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Are You Making A Difference?

by: Sahail Ashraf

Posted on: Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 9:13 am by: Sahail Ashraf
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Ten years ago, when it was still a small idea and Al Gore hadn’t yet gotten around to scaring the hell out of us, the environment and its attached problems didn’t bother anyone too much. Fast cars still burned fuel like there was no tomorrow. People still drove without thinking about how much fuel or emissions they were messing around with. And no one seriously believed that hybrid cars would be a viable option for drivers.

Then CFCs became famous, Al did his thing, and now you can’t move for Earth Ships, death raining from the skies, and a general feeling that we are all ruining the planet and depriving future generations of basic necessities like light and heat.

Now that environmental issues have directly affected the cars we drive, things have become quite complicated. Catalytic converters are standard, and the current state of play is clear to all: if you don’t drive a hybrid car, or a bicycle, you aren’t serious about the environment.

But what do hybrid cars actually do for the environment? Are they actually helping? When you fire up the thing in the morning, are you actively transforming the future of the kid next door?

The truth is that, with the massive number of vehicles running around on the planet’s surface today, changing your car so that it runs on alternative fuels is one of the single biggest impacts you can make on the environment. The very fact that you use your car every day means that it has a regular impact on the world. And if you are using a greener vehicle, that regular impact is positive, rather than negative. If you aren’t convinced that cars are having this huge effect on the environment, just imagine what it is like at the Champs Elysee right now, one of the busiest places for traffic on Earth, the least safe place to be a pedestrian, and possibly the single worst spot on the planet for a negative carbon footprint.

To put it more starkly, every time you run a gallon of alternative fuel you have just prevented a gallon of conventional gas from being burned and the subsequent mess of poison being released into the atmosphere. We’re talking carbon monoxide, dioxide (which stops heat from escaping in the atmosphere), nitrogen and sulphur. All of that rubbish will still be released in the millions of gallons used every day, but thanks to you, it will be one gallon less.

Then there is the fossil fuel issue. The United States is a major drain on the world’s resources of fossil fuel. This is the stuff that is going to run out. There is no actual agreed time frame for this, but let’s say that your children’s children will probably watch the natural oil and gas in the ground and under the sea disappear before their eyes on the television news one day, and leave it at that. But before they become extinct sources of fuel they will run low, and cost millions and millions of dollars to find and extract. That’s before they go. So the situation we are left with is an increasingly more expensive resource. And then you come along in your hybrid, actually making a difference, either by cutting down on the wastage of those fossil fuels, or abandoning their use altogether.

You put all these ideas in the pot and you can see, quite clearly, that using a hybrid car has a positive impact that will slow the problem down, and hopefully sow the seeds for the long term solution.

We shall return to this topic another time. But when all is said and done, and you have managed to realise some savings in your fuel bills, step outside and look at the world. And remember that, in some small way, you are changing it’s future.