While Boston Globe columnist Tom Keane wants to save the planet as much as the next guy, he's fed-up with green policies that make things worse. To wit: Logan Airport's new policy blessing hybrids with preferential parking– which encourages people to drive to the airport rather than use mass transit. Keane attacks other green laws: prohibitions against urban density (that push sprawl to the 'burbs), Brookline's proposal to double excise taxes on SUVs (which can be more fuel efficient than cars), carpool lanes (which slow down the majority of drivers and create more pollution), cloth diapers (whose cleaning requires more energy than disposables "in some cases") and carbon trading (which encourages consumption by relieving guilt). Kean's rant against "environmental backfire" is a welcome sign that common sense may finally be entering the debate over planet-saving public policy. And if you believe that, I've got a hydrogen-powered BMW 7-Series I'd like to sell you.
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Keane’s article could’ve been written by a petulant teenager 10 years ago.
“ZOMG! There’s a chance that this proposal might have side effects I never anticipated! (But maybe the people in charge have anticipated them but I’m too busy being clever to have noticed!)”
Don’t get me wrong: there are some good reasons to be concerned about some systems that provide warm-and-fuzzy feelings while making their problems worse. We could sit down and debate, say, whether car pool lanes move more people faster than not having them.
But, by dogpiling all of these issues into one articles, Keane just looks like a whiney kid determined to throw so much uncertainty around that, really, he should be allowed to do whatever he wants. All the other kids get to drive around town until midnight! It’s not fair!
Some of this eco-crap is just stupid.
I was at an new outlet store last week when I saw a “Hybrid parking only” space… Huh? Evidently hybrid owners get the same sympathy as pregnant women and the handicapped.
Tangent: I used to find pregnant parking spaces ridiculous, now I understand them and I’m glad to see them in enviroments where pregnant women need to regularly find themselves (grocery stores, malls, department stores, et al).
I never parked in a pregnant/new mother spot, but I always felt like it. However, a “hybrid only” spot won’t deter me. Ever.
@gfen – I’m with you there! My ’96 Accord is a hybrid. When it runs out of gas, I push it! Two sources of power, ergo, hybrid!
I find it a stretch to assert that hybrid-only parking will encourage people to drive more. It may encourage people to buy hybrids, but those people will be driving something anyway.
Any eco-regulation is a half-measure. The root problem is not that what we do is wrong, it is that there are way too many of us doing it.
Keane has a point – a lot of the populist green measures are designed to make people feel better and not improve the environment. Policies that would really make a difference would most likely result in a decline in our standard of living and that is unacceptable for most people. But at least when the driver of the Hybrid V8 Tahoe parks in the hybrid only spot they can feel that this is their reward for ‘doing their bit for the environment’.
The hybrid-only parking spaces is from the same mindset that gave us compact car only spaces some years back. It was just as much nonsense then too. I can agree with his thoughts on carpool lanes. The concept is a colossal waste of roadway.
Beyond that, Mr. Keane is either trolling or hasn’t done his research properly.
His idea that mass transit is preferable to driving to the airport is suspect. While combined the automobiles may consume more fuel, the buses currently used belch more toxins into the air than the cars. Then there is the problem that with mass transit in order to provide the service you need to run the vehicles regardless of how many riders there are. With individual cars, if no one needs to go there then the vehicles are not running.
His arguement that SUV’s can get better gas mileage is a bit messed up as well. That is unless you consider a Jeep Compass to be an SUV. Sorry, I can’t go along with stretching the definition that thin.
The cloth diaper argument of his leaves out a few factors. Disposable diapers are usually made of plastic fibers (sourced from crude oil), and end up in landfills (wasting land and creating a potential groundwater contamination problem later). Cloth diapers are usually made from cotton (a renewable resource), washed using hot water (water is also renewable, detergents break down rather easily, and energy to run the washer and heat the water can be from clean and/or renewable sources), and reused. I’m sure that the average household washing machine and hot water heater uses less energy to wash a load of diapers than it took the diaper factory to make the same number or disposables. Factor in the energy used by the sanitation company to process the soiled disposables and you’re further in the hole.
Can I be the heretic – I don’t believe in this man made CO2 = warmer globe stuff.
There, its out in the open.
Before I get taken out for execution I would say that I do believe the climate is warming, and I do believe we polute too much and I do believe we need to be far more efficient in our energy usage.
But all I see from the “carbon footprint” reduction is more chance for marketing and taxation without any benefit.
This is a typical reaction when you get:
a) Environmentalists who don’t understand cars or transportation.
b) Politicians who don’t understand cars or transportation.
The Gwinnett County Arena/Convention center has electric car parking, complete with plug-ins. Wonder how long it’s been since those have been used. Hybrid parking will go the way of the dinosaur eventually, but maybe electric-only parking will come back.
Cloth vs. disposable diapers is an interesting debate. In areas where water is in short supply (but landfill space isn’t), disposables may actually be more environmentally friendly. Eventually, to the consumer, cloth diapers will save you money, but as far as saving the environment, it depends on what environment you want to save.
I agree with some of his points (hybrid-only parking is reactionary pandering of the worst kind) but if he thinks that it is the environmental lobby that is resisting urban density he is mistaken. Most sensible “greens” fully recognize that densification is the only way to accommodate population growth without endless sprawl. The ones decrying urban density are the NIMBYs who resist change in their neighbourhood.
