SELF-DEFEATING GREENIES

All over the country, particularly in the West, wildlife habitat is being fractured by what has become the American dream of a half-acre and a house. Much of this can be traced to cheap fuel and/or high-mileage automobiles that have put outlying "bedroom communities'' within economic reach of millions of Americans.

Nevertheless, the 40-mile-per-gallon automobile remains the darling of the environmentalists who claim it will free America from its dependence on foreign oil, save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling and help stop global warming. In this month's issue of Outside magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chastises U.S. automakers for their failures to build cars that get even better gas mileage as well as the government for not forcing automakers to build such cars. The editors ask Kennedy if "spoiled" Americans unwilling to make sacrifices are part of the problem. No, says the lead attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The problem is all big business.

That might be the politically correct answer for an environmentalist, but it is wrong. I have met the problem, and it is us. Let's face it, we don't want to make personal sacrifices -- not for the environment, not for our communities, not even for our health. We're the fattest people in the world, and we drive the most. The two are related.... It's all about economics. Better gas mileage has the same effect as cheap gasoline. It drives down the cost of travel and makes other life choices affordable. Instead of settling for a condominium in the city, one can spring for the house in the Valley where you can burn up even more gas in the lawn mower.

This is the dirty underbelly of the technological solution to our energy problems that the environmental community ignores. Improving automobile fuel economy only makes a difference on oil imports if people limit themselves to driving the same distances tomorrow that they drive today. History suggests the opposite is more likely. The mushrooming bedroom community springing up here is only one case in point. Small towns and cities once separated by large expanses of open land have been sprawling together for years across America. Urban areas are spreading, too.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says these city-states expand into the open space around them at about twice the rate of population growth. As they do, they bury the land in pavement and buildings. Wildlife habitats disappear. Streams grow turbid and polluted with parking lot run-off. Natural areas become weed infested plots. Homeowners unhappy with weeds wage chemical warfare. In Alaska, these changes are magnified by steady population growth. But even where populations hold steady, Cornell professor Rolf Pendall has found sprawl. He looked at 282 metropolitan areas in the 1980s and discovered that even where there was no growth, the amount of urbanized land still increased by an average of 18 percent.

Why? Cheap transportation. We're an automobile society. The family dinner has given way to drive-through dining. Cellular telephones and computers have put the office in the front seat, while the DVD player is promising to make the back seat the entertainment center. Cars are such an integral part of the American lifestyle it takes a real effort to break free. The desire to stay fit is the only thing that keeps my truck at home while I ride the bike -- even if the municipality would prefer I drive....

Instead of pushing for a fat gas tax to make Americans reconsider driving so much, the Sierra Club joined the Natural Resources Defense Council and other conservation groups in pushing for federal rules to require cars to go farther on each gallon of gas. The inevitable outcome: Americans won't have to think of the costs -- economic or environmental -- of driving. This is the sort of environmental ethic that has helped to pave the foothills of the Cascade Mountains outside of Seattle, carve good parts of the Midwest up into five-acre "ranchettes'' and cut the wide-open spaces of the Susitna Valley up into ever smaller lots sporting "No Trespassing" signs with no place to walk between.

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GLOBAL WARMING PANIC COSTS LIVES

"The global-warming alarmists haven't managed (yet) to bring on the worldwide economic paralysis that would result from implementation of the Kyoto Treaty, but they are about to score a lesser victory that will result in the loss of thousands of human lives.

The California Air Resources Board has approved a plan that would sharply reduce, over the next 11 years, vehicular emissions of carbon dioxide, which some scientists contend is partly responsible for what they believe is a recent rise in global temperatures. (Other scientists disagree that world temperatures are rising, let alone that increases in carbon dioxide caused by human activity are responsible; but the media, feeding the same public anxiety that not long ago fastened on nuclear winter, acid rain and the ozone hole, has turned "global warming" into a worldwide cause celebre.)

The regulation, which would phase in from 2009 to 2016, would force each year's new cars and trucks to meet increasingly stricter limitations on emission of carbon dioxide and other gases supposedly linked to global warming. The board's own staff estimates this will add about $1,000 to the cost of each new vehicle, but contends that savings on gasoline would, in the long run, more than make up for this. (Would, that is, if the initial buyer drove the vehicle for more than 100,000 miles, which few do.)

Industry spokesmen disagree with the cost estimate, putting it at from $2,000 to $3,000 - far more than any gasoline savings. If so, car manufacturers will do the only thing they currently can to keep prices at an affordable level: downsize new vehicles. (Hybrid cars won't solve the affordability problem because they cost, at least currently, up to $4,000 more than similar conventional cars.)

Well, what's so bad about downsizing? Do Americans really need the mid- and larger-sized passenger cars that clog the roads today? Mightn't we all be better off if forced to drive smaller and lighter vehicles?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. While sport-utility vehicle rollover deaths have increased (up by 200 deaths between 2002 and 2003), a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that vehicle downsizing in the 1970s and 80s, in the name of fuel economy, resulted in 2,000 deaths and 20,000 serious injuries. The National Academy of Sciences confirmed the finding, and USA Today, extrapolating the results to all years in which fuel economy standards have been in effect, found that vehicle downsizing caused 46,000 deaths. The increased risk run by people in small cars is one of the best-established statistics in the whole field of car safety. As Ralph Nader himself put it in 1989, "Larger cars are safer."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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