We need to use a lot less oil and emit a lot less CO2. I doubt anyone who regularly reads this site would seriously debate those assertions. As we see so often, the truly interesting issues arise only in the follow-up questions: What do we cut? Who has to make which lifestyle changes (and, in some cases, sacrifices)? Who bears which monetary costs? And, most important of all, who gets to answer those first three questions?

All of this came to mind when I read a couple of items that flowed through my news feeds in the last couple of days…

Courant.com: Some Still Swear By Gas Guzzlers, But For How Long?:

Whether I’m launching onto I-84 or passing a truck on Route 44, I want to hear a sound — not a buzz or a whine, but a throaty snarl that speaks of power and survival.

Like many Americans, I need a car with spirit and heft, and if it has some elegance or attitude in the fender lines, so much the better.

Events, however, are conspiring to end this long affair.

Rising fuel prices, the recession, federally mandated fuel economy hikes and smart growth are combining to scrap the vigorous, often chunky vehicles that take our cheeseburger-loving behinds down the road. It won’t be long until we’re all skittering along in identical pods, spurting puffs of mist from our hydrogen-fueled mini motors; or worse, moving under our own puny power.

So I say, let’s enjoy these final years of gas-guzzling joy. Get under the oil tap this Memorial Day weekend and swill.

Speaking as an ex-motor head, a guy who owned sports cars and a 100+ HP motorcycle, someone who lived and breathed 0-to-60 times, 60-to-0 braking distances, lateral G-force ratings, etc., and thought it was my moral duty to exercise all of a speedometer’s range while wallowing in the adrenaline rush of eyeball-flattening acceleration, I have to admit that I went through a list of reactions upon reading this.

My knee jerk reaction: Get over it. The age of mindless, thoughtless consumption is over. Even here in the historically myopic and selfish US we’re (finally!) exiting adolescence and becoming acutely aware of how much our actions affect each other, and therefore ourselves. Poor baby–you have to give up your bloody hobby as part of our joint effort to avoid the twin horrors of peak oil and climate chaos!

After a few moments of contemplation, I realized I was making the same idiotic and infuriating mistake that so many others make: I’m imposing my own values (as they exist today) on others, dismissing the viewpoint of the people I’m passing judgment on, and confusing strategy and tactics.

I’ll come back to these points below, but let me flesh out the pattern a bit with the other article I read, Cultural Trends Examiner: Indy 500 continues to waste fuel: Another car race with no awareness of recession or peak oil:

The Indy 500 happens at this time ever year regardless of the price or scarcity of gasoline. It’s pushing $3 per gallon, and it was near $5 per gallon last year. Still, these folks continue to blow off valuable energy as if there is an endless supply. They no longer use gasoline but have replaced it with ethanol, the plant-based fuel that is now causing us to grow corn and sugar for fuel rather than feeding the 25,000 who will die of starvation today. Experts say that the energy required to fill one SUV tank could feed a single person for an entire year.

And we still haven’t even included the waste from the fuel used by people who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend and watch cars drive fast around and around and around. I thought that we were deep into a recession, and that people were having trouble with the basics of life. We’ve been asked to limit our use of oil and combine out trips to save fuel, but these racers just keep driving nowhere. And people come out to watch and cheer as long as they make lots of noise and crash every so often. How about a real technology race of electric, sustainable energy vehicles?

That does not seem to be the interest of such big sports events. People are still attending and making a big deal about this type of “competition,” which is really nothing more than lots of fat cat corporate types getting “we the people” to get excited about overpaid “athletes” creating a spectacle. It’s just big money using more big money to attract money from unconscious people (mostly guys).

The majority of people who have the great seats are corporate executives whose tickets are bought by the company, many of which are being supported by U.S. government funds. That big corporation may be receiving bail out money from us (”we the people” American taxpayers), but they still “invest” in taking themselves and their clients to these big sporting events.

Since I try very hard to stick to the numbers in such discussions, let me point out that the amount of fuel used every year in the US during these races plus everything burned to get the drivers, their huge support teams, the cars and other equipment, and all those spectators to a race is certainly an impressive number, in absolute terms, but a truly insignificant one in terms of the overall US liquids fuels consumption. I won’t bother doing the research needed to ballpark the number; consider it an exercise left for the reader. Nor will I address the issue of who is buying those expensive tickets, which borders on class warfare and is therefore irrelevant.

