That is exactly what I’ve been trying to people, but more calm, coherent, and with facts to back it up.

Who said station wagons and minivans are not?

I’m against many zoning laws and high-tax cities, but not necessarily building codes. I’m not quite sure that one fits.

Oh brother. I know you’re an SUV owner, but your spin on the anti-SUV movement is disingenuous. How exactly is Arianna Huffington bullying anybody? It’s an education project, not a legislation project.

And what’s this nonsense about SUV being a symptom and not a problem? The problem isn’t zoning laws and building codes, the problem is our dependence on foreign oil. The problem is that our foreign policy is dictated by our energy needs. The problem is that the money we’re funneling into countries like Saudi Arabia gets used to support terrorism. SUV aren’t a symptom of these problems, they are a major contributing cause of them.

You’re free to be a part of the problem or a part of the solution. Just don’t pretend that the problem doesn’t exist.

The problem with the anti-SUV movement is that it gives those not driving SUVs the illusion of some moral supperiority that they in their Honda Accords aren’t part of the problem. By owning a car and using it on a daily basis to drive to a job you are contributing to the problem also. You also burn foreign oil and contribute to the low density development. You also drain resources from local, state and federal governments to support the roads you drive on that could be otherwise utilized to develope a more comprehensive public transit system.

Another observation about the anti-SUV crowd they seem to just as often deamonize SUVs because they are driven by aggressive drivers, they can’t see around them or they are articles of conspicuous consumption. This makes them come off as just not liking SUVs and looking for any reason that will draw more support to their side.

(in the interest of full disclosure I own a SUV)

I think you may have misinterpreted my point. I’ll try to restate it more succinctly:

SUVs do not actually represent as much inefficiency as Huffington et al. seem to think. There is a strong tendency for people to under-estimate the efficiency of cars that have an “inefficient” image. The 2003 Ford Escape gets 28 mpg on the highway; the 2003 Ford Focus station wagon gets 30 mpg. You can obviously find different cars to compare to show much more of a disparity, but nevertheless the data seem to show that SUVs are getting more efficient.

SUVs are so popular in part because the large station wagon was effectively killed off by the government. I’ll admit that this is a wash in an argument about fuel economy, because the wagons were about as efficient as the largest SUVs today. But as far as the anti-SUV argument complains about not being able to see around SUVs, their supposed propensity for tipping over, etc., it’s still a valid point.

Small conservation efforts (like the total elimination of SUVs in America) would not have any effect on our demand for foreign oil. In fact, since American oil is more expensive to produce, American production would be squeezed first by any reduction in demand for oil (and the subsequent reduction in price). There’s probably even a band of reduction in demand that would result in increased importation.

Attempting to create a negative public image of SUVs and their drivers is a spectacularly bad idea. One of the criticisms of SUVs is that they support this hyper-individualistic view of the world; basically, that they turn people into assholes. I won’t necessarily dispute this, but I’ll ask: if SUV drivers are hyper-individualistic, and define themselves by what they see as their independence, is hectoring them more likely to get them to change their minds about SUVs, or more likely to cause them to buy SUVs just to show that they can’t be pushed around by tree-huggers?

My main point, and the one I think you’ve misunderstood, is this: People in the United States drive these vehicles not because of feelings of sexual inadequacy, or because they have some burning need to drive off-road all the time. They drive them for the same reason that Americans have, particularly since the beginning of the Age of Suburbs, always driven larger cars: they drive too much. If you like, I can explain the reasoning behind this at great length, but for now let’s just accept that, nearly everywhere in the United States, it’s illegal now to build anything — houses, offices, shops, factories — in such a way that any means of transportation other than private cars is acceptable to the majority of the people who live, work, and shop in such places.

As functions have moved farther and farther apart in an attempt to make this flawed system work on an ever-larger scale, people have begun driving longer and longer distances, spending more time in their cars, hauling their kids around everywhere, etc. Spending more time in their cars, the demand larger and more-comfortable cars. Since less-efficient ‘cars’ have been effectively banned by the CAFE standards, people have turned to SUVs.

I don’t think that you can get many Americans to stop doing things by telling them to stop. It doesn’t work with speed limits, it doesn’t work with the War On Some Drugs, and it certainly won’t work with Arianna Huffington whingeing about SUVs.

So much for succinct, eh?

By the way, I don’t consider that much or any of this applies to me. Even Huffington & Co. make it clear that they’re against unnecessary use of SUVs, and mine is quite necessary. I live on the side of a mountain, and the only reason I haven’t been trapped in the house by snow for the last three weeks is the Jeep. And even that I have to leave at the bottom of the driveway because of snow. I don’t drive the thing any more than I have to, which I believe was the original intended use of such vehicles. At 11 mpg you have a strong incentive to limit your use.

I’m not saying that sending less money to people who should “Death to America!” isn’t a good idea, and I am not pretending that a problem doesn’t exist.

