Ah, the end of summer. Time to wring the last bit of sun-drenched pleasure out of the shortening days. It's a race against the earth's tilt, and if one must race the earth in August, then why not do it on the water, in something with 320 horsepower, cup holders, a CD player, and a built-in cooler?

I am sitting in such a thing, a 21-foot pleasure boat called the Crownline 216 LS, an air-conditioned showroom breeze blowing around my head. It's mighty comfy up here in the 216 LS captain's chair, which is padded to a luxurious degree and faces out of this showroom toward the southern edge of Lake Union, where the boat is meant to roam at up to 60 miles an hour. At my fingertips is a console that seems ripped straight from the dashboard of a high-end automobile. In fact, sitting here feels so much like sitting in the driver's seat of a luxury car that I imagine turning the boat's steering wheel and merging with the thick traffic just outside the showroom's floor-to-ceiling windows.

I tell the woman who is helping me: This feels exactly like sitting in the driver's seat of an SUV.

"Oh yeah," says Melinda L. Wade, part owner of Sport Boat Northwest.

Beneath me, however, is a vehicle very different from an SUV in at least one respect. It gets far worse gas mileage—only about four miles a gallon, while even the Hummer, the most petrol-thirsty of the SUVs, gets around 13 miles per gallon. I say to Wade that this pleasure craft certainly has poorer fuel economy than any SUV I've ever known.

"Much more pleasure, though," she says, with a saleswoman smile.

•••••

What's a little global warming, or even a lot, if we have a pleasurable time causing it?

Supposedly eco-friendly Seattle is the nation's capital of such thinking when it comes to boats, with the civic fathers here boasting of our having the highest number of boats per capita in the country, while keeping mostly mum about the copious greenhouse gasses these boats cough out each summer.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, however, has spoken up, pointing out that an hour of waterskiing can generate more smog than driving a car from Washington, D.C., to Orlando, Florida. For some large yachts, the group says, 10 hours of cruising uses up more gas than a year's worth of driving. It is these kinds of calculations that led maritime expert Andre Mele, in his book "Polluting for Pleasure," to ask of pleasure boating: "Is there any form of transportation more profligate?"

His answer: "Only a fighter jet."

Seattle, seemingly oblivious to all of this, keeps right on boating as usual, and has even managed to glamorize both fighter jets and pleasure boats with Seafair, our region's annual waterborne celebration of the right to thoughtlessly waste gas and pollute the environment in the name of freedom. It's enough to make a Republican president proud.

Over at the Seattle Mayor's Office of Sustainability and Environment, officials remain unsure of how many tons of greenhouse-gas emissions emerge from the tailpipes of the city's pleasure craft each year, though they say a study is underway. This is the same office that recently spearheaded Mayor Greg Nickels's bold campaign to get cities around the country to sign on to the terms of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, an effort that embarrassed the Bush administration when more than 170 American cities agreed to a seven-percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2012 (terms Bush had rejected for the nation as a whole). Pleasure-boat emissions would be a good place for Seattle to start cutting that seven percent, if anyone knew how much pleasure boats were emitting in the first place. With neither the city nor state agencies having any answers, the best figure one can get is a rough estimate, from the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency: about 135,000 tons.

That is, admittedly, much less carbon dioxide than comes out of the region's far more numerous SUV tailpipes in a given year (about 2.4 million tons), but it's not insignificant. Carbon dioxide is a gas essentially as light as air. Imagine producing 135,000 tons of it. That's a lot of pleasure. And an expensive lot of pleasure at close to $3 a gallon, which is where gas prices are headed as media reports warn of the end of the age of oil, and scientists tell us that humans have either almost, or already (depending on which scientist you believe), used up half of the planet's oil supply—a tipping point at which, experts say, things could start to get very desperate very quickly, though Saudi Arabia, home to the world's largest remaining oil reserves (and, not coincidentally, a majority of the 9/11 hijackers), tells us not to worry, and please keep sending the oil checks.

Seen in this light, pleasure-craft emissions also constitute a telling barometer of Americans' willingness to ignore global realities and screw the environment for the sake of fun, even while that fun is becoming obviously unsustainable and quite pricey. If powerboats, which are more expensive and less fuel-efficient than SUVs, are still as popular as ever with gas approaching $3 a gallon, the idea of conservation has little hope. (There is no serious talk of hybrids in the pleasure-boat world, says Ryan Helling of the Northwest Marine Trade Association, a group that represents boat-sellers, although there is one small electric boat dealership on south Lake Union.)

I asked Wade at Sport Boat Northwest whether pleasure-craft sales were down this summer, given the high gas prices. She said no. Then she went off to help two men who had just walked into the showroom and declared (this was around 4:00 p.m. on a Friday) that they wanted to purchase a boat immediately and have it on the water for skiing that afternoon.

•••••

That evening I took a bike ride along the ship canal between Lake Washington and Puget Sound. I thought about what I had heard from another boat seller that day, a dealer in mammoth yachts. He showed me boats so big that when I asked how many miles to the gallon they got he corrected my question, saying it should be "How many gallons to the mile?"

I rode over the University Bridge, stopped in the middle, and watched the pleasure crafts pass below, with their whimsical names stenciled on their sterns. The True Grit featured a woman in a swimsuit lounging on cushions on the bow. Another, with a name about catching a dream, featured an American flag on its radio antenna. I rode to Fremont, along the part of the Burke-Gilman trail that parallels the ship canal, keeping pace with the Kruizer, a motorboat chugging west.

I wondered to myself: In a city where people have made a sport of stalking SUVs and covertly placing "I'M CHANGING THE CLIMATE! ASK ME HOW!" bumper stickers on them, how have all the boats around us escaped such activist ire? Is it just that we associate boating with a love of the outdoors, and assume boaters would never do anything more selfish and environmentally damaging than SUV drivers?

At the Ballard Locks, I watched a 41-foot Chris-Craft, its original 1969 engines rattling its hull, descend into Puget Sound. Its captain, a man out for a cruise with his family, declared with no evident regret that he was getting one mile to a gallon. I asked the woman I presumed to be his wife whether it was worth the cost.

"Yeah," she called back, wearing purple fleece and white Keds, her boat sinking to the lower level. I must have looked like I didn't get it, because she then called out a further explanation: "It's a perspective thing."