So yesterday we took delivery of our new Civic Hybrid (in an attractive shade of Magnetic Pearl, with the dealer-$-packed options including a custom leather interior). We’ll be selling the Odyssey in the next few weeks (anyone want a nice 2000 Odyssey?), and this will be our only car (well, we do have four motorcycles…).<\/p>\n
The tipping point toward decision was a spill TG took on her motorcycle while commuting; minor, little damage except to the cosmetics of her new bike and to my lifespan as the anxiety hit my adrenals…The program in California that lets hybrids use the HOV lanes is about to close, and by buying a hybrid now, we could get stickers allowing her to drive to work and still use the carpool lane – a saving of about 15 minutes on her otherwise 50 minute drive.<\/p>\n
Hopefully, she’ll use it…<\/p>\n
But there were other reasons as she & I discussed it last week.<\/p>\n
The biggest one is simple; we’re down to one kid in the house, I’m not racing motorcycles (requiring a trailer), and so we haul around a bigger vehicle than we need. Objectively, the environmentally soundest thing we could do would be to put another 60 or 70,000 miles on it, and not buy a new vehicle. <\/p>\n
But I do think it’s worth something to make tradeoffs between long-term and short-term impacts, and right now the thing we need to do is buy less oil. And while the difference between a 25mpg Odyssey and a 35mpg Civic Hybrid isn’t great, there’s some difference – back to my minor steps that add up theory.<\/p>\n
And like it or not, it’s a public statement. In my case it’s not a public statement about global warming or saving the ice cap. It’s a public statement about lowering the price of oil and starving the funding for Finbury Mosque and all the other places around the world where people are being taught to hate me and my children.<\/p>\n
So yes, I know we’ll likely never see a ROI on the price we paid unless gas is $4.00 per gallon. The value to me is the security of TG commuting more miles on 4 wheels instead of 2, and of my putting our money – literally – where my mouth is<\/a> on what we ought to do about energy policy.<\/p>\n Once we get a few miles on it, I’ll talk about it some more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Armed Liberal goes crunchy, buys hybrid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}