I am rather saying that the problem isn’t SUVs, but that SUV overuse is just one of the many serious effects of nearly everything built in the last fifty years having been built to an inhuman scale. And I’m saying that directly attacking SUVs is likelier to make the situation worse, rather than better.

Julie wrote:

I’m against many zoning laws and high-tax cities, but not necessarily building codes. I’m not quite sure that one fits.

Well, building codes and zoning laws go hand-in-hand. If you got rid of the zoning laws entirely, but left the building codes as they are, you'd still be in trouble. The building codes assume a certain type of zoning laws are in place, and to that extent I'm against them, but I am not advocating that I am, however, against the building codes that require everything to be built to middle-class standards. I'd say that having the very poor living in housing that has relatively tiny living spaces, communal bathrooms and showers, a kitchen at the end of the hall, and slightly less paranoia about fire, would be preferable to leaving them no independent choice but to live in cardboard boxes. The middle-class *do*, after all, send many of their children to live in such accomodations while they're in college, only we call them dorms instead of SRO hotels.

I’ll try to respond point by point.

The Detroit Project and people like myself aren’t so much against SUVs per se as we are against the unnecessary use of grossly fuel inefficient vehicles.

I understand at least a few hybrid-electric SUVs are coming to market in the next year that are very fuel efficient. I think this is a big step in the right direction and I hope SUV consumers will use them as substitutes for their inefficient vehicles.

Your claim that a decrease in oil consuption wouldn’t decrease our need for need for foreign oil is pretexted on the assuption that we will continue to buy from the lowest cost supplier, regardless of whether that supplier happens to be funding people trying to murder us. My point is that if we produced more fuel efficient and alternative fuel vehicles the net cost of fueling our vehicles could remain constant even if gasoline prices increased substantially. My ultimate desire is an end our country’s need for oil from the middle east, which I think will solve a whole host of problems.

I agree that demonizing SUV owners is the wrong approach, but I haven’t found that the Detroit Project actually does this. Certainly, there are some nut job outfits that are trying to demonize SUV owners, but they are hardly mainstream. I do think we need to educate SUV owners of the consequences of their actions, however, and teach them the cheap oil is not a birthright.

I understand that your point is that urban planning has been a failure for the last 50 years and as a consequence people are driving more, and consequently, driving more SUVs. Fine, that’s a problem. To my mind, a bigger problem is that a significant contingent of our society is engaged in a behavior that results in our country having to play a role in the world that I do not think is in our own best interests. For Christ sakes, it’s a behavior that results in the direct funding of some very unsavory people, including the dictator we’re about to go to war with and nut jobs that are actively trying to kill us! The argument that access to cheap oil should not be sacrificed simply because we find commuting in gas guzzlers more comfortable does not get much sympathy from me. The social cost of cheap foreign oil is too great.

The Detroit Project and people like myself aren’t so much against SUVs per se as we are against the unnecessary use of grossly fuel inefficient vehicles.

I’m against the unnecessary use of all vehicles, but I also take a broad view of “unnecessary”. I also think that you’re thinking of a quick solution, while I’m looking at what’s going to happen in the next fifty years. The current mad popularity of SUVs will die out before long, just a tailfins and custom vans and every other automotive fad did, no matter what anyone says pro or con. People in Texas will keep putting 85,000 miles or more a year on their Suburbans as they do things like drive from Dallas to Houston, but in most places, people will move on to something else. Anyway:

Higher-efficiency vehicles are a win on all fronts (except economically, but that should improve once there’s more competition in the sector and once they’re produced in greater numbers), but even if the entire fleet’s fuel economy were doubled tomorrow, I don’t believe that they will help enough to meaningfully decrease the United States’ demand for oil from nut jobs. (By meaningfully decrease I mean decrease to the point where we have sufficient maneuverability in the oil market to enact embargoes that are not just self-destructive.)

It’s incredibly difficult to get good figures on actual by-sector energy consumption in the United States, partially because everyone uses different units of measure. Some statistics are given in thousands of gasoline-equivalent gallons, some in BTUs, some in kilowatts, some in barrels of crude oil (which contains a lot of things), etc. As a result, I’m going to have to be a bit more vague than I’d like.

We already import more oil from each of Canada and the UK than we do from countries in the Middle East, and 73% of our energy use (and 29% of our petroleum use) is for things other than transportation.

Buying our energy from other than the low-cost supplier would be disastrous for a whole bunch of reasons. The economic consequences alone would destroy American industry once and for all. The United States would be buying oil only from certain countries at inflated prices, while France and Germany (to pick two examples totally at random) would be buying at artifically low prices from the Arabs because the largest consumer of oil (the USA) would have put the Middle East outside their market. (And you can bet that the Arabs wouldn’t be any happier with us for it, too. While decreasing the amount of money we send them, it has to be considered that this alone probably wouldn’t do much if anything to decrease their blind hatred of the United States; it’d just decrease the extent to which we finance it.)

