Transportation & Energy...

Would you like to know the carbon footprint of your new Cadillac Escalade? I bet you wouldn’t. Nope, if you drive one of those you don’t really care about MPGs or pollution. I’m sure you’re just too busy eating your young.

Okay, cheap shot - totally uncorroborated (but not unimaginable). Your annual carbon footprint, according to fueleconomy.gov, is 13.1 tons of C02, by the way. Worse than the 12.2 of the Hummer H3 (the H1 and H2’s footprints are suspiciously absent from the site). Oh yeah, I have found a new realm of self-righteousness and reason to be snotty to people in traffic. Not that I needed any more, I was plenty snotty already…

This one started with mild curiosity:

I read somewhere that the Model T got better gas mileage than the average light-duty vehicle today. Think about the leaps the telephone has made in the last 100 years. From a glorified telegraph machine at the turn of the last century to the iPhone. But cars are getting WORSE fuel efficiency?! The answer is yes and no. The reports of the actual MPG of the Model T vary. Some say that it got average of 21 MPG; others, up to 25. The average for all vehicles today is 21 MPG. But the fudging of the MPGs for sake of argument may never change. The Model T’s all 4 cylinders couldn’t go above 45 miles an hour. It also had a whopping 20 horsepower (compared with the ’07 Camry that has 269).

The thing from an environmental stand point with the Model T was that early versions could run on ethanol. That changed during prohibition. The Model T was not chosen as the most popular car of its time because it was good looking, safe or fuel efficient. It became popular because it could be mass produced and Ford had a credit program where the middle class could at last own an automobile. There were other electric and steam powered cars that were superior to the Model T but economic Darwinism left them behind.

So the Model T kind of got around the same gas mileage as today’s vehicles, if not held to any today’s standards for automobiles. Skewed factoid, but still very interesting. Still mortifying.

That lead me to the EPA’s website, where I looked up what the MPG is on my car (an ‘07 MINI Cooper manual). There is a bit of a difference between what the manufacturer said it was going to be (37-40) and what it actually gets (average 35).

The website now offers to quantify the carbon footprint of your vehicle. Mine is 5.9. The Prius is 4.0. The Aston Martin DB9 Coupe- 15.2. Now I have the ammunition for a juicy new prejudice! “Your footprint is over 10 - don’t even think I’m letting you in!” “Oh yeah, you don’t care about smog, Mr. 11.3? - I don’t care about speeding up so you can have this parking place.” “Hey you, 9.6! Go @*#& yourself!”