Tom Whitehurst

Ozone briefing provides insight into car culture

   The three-quarter-mile drive to a news briefing about ozone provided time to reflect on individual choices that affect our environment. A three-quarter-mile walk would have provided five minutes more.
   All of the speakers, and everyone else I asked, drove to the event on Tuesday, where we were told how perilously close we are to losing our status as the nation's largest industrial clean-air city.
   Mayor Loyd Neal arrived in his Jeep Cherokee sport utility vehicle - only slightly worse of an enviro-criminal than my premium-burning, six-cylinder '91 Toyota Cressida, but a petty offender compared to the Chevrolet Suburban driven by Ray Allen, executive director of the Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program, or the Chevy Z-71 off-road pickup driven by Buddy Stanley, regional manager for the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission.
   Stanley's boss, TNRCC executive director Jeff Saitas, set a better example, driving here from Austin in a six-cylinder 1993 Toyota Camry. That's his family's big car. His other vehicle is a four-cylinder pickup.
   Saitas is a father of three, which reminds me about a conversation I had recently with a co-worker about why in the world she needed her big ol' Ford Expedition.
   "If you had two kids," she said, "you'd understand."
   Shut me up.
   Enviro-citizens
   We live in a world where state Reps. Judy Hawley and Gene Seaman are able to brag, legitimately, that they're responsible enviro-citizens because she drove her Mercury Marquis and he drove his Lincoln Continental to the event.
   A new Continental retails out at around $40K, and Consumer Reports describes its V8 engine as muscular - more so than the same-size V8 in the Marquis. And yet our affluent Republican Lincoln-driving legislator sounded totally believable when he said he was too cheap to drive a gas-guzzling SUV. The Continental is supposed to get 17 mpg in the city and 24 on the highway. A Suburban - which is what Hawley replaced with the 18-in-the-city, 25-on-the-highway Marquis - would get 13 and 17.
   Delivering
   So that's two politicians actually reducing the amount of hot air, while maintaining an extremely high standard of comfort and luxury - in other words, what politicians always promise but never deliver. And it was bipartisan.
   But they could learn a lot about example-setting from Bill Hennings, chairman of the Corpus Christi Air Quality Committee. He arrived in his fuel-efficient, unostentatious, well-below-his-means, four-cylinder, standard-transmission 1995 Honda Accord.
   I'm sure the Europeans would be impressed.
  
  
  

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