Index

8:   War x 4

Any government concerned about global security and climate change should be banning 4x4s

George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th July 2004

Financial Times, 3rd July, main section: "French road tax rattles  gas guzzlers". The French government  is hoping to impose a tax of up to 3200  euros on new 4-wheel drive cars (4x4s),  which are wrecking its cities and  cooking the planet.

Financial Times, 3rd July, How to Spend It  supplement: "Wet this baby's head".  A new amphibious vehicle "will be the  beefiest 4x4 on road or water". It has a  top speed of over 100mph on the road,  and 30 on the water. The developer is  holding down the price to "teach  people to recognise it as the way  forward". 

Now we can bugger up our rivers as  well as our roads. This is what we mean  by progress. 

Neither the Financial Times nor the  company's website reveals how many  miles per gallon, or gallons per mile,  the Gibbs Aquada does, and the  woman at the sales department told me  she didn't understand what I meant by  "mpg". (Perhaps I am asking too much  of these people: the spokeswoman at  the government's Department for  Transport hadn't heard of carbon  dioxide). But, in case you were wondering, the FT explains why you might  need one: "This will take you on the  school run and up the Amazon". If  your children go to school up the  Amazon, in other words, it's indispensable. 

Or perhaps the inventor has developed  the perfect business model. If the  Gibbs Aquada takes off, global  warming will accelerate. If global  warming accelerates, floods will become  more frequent. If floods become more  frequent, you will need the Gibbs  Aquada to get to school. 

Tony Blair now identifies climate  change as "the single most important  issue we face as a global community".(1)  The main cause of climate change is the  production of carbon dioxide. The  fastest-growing source of carbon  dioxide in Britain is transport: its  emissions increased by 50% between  1990 and 2002.(2) Flying accounts for  most of this, but another reason is that  the market for large 4x4s more than  doubled in this period. Every year,  150,000 British people now buy one of  these monsters, mostly to drive around  our cities.(3)

Officially, the biggest 4x4s can manage  12 or 13 miles to the gallon in urban  areas. Unofficially, US journalists found  that the Ford Excursion was doing  3.7.(4) Switching from an average car to  a big 4x4, the Sierra Club calculates,  uses as much extra energy in twelve  months as leaving your television on  for 28 years.(5)  Arguably, the war with Iraq was a war  for 4x4s. As the former environment  minister Michael Meacher pointed out  in the Guardian on Saturday, the US  could do without its oil imports from  the Persian Gulf if the fuel efficiency of  its cars was improved by an average of  2.7 miles per gallon.(6) Special tax  breaks make 4x4s effectively free to US  businesses,(7) with the result that they  now comprise 46% of the private  fleet.(8) Abandoning those tax breaks  would remove a major incentive for  war. 

Our fashion accessories, then, are  mowing down the people of Iraq,  Bangladesh and the Sahel. They are also  slaughtering our own. Because big 4x4s  are higher and heavier, the occupants  of a vehicle hit by one are 27 times  more likely to be killed (according to  the US Insurance Institute for Highway  Safety) than the occupants of a vehicle  hit by a normal car.(9) For the same  reasons they kill between two and three  times as many of the pedestrians and  cyclists they hit as smaller cars.(10) 

Obviously, therefore, as Blair now cares  so much about global warming, the  British government is about to follow  the French by discouraging them. I'm  joking, of course. "Industrial civilization," Mustapha Mond, the controller  of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World,  observed, "is only possible when there's  no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the  very limits imposed by hygiene and  economics. Otherwise the wheels stop  turning". This government intends to  keep the wheels turning as we drive  over the abyss. This is why the woman  in the transport department's press  office used precisely the same words as  the man from the Society of Motor  Manufacturers and Traders. "It is up to  people to drive whatever car they  choose". Taxing or banning 4x4s, she  told me, would restrict people's  "freedom of choice". The same argument, of course, could be made about  the laws preventing citizens from  carrying rocket-propelled grenades to  work. 

