One of the great things about living in the USA is that you can drive what you want, and I can drive what I want, within limitations prescribed by law.
Stated that way, there's nothing special about living in the USA. You can do what you can afford to do within the law in any country.
I don't spew pollutants any more than the law allows.
I appreciate that, as well as your advocacy of closing the light truck loophole so that Chevrolet trucks will have to be as clean as Fords are now (voluntarily) or will soon be. But we don't live in a world (and I don't think you would want to) in which laws are so refined that compliance with them represents the optimal individual and social behavior, leaving no ethical or practical questions to be asked or choices to be made. In such a law-bound world, individual choice would be minimized and conformity maximized.
If, then, we seek a healthy balance between reasonable regulation and individual choice, we should voluntarily go beyond the requirements of the law when we can see that doing so is in our overall interest and will lessen the likelihood of stifling one-size-fits-all regulation.
So the real question is not whether someone can afford a large SUV or 3/4 ton truck, but whether the undoubtedly real and measurable benefit the owner receives from the safety and comfort of a large vehicle is worth the adverse impacts on the environment and the price of oil, the relatively poor visibility from within such vehicles, their tendency to block the sight lines of others, their poor collision avoidance maneuverability, and their disproportionate infliction of fatal results on drivers of smaller vehicles in collisions that do happen. |
