Is an SUV a Green Vehicle?

Before gasoline power arrived, beasts of burden were polluting agricultural communities along with meat producing animals such as cows, chickens and pigs. By eliminating horses, mules and oxen on farms, tractors and other types of gas-powered farm machinery greatly reduced the problem of animal waste that environmentalists, with justification, still complain about. This also eliminated the need to grow the food required by millions of farm animals. It has been estimated that it took about 93 million acres of land in 1900 to grow the food to fuel the farm animals that were soon replaced by motorized farm machinery. Much of that land has now gone back to woodlands....'Our Green ICE Age,' Dwight R. Lee, TCS Daily, 3/16/2007

One of the advantages of being on the left in the 21st century is that denial of history is a major credential of belonging. You don't know about conditions before our time because you've never, for instance, read William Blake's descriptions of the early industrial age in England, or seen photographs or read reports about conditions in Pittsburgh in 1920 or New York in 1880. In a politics that's only about now and me and instant satisfaction, the past is an irritating bit of refuse, rather like the smoke coming out of Al Gore's colossal mansion.

But consider a 6-passenger SUV, that swerving behemoth of the Interstate. To get the same six people from, say, St. Louis to Fargo, in 1890, you would have needed the following: at least six horses plus a horse-drawn wagon for the luggage, say, eight horses. Forage for a horse is several acres. So you'd need to avail yourself of thirty or forty acres a day to feed the beasts. The mounds of manure and barrels full of urine deposited by the horses enroute would bring pollutants to thousands of water sources as you traveled. Of course, the trip would probably take a month whereas a couple of days would get you there via an SUV dreadnaught. As Dwight Lee's article suggests, multiplied by tens of millions, such transport poisoned the atmosphere, water, and introduced disease and death everywhere it existed. So one may fairly say that, compared to horses, an SUV is very green.

Luther