Let's Not Adopt Hypermilers' Creed
Danny Westneat has 50 percent of a good column in the Seattle Times about adapting our hyperconsumptive ways to something we can all live with. But he tries to hang it on the "hypermiler" hook, a buzzword which "means going to extremes—in changing your habits as well as your technology—so you can max out your gas mileage."
Going to extremes is what's got us in the mess we're in. What we want is incremental shifts toward sustainable behavior that you don't need to have OCD tendencies to support. Extremes create overshoot and blowback; sustainable behavior may turn out to be transformative, but it's largely about identifying wasteful gaps and filling them.
Westneat says: "Invest if it makes the country work better. By building mass transit. Solar arrays. Wind farms. Natural-gas cars. New energy grids. Anything that transforms the economy as it boosts it." That first line is the best. Invest in what works better. The Al Gore-ish, magic bullet stuff that comes after...who knows. We'd love solar jetpacks, too, but right now the best way to save gas is not through hypermiling, but by eliminating the gas-guzzlers through fuel efficiency requirements.
Visual illustration thanks to ChrisB, a valued member of the Seattlest Flickr pool.
