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I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices.

There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists.

There are the pragmatic environmentalists, who value the environment and seek to find the most effective ways to minimize damaging it through human activity.

Then there are the religious environmentalists. A new type of puritan, religious environmentalists seek to cast individual worth and goodliness in the frame of environmental impact. It's not about results so much as it is about intentions. It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used for extremely short commutes, or whether the SUV is used to carpool with 3 other people, or whether you walk to work everyday and only use the car on the weekends (and thus have lower per-person per day carbon emissions than the prius or smart car owner who drives alone and commutes from the suburbs).

As this very article shows, such religious fervor is built, as always, on a mountain of ignorance. And the faithful are zealous in spite of rather than because of any practical knowledge in the subject.

There are lots of pragmatic ways we can be reducing humanity's environmental impact, but the religious greenies aren't helping. They are building up resentment that may eventually lead to a backlash.

> There are, broadly, two kinds of environmentalists.

Not only that, I'd say there are two such kinds of advocates for anything.

Yes, but not all such "religions" are fashionable.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't -- Robert Benchley

Well, there are at least two kinds of people in the world then. -- cema

It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV, regardless of whether that truck is used [...]

I understand the point you are trying to make (energy consumption is an aggregate quantity so cannot be derived from instantaneous measurement), but of course it is annoying people like her which have caused the kind of changes that have resulted in a 50mpg family car as opposed to a 22 mpg car, and there's no reason to suppose that 10 years from now that guy won't be able to haul a dead deer in an SUV-sized vehicle that does 50mpg.

Sadly, it is often the over-bearing extremists that cause progress to be made.

> there's no reason to suppose that 10 years from now that guy won't be able to haul a dead deer in an SUV-sized vehicle that does 50mpg.

Increasing the fuel efficiency of vehicles is not something that can be achieved by will alone; it also requires the cooperation of physics.

First, the SUV could quite likely already do 50mpg if driven by a hypermiler, and maybe fitted with truck tires and a streamlining tail. But it would take twice as long to get back from the deer hunt, and it would be a bumpier and much less comfortable ride.

At a given speed with a given frontal area in a given density of air, though, you're really limited by how low you can get the drag coefficient, and at any speed you're limited by how low you can get the mass and rolling resistance.

On this subject, I highly recommend Chapter A, "Cars II", of Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ps/2...

it is annoying people like her which have caused the kind of changes that have resulted in a 50mpg family car as opposed to a 22 mpg car

That's partly true. But it's also true that it's people like her that are the reason for behemoth SUVs.

Back in the 70's such folk agitated for the CAFE regulations governing fleet fuel efficiency. It's important to note that these standards applied to passenger cars, as they quite clearly cannot be applied to 18-wheelers.

We got cars of greater efficiency, and one of the changes that led to this was the demise of large family station wagons. However, the consumers still wanted a way to drag around their families. This led to the evolution of the minivan, and eventually to the SUV.

While I don't have nearly enough data to know whether the net effect was positive, it's clear that at least at the margin, the effect of the CAFE regulations was negative.

You can't fool the market. It always finds a way to route around obstacles.

But it's also true that it's people like her that are the reason for behemoth SUVs.

You have some interesting speculation here but no evidence at all.

Growing up my family had a station wagon and a regular sedan. They had comparable gas mileage IIRC. I think station wagons were driven out of the market (heh) in part because people felt safer and more powerful in SUVs and when you're driving your family around, safety matters. I certainly knew a lot of people who got SUVs for hauling the family around specifically because the high altitude made them feel invincible and they assumed that the extra weight would help in crashes against smaller vehicles.

For whatever it's worth, I have an anecdote regarding safety in station wagons vs. SUVs. When I was young my little sister was almost killed in a car accident because she was in the back seat of a station wagon when they were rear-ended by an SUV. SUVs don't have the same bumper level that other cars do, so instead of impacting the designed crumple zone, the SUV rolled up into the back window of the station wagon. Another foot and she would have been decapitated.

Subsequently, I've seen a couple sources which corroborate this trend -- in high speed accidents between cars and SUVs the fatality rates where higher than two cars.

> You have some interesting speculation here but no evidence at all.

And you follow this assertion with more speculation without evidence. Interesting...

It is an environmental sin to own a "gas guzzling" truck or SUV

At times I wonder how much of the truck/SUV critique is really driven by environmental concerns. I know a lot of people that hate SUVs because they can't see around the damn things which makes driving more hazardous. And I've raged at trucks and SUVs whose regular headlights completely blinded me because they're set two feet higher than a normal car's. That makes me wonder how many people are enraged about those vehicles but frame their critiques in environmental terms because you can't yell at someone you know because someone else who drives the same vehicle pissed you off, but you can yell at them about a more generalized harm like environmental pollution....

> I know a lot of people that hate SUVs because they can't see around the damn things which makes driving more hazardous.

Not to mention how much worse it would be to end up in an accident with one of them.

Too many people think that SUVs are 'safe' because of stuff like this. They feel that they will buy it, it will be a 'tank,' and they can drive any-which-way, completely care-free (nevermind things like the higher center-of-gravity...).

I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill....

