The greenest car is the one that’s already on the road…

A couple days ago I wrote a post about green buildings arguing that tearing down an existing building and building a new “green” building doesn’t necessarily save energy. One of the reasons is because constructing a new building takes a lot of energy, regardless of the construction materials used. This is also true with cars.

I read on the Wired blog yesterday about Ryan Mickle. A couple years ago, Mickle bought a Range Rover Sport. Now he lives in San Francisco and regrets his decision because he believes the SUV is environmentally irresponsible. He writes:

One Fewer SUV.

Since I moved back to San Francisco, I don’t need a car, so I want to take this SUV off the road for good. If I sold it, it’d just keep polluting with someone else behind the wheel. So I’m leaving what to do with it to everyone to help me decide.

…

Send me your ideas.

Should we blow it up? Drive it off a cliff? Convert it to a biodiesel or plug-in hybrid and give it to an organization that can use it to do something great? I’d expect that the best ideas will both be environmentally conscious and attention getting.

If Mickle is truly concerned about being environmentally conscious, he has a real problem. He says he wants to take the SUV off the road for good, but that’s almost certainly the most environmentally irresponsible thing to do.

A lot of energy goes into manufacturing a car. There are the obvious energy expenditures such as the power required to produce and transport the raw materials and the assemble and transport the car to a dealership. But there are unseen energy costs such as the energy that was required in the research and development of the car and the energy component of the administrative overhead for the auto company. All of this energy use adds up.

Mickle doesn’t want this car on the road because it only gets 13 mpg. That’s true, but throwing it away is wasting most of the energy that was used to manufacture the car. This is the point of reusing something–we reuse something because it is cheaper (or requires less energy) to reuse something rather than throw it away. A car is definintely not a single-use product.

It would be more environmentally conscious to give this car to someone who is going to buy a new car than destroying it. It might seem counter-intuitive, but people who want to “be green” need to think about all of the costs and benefits of their actions, not just one aspect (such as a car’s fuel economy).