| Dear
EarthTalk: Is General Motors’ new “H3”
Hummer any friendlier to the environment than earlier models,
or is it just a little smaller? --Fred Poisson, Bridgton,
Maine
Indeed, everything is relative. While the new Hummer H3 is
smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient than its larger predecessors,
it is far from an environmentally friendly vehicle. Hardly
fuel efficient, the H3 gets just 16 miles per gallon (MPG)
in city driving and 20 on the highway.
According to the non-profit Consumers Union, publisher of
Consumer Reports magazine, General Motors (GM) developed the
less-expensive Hummer H3--in the wake of shrinking sales of
its larger H1 and H2 models--to compete with other midsized
Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) in the mid-$30,000 price bracket,
such as the Ford Explorer, Honda Pilot, Toyota 4Runner and
Jeep Grand Cherokee. The move paid off, as GM turned a spiraling
downward sales trend for the Hummer line into a 200 percent
overall sales boost for the brand with the introduction of
the H3 last year.
As the biggest and most visible of the large SUVs, previous
Hummer models raised hackles among even more moderate environmentalists
(as well as highway safety proponents) for their excessive,
imposing size and weight as well as their fuel consumption
and contribution of polluting emissions. Far worse than its
offspring, the Hummer H2 gets only 10 MPG in the city and
13 MPG on the highway, and generates more carbon dioxide per
mile than almost any other light truck. The vehicle’s
debut prompted a number of anti-hummer websites and campaigns,
including “Hummerdinger” from the Sierra Club,
complete with facts, figures and a few short films, and a
“Hummer and Hummerer” ad parody circulated widely
on the Internet.
Probably the only way to really “green up” a Hummer--or,
for that matter, any SUV--would be to follow the lead of California
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who drives a one-of-a-kind
Hummer H2 modified by GM engineers to run on compressed hydrogen
instead of gasoline. The prototype car’s primary tailpipe
emission is water vapor. GM owns the vehicle but shares it
with Schwarzenegger's office in order to raise awareness about
the possibilities for the cars of the future. For his part,
Schwarzenegger, who expressed interest during his gubernatorial
campaign in vehicles powered by alternative fuels, likes to
drive his hydrogen-powered Hummer in order to “demonstrate
the economic and technical viability of hydrogen.”
With the exception of Arnold’s H2, the H3 does qualify
as the most environmentally responsible Hummer on the road
today. But that’s not saying much, as SUVs are notorious
for their poor fuel efficiency and heavy emissions. Environmentalists
in need of SUV styling or functionality would do better to
look into gasoline-electric hybrids versions of the Ford Escape
or Toyota Highlander, each of which get about 33 MPG in the
city and 28 MPG on the highways.
CONTACTS: Consumers Union “Greener
Choices” website, www.eco-labels.org/greenconsumers/home.cfm;
Hummerdinger, www.sierraclubplus.org/hummerdinger;
“Hummer and Hummerer” ad parody, www.electrifyingtimes.com/hummer_hummerer.html.
GOT AN ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTION? Send it to:
EarthTalk, c/o E/The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098,
Westport, CT 06881; submit it at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/thisweek/,
or e-mail: earthtalk@emagazine.com.
Read past columns at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php.
Dear EarthTalk: How is it that African-Americans
are said to suffer the most in the U.S. from pollution and
other environmental ills? -- Jon Stein, Novato, CA
While conducting research upon completion of his sociology
Ph.D. in Houston in 1979, Dr. Robert Bullard noticed that
all the city’s garbage dumps were located in and around
neighborhoods inhabited primarily by African-Americans, even
though blacks only accounted for a quarter of the city’s
population. Bullard hypothesized that such discriminatory
siting was no coincidence, especially since Houston had no
zoning laws to regulate land use. At the time, his findings
helped a middle class African American community in the city
prevent the building of a new dump facility in their neighborhood.
Fearful that the Houston situation was no anomaly, Bullard
cast his net wider to find more examples of what he called
“environmental racism.” Indeed, he found not only
dumps, but also polluting factories and other industrial blemishes
throughout the American Southeast--from West Virginia to Alabama
to Texas to Louisiana to Florida--located where poor and sometimes
middle class African Americans lived. While discriminatory
decision-making was no doubt a factor, Bullard also theorized
that such communities’ lack of political experience
also contributed to their predicament. Such realizations gave
birth to an entire new political movement, and today thousands
of activists in the U.S. and elsewhere monitor policy making,
lobby for new laws and fight City Hall in the struggle for
“environmental justice.”
In his seminal 1990 book, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and
Environmental Quality, Dr. Bullard emphasizes that the kinds
of problems he uncovered in black communities in the Southeast
are not limited to a particular region or ethnicity. “People
of color in all regions of the country bear a disproportionate
share of the nation’s environmental problems,”
he said. The book, now in its third edition, highlights some
of the cases Bullard considered over two decades, and makes
a compelling case for taking into account issues of fairness
when it comes to the siting and remediation of hazardous facilities
of any type.
Bullard’s pioneering work also helped shatter the myth
that minority communities didn't care about the environment.
With financial help from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation,
Bullard convened the first National People of Color Environmental
Summit held in October 1991, and a year later published the
first version of the People of Color Environmental Groups
Directory with listings for more than 300 different groups
in the U.S. alone. An expanded version of the directory released
in 2000 is available free online from the website of Bullard's
Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University.
These days Bullard is marshalling all the resources he can
to monitor the “mother of all clean-ups” in post-Katrina
New Orleans, and has been highly critical of the slow pace
of federal and state efforts. Acknowledging that funds are
limited, Bullard wonders, “which neighborhoods will
get cleaned up and which ones will be left contaminated.”
No doubt, though, residents are glad to have Dr. Bullard and
the thousands of environmental justice activists he inspired
on their side this time around.
CONTACTS:
Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University,
www.ejrc.cau.edu; People
of Color Environmental Groups Directory, www.ejrc.cau.edu/poc2000.htm. |
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