In the local news report, a gas guzzling SUV went from 9 mpg to almost 21mpg.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Hydro-4000

A Prius or other high mileage car uses less fuel per mile than lower mileage cars.  One of the two root causes of all environmental harms is overconsumption.  So driving a Prius is less environmentally harmful than driving a car that gets lower gas mileage.  What the hell does that have to do with being a yuppie?  Unless Grist is advocating that everyone give up their cars, which would be great but which Grist is also clearly not advocating.

I thought the little comment about "yuppie environmentalism" was very good and hit on some heads. Since I did not write it originally I can only guess what it means. I guess that it refers to  those young, urban professionals who find it important to decorate their lives with some currently popular product that shows off their life-style rather than changing their life-style no matter how it LOOKS. I have questioned the styling attempts of car designers before. If fashion and looks guide your thinking, you will create a short-lived fad and the people who follow it will run after something else tomorrow. Trendiness, and the industry who supports/created it has created the consumerism you attack. And young urban professionals seems to be falling for this sort of marketing in way too many areas.

If I sell my car and buy a hybrid, I most likely create more pollution than if I just keep my car and run it as long as it can still run. That is because the production of a hybrid has quite an impact on the environment and because somebody else will drive my car and drive it too (unless I trash it rather than selling it). Of course, I do not have an inefficeint car, it is a 1997 Saturn and where and how I drive it I get between 36 and 40 mpg. In addition, not using a perfectly good car and buying a hybrid is in my opinion "over-consumption".  

Consumption is not limited what you do with the product. It needs to be looked at from the beginning to the end of a product.

And if environmentalism stays its course in North America, ANY THING you can buy here will be green. Not because it really will benefit the environment, but because it possibly damages the environment less while FOR SURE being BELIEVED to be "green". The marketing people in charge of influencing your wants know what they are doing.

What makes you believe that a Prius "is less environmentally harmful than driving a car that gets lower gas mileage" and "a lot better"? Are you a romantic environmentalist and fell for the "want to believe" and "feeling green" too?

Some people like more than just feeling they are doing the right thing. And that does not make them anti-environmentalists. In my case, it makes me cautious and weary of "easy" technological solutions that do not require habit changes and where reliable data is hard to come by. Like in case of a hybrid car.

A hybrid car like the Prius is not a racing machine and I do like that so many people are willing to forgo high performance regarding speed and acceleration. It will allow higher performance regarding pollution and energy consumption in all sorts of vehicles.

Karsten
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http://www.polluteless.com
Practical Advice to Pollute Less

Rising food, resource and fuel prices will increasingly make automobile ownership too expensive for the average person. Increasing congestion will make driving an even less efficient form of transportation. Meanwhile, improvements to transit, rail and cycling will give people the real transportation choices they need.

The automobile is going the same way as the cigarette. Fewer and fewer people will be using them

How many of those who bought a Prius would have otherwise held on to their current cars for longer? How many would have bought a bicycle instead? How many traded in their cars for a Prius, and how much were those cars driven by subsequent owners? What do Prius owners do with the money they saved on gas? Did many of them buy flights?

All else being equal, higher-mileage cars are a good thing. But when trying to calculate an environmental footprint, not all else is equal.

The point is that 40 years ago if someone said that only 16% of people in British Columbia would be smoking today, people would look at you as if you were crazy. To assume that people will continue to drive 40 years from now just because they do today is quite a stretch. The world does change sometimes quicker than anyone can anticipate. The automobile is going the way of smoking and the horse.

As far as driving goes, in the City of Vancouver, the percentage of people that drove to work is down to 51% down from 55% ten years ago. Pretty soon it will be below 50%. Once you lose the majority, the pace of change picks up.

I, however, would be wary of buying any type of new car right now.  Technology is changing so fast, and who knows what the price of gas will become, or how soon peak oil will occur and cause a massive shift in transportation habits.

It seems that the future of transportation must at some point shift to more biking, walking, and public transport; but it's tough to say when the "future" will happen.  To some extent it's happening now- but at different rates for different people.  

What's really needed, as I said at the end of my post, is for people to give up driving altogether.  If humans are going to come anywhere near fixing the ecological devastation they've wrought over the past 10,000 years, they're going to have to live a lot more simply and naturally.  All cleaner technology can do is mitigate the harms, not fix them.