Monday, May 21, 2007

Keep an eye on your Escalade

About two months ago in the London Review of Books, John Lanchester, known as a novelist and critic more than a political or scientific commentator, wrote a very long and very important piece on climate change. It's a call for the kind of rapid change typically advocated on the left, but it provides some balance as well:

The first thing to do is to admit that Dick Cheney is right. 'Conservation may be a personal virtue,' he said in 2001, 'but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.' Rephrase that sentence to state that conservation is indeed a personal virtue, and both halves of it are, it seems to me, true.

In one very interesting passage, Lanchester wonders why we don't see vandalism of SUVs in cities everywhere:

In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it?

In the new issue of the LRB, Rebecca Solnit, author of "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," among other books, writes a letter to the editor to point out that in the US, some people have jumped the gun on Lanchester:

John Lanchester's piece on climate change was powerfully disturbing (LRB, 22 March). But he's wrong on two counts about the absence of 'terrorist attacks' on SUVs. First, there have been at least a few such attacks in the US: in April 2005, William Cottrell was sentenced to eight years in federal prison and ordered to pay $3.5 million in restitution for destroying some 125 SUVs at dealerships and homes in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles; and the Earth Liberation Front has repeatedly claimed responsibility for damaging or destroying SUVs over the last few years.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:58 PM

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