This isn’t imaginary; you can see the effects of a similar program in the U.S. candy industry. In the United States, sugar sells for about twice the world market price because of a government program designed to prop up the U.S. sugar industry by restricting imports. As a result, very little hard candy (i.e. the kind you can’t make with corn syrup) is made in the United States any more.

Few industries have sugar (as opposed to just any sweetener) as an essential input. Everything has energy as an essential input.

To my mind, a bigger problem is that a significant contingent of our society is engaged in a behavior that results in our country having to play a role in the world that I do not think is in our own best interests.

I agree with that. But the only effective way I can see to get people to do what you want is to make that thing intrinsically the most personally advantageous thing for them to do. Hybrid cars are a good example, but unfortunately I think that what they’ll do initially is replace a good number of the 40-mpg Civics on the road with 60-, 70-, or 80-mpg vehicles. It’ll still be a good start.

In any case, someone who spends hours a day in his car, or who hauls a lot of kids or groceries around on a regular basis, will probably not choose an efficient vehicle — his Suburban might already be the most-efficient vehicle available for his task. I suppose that what I’m arguing is that we don’t need to become more energy-efficient (though that doesn’t hurt either) but that we need to become less energy-consumptive, particularly since a lot of the energy we consume driving to strip malls and office parks doesn’t really make out lives better. If we do less unnecessary work (in the sense in which the word is used in physics), we can very significantly decrease our energy consumption while making our lives better at the same time.

Buying our energy from other than the low-cost supplier would be disastrous for a whole bunch of reasons. The economic consequences alone would destroy American industry once and for all. The United States would be buying oil only from certain countries at inflated prices, while France and Germany (to pick two examples totally at random) would be buying at artifically low prices from the Arabs because the largest consumer of oil (the USA) would have put the Middle East outside their market.

You have a point, but keep in mind that I was talking about reducing our consuption of middle east supplied oil, not necessarily our energy consumption (though, as you said, that doesn’t hurt either). I don’t actually know how much of our total engery use is in the form of oil, but whatever the number, I’m sure that it’s too high. Would be interesting to see a breakdown of cost per megawatt of different fuel souces.

I am not convinced that economic disaster would necessarily ensue if we conscientiously approached the problem of moving to a less problematic source of energy than middle eastern oil. As far as our cost of inputs increasing, as you’re well aware, the end user price of oil is much higher in just about every other first world country, including Canada.

In any case, I don’t mean to suggest that this is something that we can accomplish overnight, but rather an undertaking akin to our national commitment to reach the moon by the end of the 60s. Using more fuel efficient vehicles is just a first step in the right direction.

I suppose that what I’m arguing is that we don’t need to become more energy-efficient (though that doesn’t hurt either) but that we need to become less energy-consumptive, particularly since a lot of the energy we consume driving to strip malls and office parks doesn’t really make out lives better. If we do less unnecessary work (in the sense in which the word is used in physics), we can very significantly decrease our energy consumption while making our lives better at the same time.

I question whether the approach of trying to convince people to be less active is really easier than trying to get them to drive more efficient vehicles, but if that’s the battle you choose to fight, I’m on your side.

Why are people here so hot about SUVs? Are only SUVs responsible for the US’s dependence on foreign oil? No! Our dependence on foreign oil came around when more and more Americans could afford cars and started buying two-three per family!

SUVs only became popular in the last ten years. Other cars like luxury foreign cars and sports cars and even many of those old, rusty “boats” from the 1970s which are still on the road are JUST as guilty of using foreign oil as today’s SUVs. And today’s SUVs are safer than most cars.

People who are so anti-SUVs are basically just jumping on the band wagon. They are the same people who would, if capable, travel to whatever city is hosting the G7, WTO, IMF just to protest and get seen on TV. In other words: they are idiots.

In your comparison of the Roadmaster wagon and the Ford Expedition, you failed to mention that the station wagon gets 26 miles per gallon on the highway, while the Expedition only gets 17. (These numbers come from the government’s own website, fueleconomy.gov) This is why I am in the process right now of locating a good low mileage ‘96 Roadmaster wagon. I am one of those people you speak of who actually needs a large vehicle. I have 5 kids and a wife, all of whom like to go places. I think it is extremely ironic that these CAFE fuel standards have actually driven many American vehicle owners to drive less efficient vehicles. It is another example of government regulations which actually have the opposite effect of what is intended. If Buick had continued to make these station wagons, I believe they would have been getting 30 mpg by now. It is the exemption for trucks which has caused the explosion in S.U.V. usage, without a doubt. As for the buying of oil from these crazy countries that want to destroy us, there is a simple solution to that problem. We need to drill for oil in our own country. If we drilled in ANWAR and a few other places, we could replace this foreign oil and say goodbye to the oil shieks and stop supporting with our dollars the lunatics who hate us. But that would be politically incorrect, as some people think the lives of a few elk and arctic foxes are more important than the lives of our sons and daughters…….