the guys at Woods Hole may be right.
If that turns out to be the case, I have a solution. On the reverse side of every problem lies a solution. Therefore, why not step in front of the train? Surely, we can stop this impending deep freeze with the same devices that appeared, just last week, to be causing the planet's predicted meltdown.
I call forth the SUV as our savior. Want to warm things up? Easy. If fossil fuels are the culprit, burning more of them will keep Old Man Winter at bay. Thus, we must immediately drop the CAFE standards for motor vehicles to 5 mpg and subsidize gas-guzzler purchases through tax credits for Suburban/Hummer/Excursion-size sport-utilities. Up the speed limit to 100 mph. Outlaw bicycles!
Better yet, if we begin to suck up more gasoline, it will relieve the Bush administration from having to justify whacking Saddam simply for his alleged human-rights abuses and his fiddling with weapons of mass destruction.
To hell with the Security Council. We want his oil! We face a national emergency, according to the guys at Woods Hole. Drive or die. Freeways or freeze. Heat that air. Drive those road crushers! Save the Earth!
Gentlemen, start your engines.
Save the earth! Drive an SUV!
May 2003
Ravaged by guilt, I was about to cancel my order for a new three-ton, fly-yellow, 300-jillion-horsepower, gas-swilling Hummer H2 and spec out a Chinese-built, 20-speed mountain bike. But whoa! Wait a minute! I'm keeping the Hummer in play, and while I'm at it, ordering a set of Bridgestone Blizzak snow tires, with studs, and an Everest-level parka from Cabela's.
Just as I was completing my conversion to a Green Giant, politically correct, anti-global-warming fanatic comes word that the world is about to get colder, not warmer. Club Med is canceling its plans for a Spitsbergen resort, and Steve Wynn is rethinking his Prudhoe Bay Mirage Hotel and Golf Course as a new claque of Chicken Littles, led by one Raymond W. Schmitt Jr., a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, sounds the tocsin.
According to Schmitt, he and his buddies have discovered a mass of rogue fresh water in the salty North Atlantic that has been expanding for the past seven years. Fifteen million square miles of invading H2O that, if it continues, could slow down, dilute, or even divert the Gulf Stream current and all its cozy warm water that tempers the climate on our East Coast and in northern Europe. A nose-dive in Fahrenheit from 5 to 10 degrees is possible, meaning last December's ice storm that made Charlotte, North Carolina, look like the ice palace in the most recent James Bond thriller will repeat itself every Fourth of July.
The United Nations resists backing off its current hysteria associated with global warming and makes assurances that any such freeze-up in the climate is unlikely before 2100. But Bob Gagosian, the head man at Woods Hole on Cape Cod, is still fretting. In a recent paper on the subject, he warned, “In just the past year, we have seen ominous signs that we may be headed toward a potentially dangerous threshold. If we cross it, the Earth's gears could shift very rapidly, not gradually—into a completely different mode of operation.”
Wait a minute. “Ozone Al” Gore has been telling us for the past 10 years that we'll all be living in microwave ovens, perhaps even before his approval ratings begin to rival Al Sharpton's. Every environmental nut between Marin County and the Club of Rome is screaming about being crushed under a woolly blanket of CO2.
But now we're back to the future of the 1970s, when other meteorological visionaries such as the late Carl Sagan were baying at the moon over the prospects of a nuclear winter and a new Ice Age. Talk about a shift into “a completely different mode of operation.”
So I've bagged the bike while planning to plow the Hummer through the 12-foot snowbanks expected to block Interstate 95 as I chug southward toward a new artificial ski slope planned for Disney World. Consider the monster storm that attacked every city in the nation east of Yuma, Arizona, in early February. Fifty inches of snow on a single day in Maryland? Gotham looking like International Falls, Minnesota?
You've got to take this whole thing seriously, especially when hospitals up and down the East Coast put out panic calls to sport-utility-vehicle owners to help transport patients. Aren't those the same sociopaths who drive devices that the elites in the national media have been comparing to nerve gas and rat infestations?
So what do we do about all of this? Says one expert, “Any human effort to control this trend would be like standing on a track trying to stop a train.”
Huh? Weren't we supposed to be able to head off global warming simply by excising the earth of sport-utility vehicles, those rolling blast furnaces spewing overheated, filthy gases into the atmosphere? Wasn't destroying the internal-combustion engine the solution to the whole mess, at least according to Ozone Al and his fellow Savonarolas?
Now every nutcase in the nation is trying to get into the act. First, a few wack jobs from the religious right stepped onstage to speculate whether Jesus would drive an SUV. Then that noted political philosopher and mental giant Arianna Huffington hit the headlines with a truly idiotic ad campaign that implied suburban housewives hauling their kids to soccer practice were in fact closet operatives for al-Qa'ida and concubines of Osama bin Laden.
But that was nothing compared with the fulminations from our man Keith Bradsher and his anti-SUV polemic, High and Mighty: SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way. Poor ol' Keith went to the edge of sanity as he accused the homicidal maniacs in Detroit's executive suites of plotting to kill millions of innocents (including their own customers) by selling them bulldozer-size machines that, in a light breeze, flop over like pup tents.
Then came Gregg Easterbrook in the January 20, 2003, issue of the New Republic, breaking ground in the anti-SUV hysteria. He said about machines such as my Jeep Grand Cherokee: “These Godzillas are instruments of death” (wow!) and called them “pharaonic contraptions” (whoa, Gregg!). And all the while I was celebrating the evil old beast for helping me navigate the snowbanks that have blanketed the entire East Coast since Thanksgiving.
Based on what I'm seeing outside the window of my study, which looks a lot like the Siberian walk-around scene in Doctor Zhivago, I'm beginning to wonder if Schmitt and the guys at Woods Hole may be right.
If that turns out to be the case, I have a solution. On the reverse side of every problem lies a solution. Therefore, why not step in front of the train? Surely, we can stop this impending deep freeze with the same devices that appeared, just last week, to be causing the planet's predicted meltdown.
I call forth the SUV as our savior. Want to warm things up? Easy. If fossil fuels are the culprit, burning more of them will keep Old Man Winter at bay. Thus, we must immediately drop the CAFE standards for motor vehicles to 5 mpg and subsidize gas-guzzler purchases through tax credits for Suburban/Hummer/Excursion-size sport-utilities. Up the speed limit to 100 mph. Outlaw bicycles!
Better yet, if we begin to suck up more gasoline, it will relieve the Bush administration from having to justify whacking Saddam simply for his alleged human-rights abuses and his fiddling with weapons of mass destruction.
To hell with the Security Council. We want his oil! We face a national emergency, according to the guys at Woods Hole. Drive or die. Freeways or freeze. Heat that air. Drive those road crushers! Save the Earth!
Gentlemen, start your engines.