Word: carlis
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...buying a hybrid isn't really that helpful? Hybrid cars require less fuel. They lower the cost of driving for the person who owns that car. When you make a useful item less expensive, the natural economic reaction is not to use less of it. It is to consume more...
...car changed the way we consume energy? In 1949 only 3% of American households had more than one car. Now there are more cars on the road than there are licensed drivers. When we think about cars we tend to think only of the energy they consume directly, the gasoline. It's certainly significant, but the truly problematic form of energy consumption related to cars is what they allow us to do, which is spread out. We get oversize houses that require huge inputs of water and energy. They let us live 50 or 100 miles away from the place...
...that? To get people out of cars, you have to make their communities denser and also make driving distasteful in one way or another. New Yorkers don't drive, because it's extraordinarily frustrating to have a car in Manhattan. New Yorkers look at the traffic jams and think, We need to get these cars moving - they're sitting there spewing exhaust. But in fact, traffic jams are environmentally beneficial because they're the reason you go down into the subway. If the cars were moving, you'd be in one of them...
...Environmental impact is higher per capita in Vermont than it is in New York City. They use more electricity, more oil, more water. The average Vermonter burns 540 gal. of gasoline per year, and the average Manhattanite burns just 90. Only 8% of American households don't own a car. In Manhattan, it's about 77%. Backyard compost heaps notwithstanding, Vermont's environmental impacts are greater...
...only fun the film rouses itself to is casting Willis as both Greer, a grizzled, bearded depressive (his son has recently died in a car accident, the victim of lazy screenwriters), and his nearly unstoppable surrogate, who lives out the career as an FBI agent that Greer used to do himself. It's a hoot to see Willis looking young and blond, his face miraculously unlined. This is how he might actually appear today if he'd stayed in TV - and if he'd been a much less daring and dangerous actor. But the spectacle won't lure enough customers...