I guess I’m a menace to the American economy now. At least according to Phil Kent, author of The Dark Side of Liberalism. Kent recently wrote an op-ed excoriating what he calls "SUV bashers" for "threatening thousands of American jobs."
How’s that, exactly? Well, the auto industry is responsible for 6.6 million jobs, directly or indirectly, and by taking on sport-utility vehicles, we’re putting people out of work.
In the first place, America now has more cars than drivers, so it seems unlikely that vehicle demand is going to disappear any time soon. In the second place, Kent’s smoking gun for trumpeting SUV virtues is a report by Air Improvement Resource Inc. (which prepares air-quality reports for industry clients like General Motors) that removing SUVs from the road would "do very little to improve the environment." The report says that if no SUVs were sold for the next 10 years, emissions would drop only 0.2 percent.
This is a dubious conclusion for a whole host of reasons. In the first place, Kent uses the one statistic to extrapolate minimal environmental impact for SUVs, something even the study’s authors are loath to do. I spoke to Jeremy Heiken, a senior analyst at Air Improvement in Novi, Mich., and he decried the tendency of journalists to "take what they need for reporting purposes and simplify it. You can’t generalize from that one statistic to say that SUVs have minimal environmental impact. You’d also have to look at greenhouse gases, particulate matter, all of which need to be studied separately."
Heiken wasn’t able to immediately furnish me with a copy of the study, which he acknowledged was prepared for an auto industry client.
But let’s look at the facts, courtesy of the Detroit Project’s Arianna Huffington: "SUVs consume more than 6 miles per gallon more than a family station wagon. No small difference when you consider that an improvement of just 3 miles per gallon [mpg] in autos nationwide would save 1 million barrels of oil per day." That same 3-mpg savings would save $25 billion a year in fuel costs and reduce 140 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, says the EPA.
"Among other things," says Salon, "the auto industry has been able to avoid some of the rules simply by making the vehicles bigger. If you make an SUV big enough, it qualifies for lenient air pollution rules, and if you make it really large, like the larger Suburbans, Hummers or Ford Excursions, they’re exempt from fuel economy standards entirely." Even more outrageous is the huge tax break that the Bush administration gives to the largest SUVs, including Hummers.
The Union of Concerned Scientists adds, "If SUVs and minivans were required to meet the same [fuel economy] standards as cars, this would cut total U.S. oil use by 1 million barrels a day by 2010."
Average fuel economy for all models of SUVs, vans and pickups is about 18 mpg, according to the Chicago Tribune, with some, like the Dodge Durango and GM Hummer, getting 12 mpg or less.
And then there’s the absurd notion that SUVs "save lives." A recent federal highway report concluding that heavier vehicles were in some cases safer was widely reported, but in that same analysis it was noted that midsize SUVs are nine times as likely as passenger cars to be involved in fatal rollovers, and twice as likely to kill the occupants of other vehicles in crashes.
So when Kent says that "bashing SUVs" is "not pro-environment, it’s just downright un-American," I say he should check his facts.