Given that just one in eight 4x4 drivers  has ever driven his car off-road, and  only two out of five have even taken  their cars out of town, why do people  drive these things? Why roll anything  up to 7.6 tons of metal (the Hummer  H1) onto the road, when a bicycle will  do just as well?

Well, it's partly because people are  terrified of being mown down by 7.6  tonnes of metal. If giant 4x4s mangle  ordinary cars, you'd better buy a giant  4x4, just as civilians in Mogadishu must  buy an AK47 to protect themselves  from civilians with AK47s. It's partly  too because we lead such humdrum  lives. When you're driving a "Defender"  or "Explorer" or "Pathfinder" or  "Cherokee", you can place yourself, just  like the adverts, on the wild frontier,  without having to travel beyond Ealing  Broadway. During the Iraq war, the  New York Times reported that men in  the US were buying Hummers (the  biggest 4x4s) for "patriotic reasons":  the troops in Iraq were using the same  vehicles.(11) (Logically, they should also  have been demonstrating their love for  their country by machine-gunning  passers-by.)

And if the dullness of your life, or the  size of your genitals, continues to  trouble you, you can always take your  truck to a green lane (until recently the  tranquil preserve of ramblers and horse  riders) to tear up some turf and find  out what you're made of. "In theory",  Auden wrote, "they were sound on  Expectation/ Had there been situations  to be in;/ Unluckily they were their  situation".(12) 

But perhaps there's more to it than  ennui and insecurity. George Marshall,  of the climate change network Rising  Tide, suggests that the people who buy  these cars in the face of both a developing global climate crisis and an  impending global oil crisis are engaging  in "reactive denial". By showing that it's  possible to consume vast quantities of  fossil fuel without an immediately  discernable adverse effect, 4x4 drivers  prove to themselves that there cannot  be a problem. 

If this is the case, then the only sensible  response is to demonstrate that there  are immediately discernable adverse  effects, by stinging these people with a  vast tax bill, or simply by banning their  anti-social behaviour. It isn't hard to  do: the government could set a minimum average mpg for all new cars: say  30 to begin with, rising by a couple  every year. This would shut the big  4x4s out of the market immediately  (there could be a temporary exemption  for farmers).

The alternative is to do as the government is doing now: leave the world to  be destroyed, in the name of that  marvellous excuse for an absence of  leadership: freedom of choice. There's a  simple and cost-effective means for  Tony Blair to prove that he's serious  about climate change: drive these  dangerous baubles off the road. 

www.monbiot.com

References

1. Tony Blair, May 2004. Article in Parliamentary Monitor, cited by Paul Brown, 27th  May 2004. Officials try to hide rise in  transport pollution. The Guardian. 

2. Paul Brown, 27th May 2004. Officials try  to hide rise in transport pollution. The  Guardian. 

3. Society of Motor Manufacturers and  Traders, 29th June 2004. The 4x4 is here to  stay - on and off-road.  http://www.smmt.co.uk/ home.cfm?CFID=921333&CFTOKEN=59 481958

4. Paul Roberts, 1st April 2001. Bad Sports.  Harper’s Magazine. 

5. The Sierra Club, 2004. Driving Up the  Heat: SUVs and Global Warming.  http:// www.sierraclub.org/globalwarming/SUVreport/

6. Michael Meacher 3rd July 2004. Time to  cut down. The Guardian. 

7. Anil Ananthaswamy, 8th March 2003.  Crunch Time for the SUV. New Scientist.

8. Associated Press, 20th December 20,  2000. Big vehicles guzzle as mileage too  low.

9. Cited by Iain S Bruce, 8th June 2003.  Revealed: the true cost of our love affair  with 4x4s. The Sunday Herald. 

10. Rob Edwards, 13th June 2004. Plan to  'punish' 4x4 drivers. The Sunday Herald.

11. D. Hakim, 5th April 2003. In their  Hummers, Right Beside Uncle Sam. The  New York Times. 

12. WH Auden, 1940. The Quest. Pub- lished in WH Auden, Selected Poems,  Faber and Faber, London.

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