I've never really understood why people get worked up over landfills. Digging a giant hole and filling it with trash is a perfectly rational solution. It isn't as if we're importing mass from space and converting it to trash...we're digging up stuff from the ground, using it for awhile, and then putting it back in a slightly different form. If we ever find a use for the styrofoam in landfills, we can mine it back out again.

I don't get worked up over landfills, but I do get worked up over all those bits of styrofoam that never make it into the landfills and hang out on the beach or in a park or wherever they happened to land - I'd greatly prefer those bits be replaced by something biodegradable.

According to this website (http://www.worldcentric.org/about-us/faq#pla6) it takes at least 180 days for a corn-based cup to biodegrade in a compost. Biodegradable or not, it's probably more efficient to hire people to just clean up the trash periodically instead of hoping for a biodegradable solution.

And even more efficient yet if people throw out their trash. The point is that people don't hire workers to clean up trash where I see all of it.

Modern landfills can actually be used as an energy source to some extent:

"More recently, it has been recognized that this landfill gas represents a usable energy source. The methane can be extracted from the gas and used as fuel. In the North Wake County Landfill, a company collects the landfill gas, extracts the methane, and sells it to a nearby chemical company to power its boilers."

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science...

I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life.

Other people's decisions become your business the instant they affect you.

The impact of any one individual's environmental choices on my life is basically zero. People in aggregate matter, but individuals have minuscule effects. At least, for the people that I interact with. Things might be different if I spent a lot of time chatting with Senators. But I don't.

Besides, this claim proves too much. Everything that everyone does can in some possible way affect me. Want to live alone in the woods cut off from human society? You're depriving us of your wisdom so the next generation will grow up more ignorant.

To put it another way, I think the whole effort to frame environmental policy as a matter of personal virtue is both ineffective and cruel. Lecturing people is not an effective way to change their behavior. And in many cases, people make environmentally poor decisions because they don't have much choice. Many many jobs in the US effectively require that you have a car. Many affordable residences also effectively require that you own a car and drive a lot. People need jobs and they need shelter, and for many people their existing jobs and homes lock them into having one car per adult in the home.

In other policy areas, we've decided that an issue is important enough and should be taken out of the realm of personal virtue and placed into the realm of social action. My brother is disabled. He doesn't have to go around begging for coins so that he can eat this month. There's no opportunity for you to demonstrate your personal virtue by donating cash to him. Instead, we've all decided that seriously disabled people shouldn't have to go around begging to survive, so everyone is going to have a chunk of cash taken from their paycheck used to cover Social Security Disability Insurance. We lose a bit of cash, but in exchange we get to live in a society where severely disabled people don't die on the street because they can't work. We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue.

We should do the same thing with climate change. Greenhouse gases are bad. So put a tax on them and let the market find a way to reduce them. Then we won't have to harass random people who make lifestyle choices we don't like; instead, people will make choices that in aggregate are more effective at mitigating climate change. In the story above, the truck driving apartment dweller would have more cash to spend than the car driving McMansion dweller, which will be far more effective in getting the McMansion dweller to change her behavior than any amount of lecturing, no matter how technically correct it is.

Trading sanctimony and self-righteousness for policy effectiveness seems like a huge win to me.

We've taken a policy problem out of the realm of personal virtue.

I'm glad that your brother is now able to live a more rewarding life without having to degrade himself or wonder where his next meal is coming from.

On the other hand, I'm sad that as a society, we seem intent on removing opportunities for personal virtue. In some ways, I can no longer be as virtuous as I might like: I have less money to give because it's been taxed away from me to give to others; or I've got less time to give, because my time is dedicated to earning that money that is being taken from me.

I have no evidence to support this, but I sometimes wonder if the fact that so much of virtue is taken away from us, that we're not in the habit of being virtuous, and that in turn makes it more difficult for us to make bigger overtures. Just a thought...

This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will. Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?

we seem intent on removing opportunities for personal virtue

Really? I do not see any evidence for this intent anywhere. Certainly, the point of SSDI is not exclusively the removal of an opportunity for personal virtue. There is also the fact that everyone here is one car accident and brain injury away from being incapable of working or caring for themselves. And while some people will purchase disability insurance, some will not and those people will become a drain on the public purse. Better, both in moral terms and in economic efficiency to make everyone pay for a baseline insurance package.

More to the point, there is nothing stopping you from volunteering to help the disabled or anyone else. SSDI provides a minimal standard of living, but we all prefer to live on more than the absolute minimum. There is more to life than a small monthly check can possibly provide, so there is ample opportunity for you to express your virtue by helping disabled people.

This applies in the negative sense as well. Because the law compels me to morality (e.g., in the kinds of things I say in public, refraining from hate speech), I don't have the opportunity to be virtuous of my own free will.

I think you're conflating morality and law. The law compels your behavior. It cannot make you moral. There is no law against being a bigot or even saying bigoted things per se.

Since I must behave this way due to the law, rather than my innate goodness, can I still consider myself virtuous?

As I understand it, hate speech is only a crime in the US when it occurs in conjunction with a systemic campaign of discrimination or a violent crime. I'd say that if the only thing keeping you from launching into long diatribes about how various racial groups are genetically inferior (while either discriminating against them or assaulting/murdering one of their members) is the possibility of legal sanction, then you are not actually a virtuous person. And this lack of virtue really cannot be blamed on society. Or the law.