It's time to kiss those SUV's good-bye

By GERRY WARNER
Cranbrook Daily Townsman
Jan. 26, 2007
I was sitting in a local coffee shop in Kimberley the other day minding my own business when I overheard the conversation of a Calgary couple sitting close to me. Seems one of them had just bought a new vehicle and was he ever impressed. Apparently his new $60,000 truck, equipped with all the bells and whistles could do just about everything except cook dinner. It had a GPS that instantly gave him his geographic coordinates every inch down the road as well as a digital thermometer that told him the outside temperature. It had some new-fangled device like a dictaphone that he could speak into and play back in case he forgot what was on his mind. The truck had a king cab with a DVD player in the back seat so the grandkids could watch a movie while grandpa concentrated on driving. It had . . . well, you get the idea.
This kind of got me to thinking about the first vehicle I ever knew in our family which was a green, 1950 Chev pickup, which was damn good at hauling wood, coal or manure and if you wanted a weather report you licked your finger and stuck it out the hand-cranked window. I can recallour trip to Los Angeles in 1954, the year before Disneyland opened. My dad, a bit of a visionary in his day, built a wooden camper on the back and that's where we slept on the four-day journey from the Kootenays. Mind you, we almost lost my mother along, the way because she made the mistake one long day of crawling into the back camper while dad was driving and almost died from the exhaust fumes. Either that or it could have been the diaper bucket in the back. It was pretty rich back there. But what did that matter to a crew of hicks from the Kootenays heading for the bright lights of the City of Angels with freshly cleaned diapers from the diaper bucket hanging on the outside mirrors of the old pickup to dry them!
Those were the days.
But getting back to the couple with the new wheels. They sounded awfully proud. Most people from Calgary do. But did they really have that much to be proud about? I don't think they did because of one simple, compelling and undeniable fact -- they had just paid $60,000 for one of the oldest pieces of technology created by mankind -- an automobile. Think about it. For more than 100 years, we've been driving, riding and sometimes committing hanky-panky in these metal boxes that have not fundamentally changed in more than a century. You can go back to the Dodge brothers, Henry Ford or Rudolf Diesel and it's the same drill -- an internal combustion engine, mounted on a metal frame rolling along on four vulcanized, rubber tires. Anything other than that is a refinement, not a change.
So as I sat there listening to the couple gush about their new toy I wasn't impressed at all, if anything the opposite. Given this world with its carbon saturated atmosphere that's slowly killing us all, given the stranglehold oil retains on the international economic order and politics and given the millions of lives lost in wars to control which way the oil flows, why should I, or anyone else for that matter, be impressed by the latest gas-guzzling, environment destroying, war provoking automobile to roll off the assembly line? Except, of course, I own one -- an SUV no less -- and I'm just as guilty as the next schmo.
So where does this leave us? One of my colleagues at the Daily Townsman rides a bicycle to work every day, winter or summer. Good on him, but that's not the solution for everybody. There are hybrids out there, a small step in the right direction, but they're not cheap and they're not exactly a radical departure from the conventional vehicles we've known all these years. Apparently some communities in the U.S. are now allowing electric golf carts-- some of them even pimped up with mag wheels -- on the regular roads where the speed limits are low. And if you've ever seen the documentary "WhoKilled the Electric Car" you won't be surprised at this phenomena at all. Legendary country-blues singer Willie Nelson has invested in a string of service stations that sell nothing but bio-diesel fuel and there's even a bio-diesel outlet in Sparwood. Ballard Power in Burnaby has been working on an efficient, affordable, hydrogen fuel cell for years and one of these days there's bound to be a breakthrough in this technology or something else. Who knows? Maybe it will be nuclear fusion?
Whatever the case, it can't happen too soon. The world currently uses 81 million barrels of oil-a-day, one quarter of which is consumed by the U.S. alone with China next at six per cent. These numbers are unsustainable. World oil supply is expected to peak this century then rapidly decline.
So the next time you hear a politician decrying Kyoto, tell him to buy a bike.
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The Old Tree Hugger

Elk River giant cottonwoods.

