An irresistible force, the belief in global warming, is meeting the immovable object, which is the rising cost of oil. Something's got to give.
"I never thought I'd pay eight bucks to see Al Gore give a slide presentation, but I did," Lee Iacocca said to me the other day. He knows that time has run out for the auto industry.
Whether you believe in it our not, the public pressure to take action on global warming keeps escalating. That means curbing the heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, which is the natural product of, among many other things, burning gasoline.
Then we're buying oil from people that don't like us and the price at the pump keeps climbing.
The answer to both is burn less fuel, use less oil, conserve. Environmentalists have been asking for this for years, but this time the double whammy, global warming and oil prices, means that something is really likely to happen. General Motors is so wary that it's paused development on future rear-drive cars.
I'll tell you what will happen but first, some numbers from the not-for-profit organization, Environmental Defense:
* 237 million Number of registered vehicles in the U.S. - almost one per person.
* 600 gallons Average amount of gasoline consumed by one U.S. car each year.
* 12,000 pounds Amount of carbon dioxide emitted from one U.S. car each year.
* 240 Number of trees needed to absorb the 12,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted from one U.S. car each year.
* 2.7 trillion Number of miles U.S. cars and light trucks traveled a year. That's the equivalent of taking ten million trips to the moon.
Girldriver USA |
Since we have 30 percent of the world's 800 million vehicles - and bigger ones, too, we contribute 45 percent of the world's automotive carbon dioxide emissions, the global-warming villain. Note that the remainder of the world is catching up fast because they love cars, too. And auto emissions are important because we just can't do anything about much of the CO2, like the CO2 created when people breathe.
Change is hard though. The richer we get the bigger we want - everything, cars, houses. And don't blame Detroit. The Europeans and Japanese are leaders in the push-up-horsepower race.
At the New York Auto Show in April the big news was horsepower. Even Toyota , the eco darling, previewed a 2008 Lexus LX 570 with a guzzler 381-horsepower, 5.7-liter V-8.
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