On a Sunday morning, clear and cool, I clambered into a white Ford Excursion stretch SUV. The wavy gray seats could have fit 15 people. But I was alone in my limo, transforming it for three hours into Seattle’s largest single-occupancy vehicle. (I am not, for the purposes of this project, counting the driver.)
My mission: use the CO2-spewing internal-combustion engine as inefficiently as possible. By producing a vast quantity of greenhouse gases, even a lone individual can exert an influence on the clammy winter weather in the Pacific Northwest. If I wasn’t willing to get off my ass and change things around here for the better, how could I justify complaining about seasonal affective disorder?
You can usually tell a Seattle resident by how they react to our cool, rainy winter months. Tourists open umbrellas, shrug into upturned collars, and scoot under awnings. Seattleites are stoic; they blink dumbly into the splatter. Don’t fool yourself into thinking this is somehow noble. It’s called learned helplessness—a passive adaptation to a repeated hostile stimulus—and it’s pathetic. Instead we should all make an effort to increase our carbon dioxide output, and secure summer all year long.
So I settled into this roomy Ford Excursion, staring at the tubular jelly lining the interior as it hypnotically shifted between jewel tones like the Henry’s Skyspace. My guilt-ridden imagination kept conjuring images: my gigantic foot crushing Alaskan permafrost (care of the brainy Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker); my hands forcibly injecting harlequin frogs with a fungus whose spread is linked to global warming (reported last week in Nature). I clenched my teeth, cranked up the Postal Service (“No concerns about the world getting warmer”) and Eminem and Nate Dogg (“I want a girl I can fuck in my Hummer truck”), and focused on the mission at hand, Let someone else save the frogs. I was on a mission to heat up the earth.
First stop: Whole Foods Market in Ravenna.
When it was first released, in 2000, the Excursion was the biggest passenger vehicle in the world. Harper’s calculated that “a full-size SUV like the Excursion will produce during a 124,000-mile average lifetime 134 tons of carbon dioxide.” And that’s just the standard model, before the stretch conversion piles on thousands of pounds of dead weight. The hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide don’t just defile the air. A cushion of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases surrounds the planet, absorbing infrared energy and warming the surface of the earth. In other words, the more CO2 we produce, the warmer our winters get.
The Excursion pulled up in front of the Whole Foods and I took my time descending from the cabin, hoping some hybrid-driving Seattleite would attack me for my presumed extravagance and I could take the opportunity to educate him or her about the service such machines are providing in our temperate city. No such luck. My stretch SUV limo attracted a few curious looks, but I retrieved an organic heirloom Spitzenberg apple without being accosted. I gave my driver the address of the Fremont PCC. He looked skeptical—I was keeping him ignorant of my secret mission—and I had the distinct feeling he thought I was nuts.
We arrived in hippie Fremont, drove past the looming statue of Lenin, and squeezed in between the Fremont Sunday Market and the certified-organic co-op PCC. Surely someone would take exception to my choice of transportation here. I was met with mute stares. A man in royal-blue Gore-Tex snapped a photograph.
I was getting fed up. I directed my driver to get on 520 and drive east. Mount Rainier rose in the background, ghostly white against a blank sky.