Bush fails again in Iraq; Democrats no better

By GERRY WARNER
Cranbrook Daily Towsman
Jan. 12, 2007
"Iraqis risk losing the support of the American people."
So spake President George Bush in a news conference Wednesday announcing as Commander in Chief he was sending 21,000 more troops in the black hole known as Iraq. "Support." Is there some kind of cruel joke going on here? Do you think for a minute that -- God forbid -- you were suddenly transported to downtown Baghdad and struck up a conversation with an Iraqi that he or she would be gushing about all the wonderful "support" they've received from the American people?
If you were unfortunate enough to have such a conversation and the Iraqi you were talking to took you for an American, you'd be lucky to survive the experience given the Dante's inferno Bush and company have inflicted on the war-torn country the past four years. Here's but a few examples I've heard about in recent weeks.
"Lancet," the British medical journal and arguably the most respected medical journal in the world, recently announced the results of a study it made on civilian casualties in Iraq since the Americans invaded. Six-hundred and sixty thousand, that's right, 660,000 dead civilians. Even on his worst days, Saddam Hussein, the "Butcher of Baghdad" would have had a hard time keeping up with that. That's a lot of dead people to "democratize"a country, but we all know when the word "democracy" falls from Bush and Cheney's lips they really mean oil. It was ever thus.
The other incident in the news goes a long way to explain the above and in some ways is even more sickening. On the CBC Radio show "Dispatches" last week, an incident was related about one of the many hundreds of American contractors in Iraq who was getting ready to return home when a thought occurred to him. While working in Iraq and making his millions courtesy of the American taxpayer, he'd never taken a shot at an Iraqi. Everyone who ventures outside the Green Zone packs heat for their own protection and this particular contractor hadn't had an opportunity to use his weapon yet. So on the way to the airport, he started to take pot shots at Iraqi civilians on the street and eventually killed a taxi driver. His ghastly act even horrified American military officials, but when they went to arrest him they quickly found out they couldn't lay a finger on him because military law applies only to members of the military which this man was manifestly not. Nor is there any Iraqi criminal law to deal with such situtions. So for the time being at least, the murderer is free while officials scramble to come up with some sort of legal sanction for such barbarous behaviour.
Kind of makes you wonder who the "barbarians" really are.
Dispatches also related another incident when a 12-year-old Iraqi boy approached a gate of the Green Zone and one of the military personnel got nervous and shot him, thinking he might be a suicide bomber. Turns out the boy, an orphan who lost his parents in the anarchy of Baghdad, was looking for work. War is hell, they say, but this is getting ridiculous.
How Bush can possibly think his so-called "surge" of troops in Iraq can do anything, but make the situation worse is beyond my ability to fathom. Didn't work in Vietnam. It's not working in Afghanistan and it won't work in a country now embroiled in a civil war as much as many Americans, and some Canadians, would like to deny it. Unofficially, Bush's own generals are supposed to have told him that either send 200,000 more troops or get the hell out of the country because anything short of that won't make a difference. And the use of the word "surge" is interesting. In these days of spinning the media, surge sounds powerful, like something is really happening instead of the tragic realty of Iraqi civilians dying every day and American soldiers dying almost every other day. (more than 3,000 and counting).
The words of former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli come to mind:"When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging."I don't know if Bush reads history. He says he reads the Bible which has alot of warfare in it too. Perhaps he should read the Bible more closely. But in all honesty, it's not just Bush.
The newly victorious and emboldened Democrats haven't exactly distinguished themselves on the Iraq file either with the exception of Howard Dean, the only high- profile Democrat to come out clearly against the war, but couldn't carry the party with him. Hillary Clinton, the unannounced, supposed front-runner, has yet to enunciate a clear position on Iraq and neither has Bar ack Obama, her supposed main rival who has done nothing beyond complaining Americans are "baby-sitting a civil war."
It's fish or cut bait time as far as Iraq is concerned. If the Democrats want to avoid having Bush dump Iraq into their lap in the next election, they should cut funding for the war now.
Otherwise they'll take the blame for Iraq in 2008 and they will deserve it.
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