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The last few years have brought changes in how humans view their environment; from news on global climate change to outlooks on the American reliance on foreign oil, long-held assumptions are coming under scrutiny. One is the phenomenon of the personal auto. The meteoric rise of Ford in the early twentieth century resulted in a deep and abiding American identification with cars. But these days, there’s a bitter debate on just how that relationship should work and about your choice of vehicle and its effects on the world we live in.
So what’s the big deal with driving your car? There are a few major issues, but the one many see as the most dire is the production of carbon emissions. One gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of carbon dioxide. The problem with this is that carbon emissions stay in the air and trap heat, leading to global climate change. These products are also hazardous to human health.
Government agencies have pinpointed personal vehicles as the biggest single root of American carbon emissions, and now, people in all walks of life are trying to limit their contribution to the massive output of carbon and greenhouse gases that our cars produce every day. Your choice of vehicle and how you drive it are ways you impact the community every day, and everyone has their own idea about what they should be doing and how they should be driving.
A lot of us don’t see why we should care about global warming, and even suggest that it might just be a natural phenomenon, although most mainstream scientists dispute this. Many who study the issue know that it’s the difficulty of proving the causes and consequences of global warming that have led to a profound movement in America to simply ignore the problem and hope it will go away.
Some of the possible consequences of global climate change are similarly vague. We can’t be sure how a longer growing season would affect the world, or whether more heat would significantly cause higher rates of skin cancer. But telling reports from the Pentagon and other think tanks suggest a rise in global temperatures would have a kind of “domino effect” leading to major wars and a breakdown, according to some experts, into “near anarchy”, as global citizens struggle to secure water and other vital resources.
Being responsible about energy use gives us a better chance of avoiding this kind of undesirable scenario, and as gas prices spike, consumers have another reason to drop the gas-guzzling SUV or luxury car: their wallets. It’s mainly budgeting that’s causing Americans to downgrade to compacts, shorten commutes, and switch to human-powered vehicles like bicycles. And that’s a good thing for all of us.
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