Moral Ambiguity

OK, so we're gonna dump the SUV. This is where it gets complicated (and I'm not even thinking about the issue that if I sell it, someone else is going to drive it anyway. Can't burn the damn thing - more CO2. And as John Gierach once wrote about his faithful truck, I'd like to bury it, but I don't have the equipment to inter a full-size automobile).

We still have to get from A to B, and I'm not quite ready to ditch my attachment to car travel (what my town planning colleagues call the "car psychosis".)

The Al Gore movie ended with a list of anti-global-warming measures, including a plea to "drive a hybrid, if you can." That seems straightforward enough. However, there are some reports emerging that suggest that hybrids are not as green as might be expected, if total life cycle cost to the environment is taken into account.

This leads to an important ideological decision. Are we going to try and save the whole planet in every way, or just prevent further global warming? More importantly, are we willing to use methods to reduce global warming which may have other environmental or societal consequences? For example, from a global warming perspective, nuclear energy seems to be the only way to provide the same amount of electrical energy that we currently consume and still reduce CO2 emissions significantly (this is a huge simplification of a very emotional debate, which I'm prepared to unpack as I go along). So, from a vehicle point of view, would we settle for a vehicle with low CO2 emissions but possibly high pollution in other respects? I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say yes. This is also a position which I'll develop and defend as this blog goes on.