Gray Shades of Green

Gray Shades of Green
Before you embrace new ways to save the environment, think about whether you're doing more harm than good.

By Tom Keane | August 26, 2007

Suddenly, everyone cares about the planet. Prodded by An Inconvenient Truth and worried that our Cape homes might one day be underwater, we're all enthusiastically looking for ways to save the world. That "we" includes the good folks at Massport, the state agency that runs Logan Airport. That's right. Logan says it wants to go green. Hearing this, I thought perhaps the airport was shutting down the New York shuttle and making people take Amtrak. But, no, Massport has something else in mind. A new policy gives drivers of hybrid cars preferential parking at the airport. Yes, use a Prius and you'll get a nice spot just by your terminal, saving oh-so-much time as you head off for your weekend jaunt to Paris.

Let's think this through. Now, instead of taking public transportation to the airport (because, after all, parking is such a pain in the neck), hybrid owners will take their cars. Rather than a smaller carbon footprint, Massport's plan could make it bigger. I call this environmental backfire: something intended to help ends up making the problem worse.

Massport is hardly alone in this. Remember "think globally, act locally"? People act locally, for example, by trying to preserve green space in their towns and keep population densities low. Yet, as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser points out, all this does is push development out farther from cities to areas where there are fewer people to object, which leads to more sprawl. Better to sacrifice a few trees in our backyards and let developers build.

Then there's Brookline's onetime proposal to double excise taxes on SUVs. Agreed, we all hate SUVs. (Well, actually, I hate yours. Mine, I like.) But SUVs are not necessarily more gas guzzling than other classes of automobiles: The 2007 Chevrolet Malibu sedan, for instance, gets a combined m.p.g. of 23, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, while the 2007 Jeep Compass, an SUV, bests it with 24. And then one has to look at how they're used. An SUV carrying two or three people is much more efficient than a hybrid carrying just one.

Car-pool lanes are another instance of environmental backfire. Lanes used for car pools carry far fewer automobiles than if they were used for regular traffic. (They have to; otherwise, no one would have an incentive to use them.) The result is more congestion in non-HOV lanes, which, of course, wastes fuel. In some cases, such as the I-93 zipper lane, the result is appalling. As commuters south of Boston doubtless know, huge jams occur at its entrance as a lane is cut off to make way for the car-pool lane. The problem reappears at the exit, as cars merge back into regular traffic. If we simply made it an open lane – with no barriers – all traffic would proceed more smoothly and less wastefully.

The list goes on. Cloth diapers may seem greener than disposables, but when one adds in the energy used to wash them, it turns out throwaways are the better choice in some cases. (The same analysis might well apply to Sheryl Crow's perhaps joking admonition that we use but one sheet of toilet paper. After the extra soap and hand washing such an approach entails, maybe using a few extra sheets might be better for the environment.) Our desire to prevent forest fires perversely ended up increasing their severity; fire, it turns out, is nature's way of pruning. Carbon trading – travel across country, plant a tree – sounds fine, but by relieving one's guilt, it encourages people to fly more while doing little to reduce the pollution created. True, the planted tree will consume the CO2 your trip creates – in 70 years. The problem of global warming, however, is today.

I don't mean to sound cynical about this. People really do care, but there is a lot of confused thinking out there. Perhaps that's because a degree of faddishness runs through much of our newfound environmentalism, as if going green were a style of dress. Looking the part – from drinking water from refillable bottles to watching LiveEarth – is apparently good enough. Whether something works or not seems regrettably irrelevant.

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2007/08/26/gray_shades_of_green/