It is not green to drive a minivan to the other side of the country. The blissful past that saw anonymous middle class men secretly polishing up their hogs and waiting for that one day to whip out to some nature reserve on a distant coast, is slowly turning into an ignorant future. Maybe it’s the wind through the hair, maybe it’s meeting new people in new places; either way, there is something primitive and fresh about escaping monotony on the open road.
It is one of our nation’s finest traditions – the great American road trip, and it has received some unfavorable heat. With scientists making doomsday predictions, inflated gas prices, and long, ugly wars fought for foreign oil, is road tripping becoming just another fleeting, nostalgic story? The new thing your aunt brags about, carbon counting, has become popular, and detrimental to racing a van across the country, simply for the joy of doing so; some folk would have you think it’s depressingly selfish.
Yet there is hope on the horizon.
While in the past, the buffoons in the oil industry nearly killed the electric car (blame it on the media, maybe the government or even yourself, however the oil companies are certainly a culprit), it still exists. But to trek across the country in an electric car today is simply absurd. The cars can only travel a 100 miles or so before they run out of juice. Depending on your geographical location, you might make it past your neighbor’s mail box, and then charging the battery takes about three hours. You might make it out of your neighborhood before sunset.
But some are changing the game. Already, the eco-conscious pioneers are strapping their hybrids and hippy vans with photovoltaic cells, giving their rides an extra 20 miles on a clear day. The intelligent car companies, like Toyota and their hybrid series, are doing the solar thing too. Nissan has a fully electric car and is continually striving to increase its battery life. Best Buy is selling a line of electric motorcycles that can reach speeds of 100 miles per hour.
Getting involved as well is the government. Out West, Washington, Oregon and California have come together to create a “green freeway.” They are projecting that within this year, Interstate 5, stretching from Canada to Mexico, will be lined with renewable fueling sources such as recharged batteries, pumps with bio-fuel, ethanol, hydrogen and compressed natural gas. Obama recently bolstered up the public transit budget with hefty billions, promoting states to invest in renewable fueled transportation. His preposition is to create a high speed rail system across the U.S. that if you read our train post recently, you would know all about. It would likely, according to the Center for Clean Air Policy, result in 29 million fewer car trips and 500,000 fewer plane flights each year, saving six billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions – the equivalent to removing a million cars from the road annually.
Perhaps it is the sad end to the mini-van and the loud boom of the Hog. The road trip has not died but evolved. My advice is take some time off, buy a used hippie van, convert it into an electric/bio-diesel hybrid, strap it with some solar panels, maybe a detachable, mini, wind turbine, mark up a map with nature reserves, and head West, or East, depending on your preference. Buy local foods. Drink at local brew pubs. Get rugged. Bathe in the ocean. Maybe ride a bike through the Rockies. Pull a Forest Gump and run, run, run. If you’re not into the whole treading softly thing, buy the new, fire apple red, Ferrari Hybrid, zip out into the sunset and donate a lot of money to some nature reservation project to keep your conscious clear (http://www.carbonfund.org/).
Perhaps the predictions were correct and Manhattan, Cape Cod and New Orleans went underwater, and San Francisco split off during some epic earthquake… now is the time to discover the other side of the country.