Speaking as one who has laid out parking lots, compact car spaces made perfect sense when some cars were as long as an Olds ’98 or a Marquis while others were as short as a Rabbit or Corolla. Being able to allocate only seventeen or eighteen feet to a row of parking instead of nineteen or twenty feet can actually add a lot of spaces on a given lot.
What we need is a massive increase in fuel taxes, both for producers and for consumers. It’s the only thing that will work.
TaxedAndConfused,
I’m with ya, man. “Global warming” is just a convenient means to enact more regulation and raise taxes, even if I agree with raising gas taxes to reduce consumption.
When NASA recently admits that, oops, 1934 was in fact a tick warmer than 1998, I wonder how the enviro-Nazis are going to spin this. After all, there was no SUV in 1934, and China was an agrarian society that didn’t wholesale pollute the planet as it does now.
As for Tom Keane’s column, all I’ll say is that bad/stupid/short-sighted laws are enacted with good intentions.
TaxedAndConfused AMEN! I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Why do we keep repeating history, are we that stupid?
I think Donal is right about the compact car spaces. It wasn’t about encouraging use of smaller cars, but more about maximizing parking spaces and minimizing the size of the parking lot. If your zoning regs require X number of parking spaces per built square feet in your strip mall, the only way you can fit them all in probably requires smaller spaces. Either you make them all smaller (seems to be the trend now) or you make a number of them substantially smaller so that the regular size ones can hold a big-ass SUV (or wagon back when they first started to appear).
Of course, you get people like a former colleague who would go out of his way to park his F-350 crew cab in the “small car only” space. Just cuz.
“Of course, you get people like a former colleague who would go out of his way to park his F-350 crew cab in the “small car only” space. Just cuz.”
I reckon he did it because he didn’t like being told what to do by people he believed thought were better (more righteous) than him and he knew that parking in that spot would really piss them off and there was nothing they could do about it.
It’s the same impulse that, say, makes people rev their V8’s in front of Prius owners and the other million and one ways in which we like to say “up yours” to people who annoy us. Pretty juvenille but mostly inconsequential. There are much more dangerous and pathalogical examples of this type of behaviour.
Jun
I think people that drive more fuel efficient vehicles should get preferential parking. Why not? They are helping the cause.
Leave the Suburbans and Ramchargers on the back 40.
Robert Farago: Brookline’s proposal to double excise taxes on SUVs (which can be more fuel efficient than cars).
Yeah, theoretically they can. But usually they aren’t. Until and unless they are more efficient than cars, the excise tax doesn’t sound half bad.
The only way that people will be encouraged to use more fuel efficient cars is if fuel is taxed. An Excise Tax will be added to the finance and spread over 5-10 years and will just make more money for finance companies.
One thing thats missing in this, how about encouraging people to use their cars less or at least differently ?
TaxedAndConfused: One thing thats missing in this, how about encouraging people to use their cars less or at least differently ?
What sort of encouragement (one that is practicable) do you think might work?
What sort of encouragement (one that is practicable) do you think might work?
Not sure being honest, most of the obvious approaches have been tried – but perhaps instead of just making life difficult in all sorts of different ways we need to examine why either people need to use their cars as much as they do. Maybe its lack of alternatives, an issue with how we plan our cities and our lives or something else.
I’m a guilty as the next person on this.
James2: “I’m with ya, man. “Global warming” is just a convenient means to enact more regulation and raise taxes, even if I agree with raising gas taxes to reduce consumption.”
Yeah. I was at that meeting.
All the Liberal scientists (climatologists, physicists, marine biologists, chemists, it runs the gamut) got together back in 1983 and said, “What can we, as scientists do to advance The Liberal Agenda?” There’s only a few Conservative scientists and they’re pretty much frozen out, reduced to writing articles for the Enterprise Institute for the $10K bounty they offer for debunking articles, so all the Liberals are in complete control.
We don’t allow any kids with Conservative tendencies to advance to doctorate-level studies in almost any of the hard sciences, or they’d figure out what’s going on and then they’d have hard data to explain to the rest of you how this is all a giant fraud.
After the big takeover of the Liberal scientists, we’ll be pretty much in charge, we’ll tax you to death and we will get the better-looking women while you’ll be reduced to driving economy cars.
Pretty clever, huh?
OK – I’m lying. We’re really being paid by the Chinese to cripple Western industry and we’ll get to go live in Beijing and get the better-looking women there as the big payoff for our hard work. Luckily, every last one of us loves tofu.
Pretty clever, huh?
Re: Preferential parking spaces. I annoy my poor wife to no end because I refuse to drive around and around hunting for the closest space (I usually just park next to a shopping cart area). I think the idea that anyone deserves a close parking space because of what they drive is ludicrous. I’d be happy to park my bicycle in the farthest space if it would only be there when I got back.
KixStart – like it ;-)
Regarding global warming, I have a hard time believing that what people choose to drive has that big of an effect on the problem when the rest of the solar system is warming up right along with our little planet.
The air quality in China’s industrial centers is so bad it is causing a marked decline in the general health of the populations there. Transit and school busses produce more pollution than the cars they are said to replace, not to mention all the crap thrown into the air by other diesel trucks. And yet I’m supposed to be concerned about my Yukon with it’s multiple pollution reduction systems. Right.