Over the past few decades, the United States’ love affair with the automobile has become more and more an addiction to the pump as it is anything else. One of the main causes is the rising importance of what was once a niche vehicle: the sport-utility vehicle, or SUV.
The auto industry, seizing on the “flavor-of-the-month” status that the Chevrolet Suburban enjoyed, has produced ever larger and less fuel-efficient SUVs. With more and more SUVs on the roads, the need for the pump is greater than ever, to the nation’s environmental, social and political detriment.
Conservative commentator Arianna Huffington has taken a stand against increasingly unnecessary SUV use, although we think she’s using the wrong tactics. Advertisements that she helped create are now playing in the nation’s largest car markets, claiming that driving an SUV is tantamount to supporting Osama bin Laden. Her argument: America buys oil from mostly foreign sources, including Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and these sources have had links to terrorist groups, such as Hamas and al Qaeda. Ergo, to buy oil from these sources is to fund terrorism.
While we believe that U.S. dependence on foreign
— and all — fossil fuels should be diminished significantly, we also believe that Huffington’s ads oversimplify a much more complex problem. While it is true that some wealthy Saudi Arabians have funded terrorism, it is often from their personal wealth and not
directly from oil profits.
Secondly, at least some of them give their money not to directly sponsor the killing of innocents by suicide bombers, but instead into more benign purposes that these groups, unfortunately, provide. Either out of political opportunism or genuine concern, groups like Hamas actually provide education, food and clothes to the people under their purview.
The Huffington SUV ads were designed to parody the overplayed Ad Council/Partnership for a Drug-Free America ads (“It’s only harmless fun. … I helped kill a family in Colombia”) that try to link marijuana with terrorism. Both ad campaigns are very misleading, and
instead of trying to foster a discussion of the issues, they use scare tactics to disguise the truth.
In the anti-marijuana ads, the argument is reductive to the point of ridiculousness. All drugs do not come from countries that support terrorism, and even if they did, following the money back to any one specific source or act of terrorism is nearly impossible. Substitute “oil” for drugs” in the preceding sentence, and the same point is true of the SUV ads.
Instead of offering the average citizen falsehoods to discuss around the nation’s water coolers, as these ads do, why not take an informed look at how much of the total U.S. oil imports come from which nations; how much U.S. fossil fuel consumption is because of SUVs; and then put that information in front of the public and let them think about the issue?
We applaud the fact that people are starting to wake up and realize that an overbearing dependence on fossil fuels is dangerous. However, the tactics Huffington is using are counterproductive to a real discussion of the issue.