Back in the day, A- had a zine called the Buick ate my Planet.  I don’t remember how many issues came out, but I do remember that it included suggestions of car-free trips and resources and told stories of living car-free in the bay area.  Anyways, I only bring it up to steal the great name (I think it may have been based on an Andy Singer comic or he drew one specifically for her zine) and it seems to me that as time goes on, it becomes more prophetic. 

I have always been skeptical of green cars, maybe because I am grounded as a bike activist, an anti-car person, and I was still pretty attached to those ideas when cars started gaining in popularity as a form of ecological activism and collaboration.  Although I was skeptical, I really never did the work to justify my thoughts, so I always kept my mouth shut.  Luckily, my friend Alexis has done some of the work to articulate issues around biofuel use, specifically in relation to food production in his article on realitysandwich.com (I love that name!). 

He makes an argument that the current emergence of food shortage and threat of famine is an issue of wealth.  New shortages can specifically be linked to the increasing market demand for biofuels.  Even in historic cases of famines attributed to natural disasters, the famine-ravished countries have continued exporting food, while people within the country starved.   Traditional land used for food harvesting or native agriculture have been razed in most places to export to wealthier nations, in turn making the poor country dependent on cheaper, less nutritious grain imports.  This continues to be true, but now the international poor are also competing with  the automobiles of the wealthy for increasingly scarce calories. 

Then came along the Prius.  I had learned long ago that the most “environmental” way to own a car was to drive as little a possible and when behind the wheel to go gently and keep that car running in your own ownership as long as possible.  Somehow, I got turned onto an article that discussed the fact that a Hummer was more ecologically sound than a Prius (I can’t find the article that I read originally, but this is a newer one).  It came down to a few issues 1)The battery 2) The expected lifespan of the car (3 is outdated with the newer hummers, it was that the Humvee parts were stock parts and not specialty-made). 

Reducing our dependency on them and getting rid of cars (for the most part, at least) is the only thing that will solve all of the problems that we have because of them.  There may be accomodations that solve some of the problems or temporarily relieve the impact, but ultimately biofuels or any other modification to cars is going to be a band-aid. (I would make an exception for the one solar powered car that I rode in at Eastwind Community, but I actually think that biking was a more effective way of getting around and hauling.)