Posted on 07/18/2003 11:50:13 PM PDT by PeaceBeWithYou
Rockville, Md. (CNSNews.com) - A coalition of environmental and faith-based groups announced on Friday that it would be issuing 15,000 "tickets" to Washington, D.C./Baltimore area SUV owners as part of its campaign to "save our planet from the catastrophe of rapid global warming."
Fred Scherlinder Dobb, a Maryland rabbi and co-chair of the interfaith group, Religious Witness for the Earth, told CNSNews.com that SUVs "are hurting the climate, hurting endangered species, hurting children, and we are out here trying to change that." Dobb held a sign that read: "Dirty SUVs = Global Warming."
The Chesapeake Climate Action Network, at a press conference in front of the Century Ford dealership in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Md., announced the ticketing of SUVs would occur throughout the weekend in the Washington, D.C./Baltimore area.
The bright orange tickets contain negative information about SUVs and their alleged effects on the earth. The tickets are designed to pressure Detroit automakers into making more fuel-efficient cars and SUV owners into rethinking their ownership of the vehicles.
Dobb predicted the tickets would persuade many SUV owners. "I really think [the tickets] will be an eye opener for many people," Dobb said.
SUV owners who are ticketed by the environmental groups can cut the ticket in half and send a pre-written post card to Ford Motor Company CEO William Clay Ford, Jr., demanding more fuel-efficient SUVs.
'Left-wing pseudo theology'
But a free market environmental group denounced the anti-SUV ticketing as "absurd."
"To stop people from buying SUVs to ward off the myth of global warming or to fulfill some left-wing pseudo theology of what Jesus would drive is absurd," David Rothbard, president of Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), told CNSNews.com.
CFACT is a Washington, D.C.-based group whose goal is "to inject reason into the environmental debate."
"SUVs may not fit into the radical green fantasy world where everyone lives within walking distance of their organic alpha garden and solar-powered mass transit train, but Americans in great numbers continue to choose these vehicles because they provide comfort, convenience and safety," Rothbard added.
However, Dobb, who rode his bike nine miles to Friday's event in Rockville, believes people must reject today's SUVs on moral and ethical grounds.
"Consumers should know that every increased mile per gallon means a child breathing easier, an endangered species not teetering on the brink...a global climate less radically altered by human hands," Dobb explained.
"The choices we make and the choices Detroit makes have real moral consequences for people and nature alike," he added.
'Guilty and conflicted'
Laura MacCleery, council for auto safety at the group Public Citizen, slammed SUVs for creating a "vehicle arms race on the highway where everyone has to keep super-sizing their family car just to be safe."
MacCleery believes rejecting SUVs is "socially and environmentally responsible" and noted that she walks to work and doesn't own a car.
MacCleery said her new website, which enlists consumers in a campaign to demand that automakers "make a better SUV," now has more than 100 SUV-driving members since it began about a month ago.
"The SUV owners tell us that they need the utility of the vehicle, but they are very frustrated. They have guilty feelings about driving an SUV," MacCleery said.
Detroit has to improve the fuel efficiency of SUVs soon because SUV owners "are sick and tired of feeling guilty and conflicted," according to MacCleery.
Michael Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said current SUVs "poison our air and destroy our health and warm our fragile planet.
"Drivers don't want vehicles that trigger perilous global warming," Tidwell explained.
"This campaign is not meant to shame SUV drivers...it's meant to shame Detroit," he added.
'Dying political cause'
But Rothbard believes the anti-SUV campaign will end up as another failed political initiative.
"My advice to the SUV owners who receive one of these 'tickets' is to hold onto it like a souvenir or a keepsake from an extinct or dying political cause - kind of like if you received a memo from Hillary's [Clinton] health care task force or a button from the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s," Rothbard said.
He also noted that SUV owners who get ticketed should consider themselves lucky that that's all they received from the green activists.
"These anti-SUV greens are only handing out tickets. They are not firebombing SUVs like some of their more radical counterparts have done out in the northwest and elsewhere," Rothbard said, referring to several incidents of SUV vandalism by radical green groups.
Dobb did concede that it was "understandable" that police were on hand for Friday's event at the car dealership, but he rejected any linkage to eco-terror groups, calling them "very small fringe groups."
"We don't want to tar the entire movement based on what a few extremists do," he said.
Dobb does, however, believe that SUV drivers may also be committing "violence" by driving their vehicles.
"The choice to drive an SUV or to purchase a new one is also doing violence to others. It's just done in more insidious and constant ways every time they turn the ignition," Dobb explained.
But Rothbard sees nothing but hypocrisy in the campaign against SUVs.
"If the same people complaining about SUVs would let us drill for our own oil in America instead of trying to shut down everything whenever we try and pull even a gallon of oil out of the ground, that might help us to achieve energy independence," Rothbard said.
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-Eric
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