I ran across another old column of mine from 1999 that never appeared online anywhere and which I think holds up pretty well in some ways, so why not?
Save Farmland—Drive a Car
WASHINGTON DC—If memory serves me correctly, there was a book out a few years back with the title Monster Trucks and Hair in a Can: Who Says America Doesn’t Make Anything Anymore? This title came back to me Friday night, when a network news report carried a breathy and ominous report about how the next generation of sport utility vehicles (SUVs) are going to be . . . gulp . . . even bigger!
For Enlightened People the car is a rolling cigarette, General Motors is the moral equivalent of Philip Morris, and American Graffiti is a pornographic movie. SUVs are therefore the triple-XXX-rated version of auto perversion. Enlightened People have been hectoring us for 25 years to drive smaller, more fuel efficient cars. The federal government mandated that auto companies make more fuel efficient cars, but the regulations exempt light trucks. This regulation had the effect of killing off the old, heavy family station wagon. But not to worry. Voila, the SUV, which is technically a light truck, was born. Liberals and environmentalists especially hate SUVs. SUVs are safer in crashes, and liberals hate it that some people are safer than others. Environmentalists hate SUVs because they burn more gas than a hamster-powered Escort or Yugo.
While Enlightened People hate SUVs, ordinary citizens love them. (I own two.) And now we will have a new generation of monster SUVs to drive between our monster homes, which were also deplored last week in the pages of the Washington Post, and Walmart, which is deplored every week by everybody. (Idle question: Given that everybody hates Walmart, how do they stay in business? Surely they have no customers. . .)
Now, if you think the specter of SUVs is enough to upset Enlightened People, try suggesting that cars have actually saved millions of acres of farmland, and get ready for the howls of unbelieving indignation. How can this be? Consider: At the turn of the century the primary mode of intra-city transport was still the horse-drawn cart or truck. There were about 1.4 million horse-drawn transportation vehicles in U.S. cites in 1900, and a much larger number of horses were used on farms to draw plows and wagons. The average horse consumed about 30 pounds of feed a day, or five tons a year. The amount of land used for growing feedstock for horses peaked at 93 million acres in 1915, an area nearly a quarter larger than the land area of all U.S. cities today. Almost no land is used to grow feedstock for horses now (the U.S. government discontinued the data series for feedstock land in 1961, because the acreage had shrunk almost to zero). Most of this land was converted to other, higher value agricultural uses or reverted to forestland. This shift happened because of the internal combustion engine in cars and farm equipment. Lesson: cars saved 90 million acres of land. And cleaned up the air in many big cites, too—have you ever drawn a deep breath on a hot day on Central Park South, near the horse-drawn tourist carriages?
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.