Do you feel guilty driving your car?

[CorpusCallosum]

I'M DOING my best. I really am. I ride my pushbike for short trips. I try to use a motorbike for longer trips where I'm not carrying much or wearing a bag of fruit (which is rare, let me tell you).

Basically, I'm trying to limit how much I drive a car these days.
Obviously, writing about them for a living dictates that I still do plenty of miles but I'm talking about non-work travel here. And where there's an alternative, I'm trying my hardest to make it work.But when Sunday morning rolls around, I'm afraid things change a bit. And I make no apologies for that.

Nope, Sunday AM, before the wallies are out there, is when I fire up my old car with its noisy exhaust and triple carburettors and head out for an hour or two, thundering along country roads, annoying no one and entertaining no one but me.

Maybe that sounds a bit selfish to you but I'm not apologising any time soon.
I figure if I'm doing my best to be clean and green through the working week, I can indulge my passion a little for a couple hours. So, you're still screwing up your face at me, eh? Let me ask you, what's your Sunday indulgence? Maybe a good steak? A few beers with your mates? Well, let's look at it through green eyes.

Those beers you enjoy so much are made from hops and barley. Both of which crops are grown and harvested in big paddocks cleared and ploughed by enormous tractors belching black diesel smoke. The beer is made in breweries powered by coal-fired power stations and delivered by trucks to your nearest grog shop. Even the aluminium in the can is smelted using vast amounts of electricity, and that's before we even get to the environmental pillaging that goes with a bauxite mine.

A steak, is it, sir? Then spare a thought for all those methane-emitting cows standing around in paddocks that were clear-felled from bush.
Oh, and don't forget the stench of the abattoir or the hum of the electric motors running the refrigeration plants at the ports of call between the boning room and the butcher's shop.

Seems like you can have your steak pink on the inside, or even blue, but it won't be green. But here's the thing: You shouldn't feel guilty, either.
I'm quite confident I've reduced my overall environmental impact, and not just by riding a pushbike.

It's been going on for years. The Morley household has re-usable shopping bags, our food scraps are composted or fed to the dog (who is most appreciative), we switched to low-wattage bulbs and appliances are off at the wall. We use grey water on the garden and we recently bought a fan rather than an air-conditioner. OK, it's nothing that most households aren't doing but added up it's worthwhile.

And you know what? Apart from remembering to take the bag to the supermarket and composting leftover cabbage rather than feeding it to the mutt (those with dogs and noses will know what I mean), it hasn't really made a lick of difference to our quality of life. Not in a negative way.
And it means I can drive my Sunday car with a clear conscience.

I'm certainly not playing down the importance of the green movement.
It just occurs to me that you can do your bit without giving up on the whole joie de vivre thing.

If I couldn't be a petrol-head on Sunday and a greenie for the other six days, I reckon I'd really have to think hard about being green at all.
And who knows which way I'd jump, but it would potentially be bad for us all.
What about you? Do you get the guilts if you take the V8 for a run on a Sunday? And have you done anything to reduce the carbon footprint of your passion for cars?

So do you feel guilty driving your car?

Personally, I don't. My car does a very good job at providing me transport, keeping me and making me feel safe in the process, been reliable, comfortable, and also very good with fuel consumption and emission. It also has very good performance matched with this.

Tell me how you personally feel???

[cawimmer430]

NOPE

I'm not a treehugger after all.

I do try to do my bit for the environment. Like if I were to live in the city I would buy a small car like perhaps a MB A-Class, BMW 1er Coupe or Fiat 500 with the appropriately suited engine.

[ree]

No, I don't feel guilty! I don't have an own car - so most of the time I ride my bike. And it has still the best CO2 emission.

[MikeJ]

Nah. I do admit I do sometimes drive around the city or the countryside just for the heck of it, but that's not going to make me feel guilty, nor would it if I had an old supercar with atrocious fuel consumption and no catalysts to do it in. The thing is that I don't drive that much because I don't need to - I've chosen my current apartment on the basis of its location, so that getting to work in the morning only takes a few minutes' walk (more to do with wanting to sleep late than environmental concerns, admittedly). And yes, I do recycle my paper/cardboard/plastic/metal/glass/biodegradables...

[coolraoul]

Honestly, I sometimes do feel a bit guilty. I try to do a lot by feet, bus or train or anything, partly because of the fuel cost and partly because of the environment.

But when I drive, well, I don't feel guilty. I only try to avoid "unuseful" trips with the car, but when I need it I need it.

I feel quite concerned by all these "green" issues, it's important to me. But I won't buy a G-Wiz because of that, there are limits!

So it's not really yes, not really no, more in-between. But as everybody voted no, I voted yes

[The Artist]

i dont care..
living in sweden i just get freakin pissed off when they make car owning so expensive, we are only 8million here..
put the pressure on industry and the monster nations like india, china and USA..
when they start to care about the inviroment as much as sweden.. thats when ile think about feeling guilty..

[Centurion]

The only thing I feel guilty about is not having faught hard enough to be driving a better car.

[GBOY]

Not really ...
However, I do feel a little guilty about having an S-550 and a Range Rover. I find myself having to explain all the time what great deals I got on both cars... especially when I also have a CLK 320 for commuting during the week. No one feels my pain at the gas pump on the big boys though, except my GCZ family of course.

[Monster]

Originally Posted by CorpusCallosum

So do you feel guilty driving your car?

Personally, I don't. My car does a very good job at providing me transport, keeping me and making me feel safe in the process, been reliable, comfortable, and also very good with fuel consumption and emission. It also has very good performance matched with this.

Tell me how you personally feel???

I was thinking about posting this up when I saw it in Drive.com but I figure out those who will feel guilty won't be in this forum anyway.

As for myself, no guilt at all. People waste a lot of resources and produce excessive pollution in everything we do, so if we feel guilty about driving, we might as well feel guilty about a whole lot of other things. It is pretty easy to target cars because there is a clear and easy to understand measurement of emissions from the cars, but it is much more difficult to measure the emissions generated by other human activities, things like smoking for one.

Also as you guys will know, there are places which if we want to get there on time, or to get there at all, driving is the only sensible option.

[coolraoul]

Looks like all of you in GCZ are horrible polluting gas-guzzlers who don't care about other people, Mother Nature or the health of the Earth... Well that's bad from you, I tell you...

Honestly, I agree that the car is an easy target.
But it's not a reason not to be more careful. Of course there are other things to do, of course the car is not the Only Awful Polluting Devil, but it's clearly not a healthy, env-friendly ass-moving device.

That's why I now am more careful and try to take the train, bus, or do feetwork more than I used to. But I also try to live in a more environment-friendly way, I think it's important.

I'm not feeling guilty to drive my car. I'm trying not to drive it unless it's necessary. Where I feel guilty, is when I take it although I could have done diferently...
But I'm not criticizing the big cars, or bashing people that go on racetrack the WE!! Passion has always been the motor of the Human's evolution, it's stupid to pretend that competition or pleasure should be banned because of the warming-up. We only have to find other ways, like electrical/fuel-cell motors and others.

I only think that everybody has to do something, and that it's not because others don't do anything for the environment that it's useless to do it yourself.

Everybody can make a little something, it has the power to change the world. Taking the bike/feets instead of the car to make 1km in a city is not such a big effort, and will save your money too.

However, I still like you, my dear GCZ buddies, even if you're destroying the world!