Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

As they start to realize they are losing the global warming argument, the new tack of conservatives is to attack the energy use of environmentalists. To hear them tell it, if you are concerned about global warming, you are commanded to live in a little cabin somewhere off the power grid and ride your bike around town like Ted Kaczynski. I suppose I could attack “small government” conservatives who draw Social Security, use publicly capitalized power like SRP, drive federal highways, attend state schools and use the Post Office. It would be better than actually arguing the merits, eh?

Hypocrisy can be fun to ferret out (by the way, Ted Haggard is moving to Phoenix), but there is calling out the hypocrites, then there is picking nits.

The latest along these lines is last week’s silly column that appeared in the Arizona Republic that went after Steve Farley for, um…riding an airplane. That’s right, he rode an airplane to Oklahoma City. This makes him a major polluter who has no right to say anything about the environment.

First off, while there are many fingerwagging hairshirt types in the enviromnental movement, Farley ain’t one of them (neither is Al Gore). If you look at what Farley actually does, he advocates providing alternatives for people who would rather have less of an environmental impact. For example, he advocates for public transportation because he wants to give people the option of not using their cars if they choose to. Unfortunately, in many cases, these alternatives don’t exist. This is what happened here.

Farley, as you might know, went to Oklahoma City to pick up a gas-electric hybrid Insight that he bought on CraigsList. According to the Republic, he, horror of horrors, rode an airplane to Oklahoma City and dumped untold cubic meters of pollution into our atmosphere.

It must be said that the plane would have taken off with or without Farley. It is hard to say that Farley “caused” the pollution. But, even so, it is really the wrong way to look at the impact.

The trouble is that looking only at how much pollution a plane makes is the wrong way to look at it. One of the better gauges is how much pollution the plane makes per passenger mile. Think about it this way: a Hyundai Exel uses less gasoline and causes less pollution than a school bus. So, do we save on environmental impact by picking up kids in a small army of Exels rather than the big polluting bus? Of course not, because a gallon of gas (and the attendant environmental impact) gets more kids to school on the bus than it would in the Exel.

Farley’s alternative would have been to rent a car or take a taxi to go to Oklahoma City. Per passenger mile, he and his daughter would have caused a lot more pollution than sharing an airplane ride with a few dozen people. As a matter of fact, one could argue that the presence of Farley and his daughter on the plane lessened the “per passenger mile” impact of the flight.

We all know that Farley is a big advocate of rail. A passenger rail line from Phoenix (where he started his trip from) to Oklahoma City does not exist. The nearest passenger rail terminal is in the town of Maricopa, which would have required driving. Interestingly, this is a spur from Tucson, meaining that passenger rail is in the same spot that it was in back in the 1870’s. Even had he started his trip from Tucson, the route is rather byzantine. For people like Farley who want an alternative to planes, that alternative simply doesn’t exist.

The article gives the names of four legislators that also drive hybrids. Guess what? If they purchased those in Phoenix, they were dropped off at a port in Houston and, yes, trucked to Phoenix. Farley’s method may have had less of an impact than that.

I found the headline rather crude, “Insight Is His, But How About His Understanding?” I guess the headline writer wanted to imply that Farley is a starry-eyed idealist who doesn’t know the impact of his actions. Farley is just the opposite, he can bore you to death with the details of his trip. But why bother with details that might interfere with the chance to take a cheap shot at someone that actually gives a darn?