War x 4

From the Financial Times, July 3, main section: "French road tax rattles gas guzzlers." The French government is hoping to impose a tax of up to 3,200 euros on new 4-wheel drive cars (4x4s), which are wrecking its cities and cooking the planet.

From the Financial Times, July 3, 'How to Spend It' supplement: "Wet this baby's head." A new amphibious vehicle "will be the beefiest 4x4 on road or water." It has a top speed of over 100 mph on the road, and 30 on the water. The developer is holding down the price to "teach people to recognize it as the way forward."

Now we can screw up our rivers as well as our roads. This is what we mean by progress.

Neither the Financial Times nor the company's website reveals how many miles per gallon, or gallons per mile, the Gibbs Aquada does, and the woman at the sales department told me she didn't understand what I meant by "mpg." (Perhaps I am asking too much of these people: The spokeswoman at the government's Department for Transport hadn't heard of carbon dioxide).

But, in case you were wondering, the FT explains why you might need one: "This will take you on the school run and up the Amazon." If your children go to school up the Amazon, in other words, it's indispensable.

Or perhaps the inventor has developed the perfect business model. If the Gibbs Aquada takes off, global warming will accelerate. If global warming accelerates, floods will become more frequent. If floods become more frequent, you will need the Gibbs Aquada to get to school.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair now identifies climate change as "the single most important issue we face as a global community." The main cause of climate change is the production of carbon dioxide. The fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide in Britain is transport; its emissions increased by 50% between 1990 and 2002. Flying accounts for most of this, but another reason is that the market for large sport utility vehicles more than doubled in this period. Every year, 150,000 British people now buy one of these monsters, mostly to drive around the cities.

Officially, the biggest SUVs can manage 12 or 13 miles to the gallon in urban areas. Unofficially, U.S. journalists found that the Ford Excursion was doing 3.7. Switching from an average car to a big SUV, the Sierra Club calculates, uses as much extra energy in 12 months as leaving your television on for 28 years.

Arguably, the war with Iraq was a war for 4x4s. As the former environment minister Michael Meacher pointed out in the Guardian recently, the U.S. could do without its oil imports from the Persian Gulf if the fuel efficiency of its cars improved by an average of 2.7 miles per gallon. Special tax breaks make 4x4s effectively free to American businesses, with the result that they now comprise 46% of the private fleet. Abandoning those tax breaks would remove a major incentive for war.

Our fashion accessories, then, are mowing down the people of Iraq, Bangladesh and the Sahel. They are also slaughtering our own. Because SUVs are higher and heavier, the occupants of a vehicle hit by one are 27 times more likely to be killed (according to the U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) than the occupants of a vehicle hit by a normal car. For the same reasons they kill between two and three times as many of the pedestrians and cyclists they hit as smaller cars.

Obviously, therefore, since Blair now cares so much about global warming, the British government is about to follow the French by discouraging SUVs. I'm joking, of course.

"Industrial civilization," Mustapha Mond, the controller of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, observed, "is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning."