Wolves in Green Clothing

By Jane Holtz Kay

Are car guys going green and environmentalists going, well, brown? The automobile industry is certainly working hard to convince the public of its new green tint. As the struggle to tighten mileage standards was playing out in Congress last month, William Clay Ford Jr. became the industry's most visible greenmonger doing an apologia for his company's polluting sports utility vehicles. In his May "corporate citizen ship report," Henry Ford's reigning heir bemoaned the evils of the popular clunkers, then shed crocodile capitalist tears that, alas, he had to go on producing them.

It's not easy being green, as Pogo said, but auto manufacturers are sure trying. It's no surprise, of course, that the makers of electric or hybrid vehicles like the Honda Insight advertise themselves with faux green statements of "just what you and the planet have been waiting for," or as Prius puts it "the new car for a new world." Nor is it any wonder that they fail to mention that while these "clean" cars cut down on fossil fuels, they still undermine the environment by eroding habitat, contributing to resource consumption (30 percent consumed in the manufacturing), sprawl, pollution, 40,000 automobile deaths a year and inequity in mobility. The surprising thing isn't that the auto guys are trying to catch a free ride on the environmental movement, however. What's disheartening is the myopia of the environmental community to this longtime enemy's camouflage.

The misperception and misdirection of the movement was dramatized by the 30th Earth Day celebration in April where founding father Denis Hayes highlighted a clean car as a major goal. Not a word from the environmentalist or his peers about public transportation. Not a word about planning and zoning and stopping sprawl or highway building. No endorsement of biking or bike paths; no walking, no pedestrian advocacy no traffic calming statements. Not an effort to emulate, say, the no-drive days that Europeans practice or the engaging radicalism by Carbusters magazine based there. No word on cleaning the existing 200 million vehicles which contribute 25 percent of heat-trapping gases

For most celebrants, the slogan might as well have been: "I went to join the revolution but I couldn't find a parking space."

Creating cleaners cars coming off the assembly line has merit. But what about the concentration on an "Earthsmart," car by the Natural Resources Defense Council. An "environment-friendly vehicle" is an oxymoron. To be sure, it is commendable to replace the more pernicious internal combustion engine. The Sierra Club's Dan Becker now fighting to put a mere study of CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) standards for SUVs and other gas guzzlers on the agenda, defends the "radically cleaner" car. By fighting this super-scale SUV, "the Joe Camel of the auto industry," he hopes to squeeze automakers into changing the product that earns $l0,000-20,000 in profits per car.

The problem is that this stopgap or "easy way out" through consumption of new clean cars deflects us from the multi-faceted planning, building, fighting needed to stop the road machine. When a New Hampshire spokeswoman at the llth International Climate Control Conference in Cambridge this spring offered financial bonuses for buying "clean cars" and purchasing new "clean cars" for state officials as their attempt to cut heat-trapping gases, the Buy America approach would make the most chauvinistic citizen blush. Why can't such clean machine makers set do more than set a moderate course? What about ending our highway-first policies? Altering the chemistry of the vehicle that causes one-fourth of our carbon emissions is fine. But why adopt the car guys' detour to challenge the chief polluter of our lives and landscapes?

No one gets hoodwinked when, say, the highway guys declare their latest highway widening in Long Island "community-sensitive." The public, says the road-battling Tri-State Transportation Campaign, is "unimpressed." No one at Washington's Surface Transportation Policy Project's (STPP) goes starry-eyed over the 56 billion dollars allotted recently to "repair" wrecked roads in the next 20 years when they see that 40 percent is expansion..

True, Bill Ford did get his comeuppance when Corporate Watch gave the company its annual "Greenwash Sweepstakes Prize" while others noted that while the bearer of the Ford mantle hired Bill McDonough, sustainable architecture's Prince Charming, to do his Michigan River Rouge plant, his cars wreck havoc on the enviro/planning at home and abroad. Environmentalists now trying to remove a gag rule to strengthen miles per gallon (CAFÉ) standards in Congress are not naïve about the car guys trying to fight their Clean Car Resolution.

Yet, they-and we-also need to know that there is no tooling with an alternate vehicle, no real clean car. Such mental contortiosn are simply the embodiment of so-called Natural Capitalism which remains, despite its authors Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins hawking, more capitalist than natural without true alternatives and good legislation. Adopting the authors' cureall of a 200-mile-per-gallon vehicle--safe as baby powder and powerful as the Florida panther (which, by the way, is en route to extinction from loss of habitat through pavement and spreading population)-is not only chimerical but dangerous. And environmentalists should know it. When the heroine of the movie Erin Brokavitch squeals over her "reward" of a new red car as she fights toxic enemies, that's Hollywood. When environmental groups squeal over the "reward" of a clean car from car wolves in green sheep's clothing, that's blinders.

The article appeared in In These Times, on August 7, 2000.

Back to Articles Index