Green Car of the Year?

From R. Thelonious, the infrequent, but dead on balls accurate poster.

My wife and I were driving down the highway the other day. Actually we were stuck in traffic. Parked on the highway. To our right was a ginormous billboard announcing the 2008 Green Car of the Year:

2008 Chevy Tahoe Hybrid!!!

"What the fuck?!" we said to ourselves. Turns out this earth-friendly gas guzzler gets 21/22 mpg est. compared to its non-hybrid brother which gets 14/19 mpg est. Apparently, everyone is gaga that they managed to get a 50% increase in city driving fuel efficiency. Notable, but not laudable. Other hybrids on the market get 30/34 mpg est. So why did Carl Pope, President of the Sierra Club, vote for the Chevy Tahoe Hybrid? Because it "ends the argument that efficiency and vehicle choice are incompatible." In the ongoing debate about the wisdom of partnerships between corporate interests (polluters) and environmentalists, score a point for the cynics who see this as the polluters opportunity to put green lipstick on their pigs.

And then I see this op-ed from Krugman. Though he and I are not very friendly due to his unexplained disdain for Obama, I still read him especially when he informs me that "the average German car uses about a quarter less gas per mile than the average American car. By and large, the Germans don't drive itsy-bitsy toy cars, but they do drive modest-sized passenger vehicles rather than S.U.V.s and pickup trucks." Not only that, but "over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the average mileage of U.S. passenger vehicles rose about 50 percent, as Americans switched to smaller, lighter cars."

Ok, I am done venting. Thanks for listening.