The problem with this view of Indy and car racing in general is that it views the whole operation via a specific set of values and imposes a moral judgment on those who see the world differently.[1]

But wait, I can hear people typing into their angry e-mail already, isn’t it absolutely true that if we gave up a lot of completely unnecessary activities, like holding and attending many professional sporting events, that we would forgo a lot of CO2 emissions and effectively leave a lot of oil in the ground? Wouldn’t that benefit us all? Of course it would, and I’ll sign up for that view just as soon as someone gives me a list we can all agree on of which things are truly “unnecessary”. You might think the first writer’s obsession with all things automotive, or my obsession with lacrosse, are inexcusable luxuries. But taking those “unnecessary” things away from people like us (and your favorite things away from you, I dare say) would have a huge impact on our lives, even if they don’t provide food, clothing, shelter, or medical care.

So, we’re at a stalemate, and we should do nothing, and race right off the edge of that quickly approaching cliff, right? Of course not. What we should do is take the approach that I keep preaching governments should adopt: Set the strategy (reduce CO2 emissions, reduce petroleum dependency), but don’t pick winners and losers. In the case of government subsidies, that usually means not selecting one technology over another for support. In the case of our individual lives and how we view the actions of others, that means leaving moral judgments for more appropriate circumstances, like how we view issues of prisoner torture or war in general, aside and focusing on the big goals.

That’s a nice sentiment (I hear you typing), but in the real world the government has to favor some solutions over others, even before our quaint panorama is warped almost beyond recognition by the absurdities of politics. Witness the recent changes in funding for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, Yucca Mountain, the ongoing PTC (production tax credit) for renewables, the endless support for corn-based ethanol, and the subsidies for nuclear power, including insurance, which would be all but impossible to acquire without government help. Until we have a reasonable price on CO2 emissions, then I think we have little choice but to employ technology-specific government support, especially where it’s critical to providing the stable, investment-friendly environment that’s critical in building a large enough industry for building and maintaining wind turbines and solar power in its various forms, for example.

I’m more convinced than ever that the solution on the climate portion of our shared nightmare is a well run (note the emphasis) cap and trade system for CO2 emissions and most other forms of environmental impact. Set the overall limit and let the market and individuals decide how they want to divide it up, with no subsidies for anyone aside from R&D funding. If some entity wants to horde its CO2 emissions allotment, in effect, and then blow it all on attending a couple of races or lacrosse games or NFL games or science fiction conventions or yacht races or whatever “unnecessary”, legal pursuit you can name, then that’s fine, and it matters not the least whether the entity is an individual, a university, a government office, an NGO, or a corporation. The grand goal–get CO2 emissions down to X tons/year–is still met, and that’s all that matters. Moral judgments should be as irrelevant to us as they are to the atmosphere, which draws no distinction between CO2 emitted for a “good reason” vs. that emitted for something “unnecessary”.

Peak oil is a far more problematic issue, as trying to get people focused on a hard and fast limit–the US has to reduce its oil consumption to Y million barrels/day next year–simply because the education process is so much further behind that for climate chaos. I know and have spoken with quite a few mainstream consumers and voters who have more or less accepted the conclusion that climate chaos is very real problem, one we have to address as soon as possible and much more vigorously than we have to date. And yet a large portion of these people (80%?) don’t realize we’re facing a second ticking time bomb in our world oil supply. Almost any attempt to talk to them about it futile, regardless of the approach (and I’ve tried everything short of puppet shows). Part of this is, I think, crisis exhaustion. Between all the aspects of the economic mess we’re living through plus all the enviros hammering at them over CO2 emissions, they simply don’t have the mental and emotional bandwidth to deal with yet another Big, Scary Thing. As a result, they think that “there’s plenty of oil” to be had, and there is no deadline approaching. Of course there is a deadline–the amount of oil in the ground and the amount of CO2 we can pump into the atmosphere without triggering a climate catastrophe are both reality-imposed limits, whether or not we choose to see them as such.

Put another way, this is a plea for us to stop and take the time to evaluate which issues do and don’t matter as the twin terrors of peak oil and climate chaos rush ever closer. We should focus all our resources on addressing the truly important ones as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then simply ignore the rest.

And as soon as I have a good definition of what’s “truly important”, I’ll let you know…

[1] I would say something here about the anti-suburbs fetish that’s so rampant in some corners of the blogosphere, but that would side track the entire discussion, so I’ll leave it for another day.