No Impact Man: Are Better Cars a Better Cancer?

Colin Beaven is known as No Impact Man. For a year he lived a life with no negative environmental impact- he didn’t drive a car, didn’t use electricity in his New York City apartment, ate only locally grown food, and somehow managed to get his wife to come along for the journey.

He asks a killer question in his post on his excellent blog “Is making a better car like making a better cancer?” and then follows it up with 25 sharp and astute arguments for reducing our dependence on cars. Here are a few of my favorite, head over and read the whole list, it should jog your thoughts on our car culture. Colin references WorldChanging’s Alex Steffan’s post “My other car is a Bright Green City”

• Societal obsession with inventing a high-efficiency vehicle obscures the fact that using our land to live in suburbs instead of compact villages and cities may be not only a sustainable but a much more satisfying solution.
• If everyone in the United States deserves a car, then everyone in the world deserves a car. If everyone in the world gets a car, we’re toast.
• Studies show that building more roads only causes more traffic.
• Where, in major cities like, say, New York, are you supposed to fit more roads anyway?
• 3.5 million Americans now spend the equivalent of a month a year in their cars, according to Alex.
• According to Alex, “procurement of the materials used to make and maintain that car (and then dispose of it at the end of its life) may mean that almost half of the direct climate impact of a car never comes out of its tailpipe.”
• So even if you come up with a car, based on the same materials, that gets infinity miles per gallon, you’ll only have cut your footprint by half.

Link [No Impact Man] & [WorldChanging]

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