On my walks around the streets of Manhattan, I recently started noticing many more new sport utility vehicles. Sure enough, a recent article in the New York Times confirmed my impression. Low gas prices have prompted the sales of pickup trucks to jump 29 per cent; SUVs are up 17 per cent.
The return of the SUV, particularly in a place like New York City, is a loathsome sight. You can understand why a hard-working rancher in west Texas needs a pick-up truck, but suburban New Jersey housewives could certainly get into the city in something smaller and more fuel efficient. You do not need a 4-wheel drive to negotiate the rugged Holland and Lincoln tunnels, or the perils of the George Washington bridge. SUVs were a symbol of the 1990s, big, voracious and out of control, just like that era’s president, and today they should be well down the road toward extinction.
SUVs continue to thrive partly because they are classified as “trucks,” and exempt from fuel efficiency standards. The reporter Keith Bradsher did an excellent book some years ago, High and Mighty, that warned that their reputation for increased safety is a complete myth, in part because they are so poorly designed that they roll over more often. Bradsher also pointed out that SUV buyers “tend to be people who are insecure and vain. . . They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities.”
Using world resources to manufacture and fuel SUVs for American suburbia is an immoral waste by any ethical standard. But the comeback of the dangerous monsters does not seem to have triggered much debate yet.
Those of us who follow the Middle East should have a particular concern. The Western exploitation of oil in the region over nearly the past century has promoted instability, injustice, and conflict, in ways both obvious and not-so-obvious. The left and the right may not have the same analysis, but both should agree that importing even more Middle Eastern oil to fuel the giant, utterly unnecessary gas-guzzlers is quite simply wrong.
