That year, the year we returned to Iraq, climate scientists wailed before the Senate in a hearing called “The Case for Climate Change Action,” which elicited this response from Republican John McCain: “No excuse for inaction on this issue is acceptable.” But the incentives were pointing in the exact opposite direction: Trucks over 6,000 pounds were eligible for substantial tax write-offs, which meant that the H2 was not just climate contemptuous; it was also being partly subsidized by the feds, a tax-advantaged show of support for a war we were on our way to losing. Here’s the conclusion of the study: “If the heaviest tenth of vehicles in America’s fleet were downsized to this lighter weight class, road fatalities in multi-car crashes—which totaled 19,081 in 2023—could be reduced by 12 percent, or 2,300, without sacrificing the safety of any cars involved.” In plainest English: If the people with the heaviest vehicles made do with slightly less, the impact to the safety of their lives would be literally zero, and thousands fewer people would die. In late 2003, a Southern California Hummer dealership went up in flames, perhaps the highest-profile act of ecoterrorism in the whole furious smelt of American history: twenty Hummer H2s blackened and singed, along with a smattering of other SUVs, courtesy of the Earth Liberation Front, a militant environmentalist group that took issue with the gas-guzzlers’ impact on the climate, which was basically only lukewarm compared with the present day.
Author: Alexander Sammon
Published at: 2025-06-22 22:45:05
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