I'm Changing the Climate!

If the gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle exasperates or even enrages you, then your spiritual home on the Internet is www.changingtheclimate.com, and your soulmates are the site's operators, Robert Lind and Charles Dines of San Francisco.

Last fall Lind and Dines tired of muttering expletives about SUVs into their beers. They began to stalk SUVs in shopping mall parking lots, affixing homemade bumper stickers that shout: "I'm Changing the Climate, Ask me How!" They say they've tagged about a 1,000 SUVs so far. Their website invites others to join them in their cause. The site's message is simple: How dare those soccer moms drive those hulking menaces that devour gas and spew carbon dioxide with impunity!

If you don't own one, the SUV is a vile monster. Gargantuan enough to sport surface-to-air missiles, SUVs inspire fear because at upwards of 5,000 pounds in weight, a typical SUV towers over other cars, threatening to squash guppy-sized rivals in an accident. But that very same size advantage makes drivers of SUVs feel safer and lets their families travel comfortably in spacious seats. Little surprise, then, that one out of every five new vehicles sold in the United States is an SUV. And little surprise that SUVs have outraged many of the rest of us as we piddle along in smaller vehicles.

Lind and Dines say they are most offended by how SUVs slurp up gasoline voraciously, burning gobs of fuel, which adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which may could change our climate for the worse.

Yet it's possible to have qualms about their particular choice of targets. If we want to balance our freedom to decide how we want to live with our need to protect our common air and climate, is targeting the cars of a million doctors, lawyers, accountants, car dealers and CEOs really the best solution?

Lind, a deer-repellant business owner, and Dines, a construction worker, talk about the environment, but they seem, more specifically, to be engaged in class warfare, and seem to be using illiberal means to wage it. The middle-aged duo is infuriated by how SUVs let well-off people flaunt their wealth by buying SUVs, which are costlier than many other light trucks and family vehicles. They don't "tag" merely any gas-guzzling vehicle. They only target SUVs owned by soccer moms or suburban professionals. They only put their stickers on recently made models. It's not gas-guzzling that offends them. It's how a particular group of people goes about guzzling.

In their site's mission statement, Lind and Dines say, "In the old days society had a pillory to shame people out of anti-social behavior." Putting bumper stickers on people's cars, they say, is an updated way of inducing shame for social good, in this case by shaming SUV drivers about their purchase. But is the pillory what we really want to return to as a means of keeping social order? Consciousness-raising can be worthwhile, but what are these guys really wanting us to be conscious of? Few are against public criticism of polluters. But many might argue petty vandalism crosses the line of acceptable public criticism.

A more boring, but possibly more effective, effort might be to push for a higher tax on consumption of fossil fuels of any kind, a lower tax for makers of machines that are powered more efficiently, and a tax on corporations (perhaps tradeable with other corporations) per pound of carbon dioxide they release into the air.

By changing the carrots and sticks of the economic game, people could make their own decision about whether they want to drive a fuel efficient Saturn two-door car or an SUV, or whether, as business owners, they want to invest in making fuel cells or SUVs. That way, we would respond to the real problem of widespread pollution, rather than be distracted by other people's tacky taste in car purchases.

— Sean O'Neill (NewsFromDC@cs.com)