Let an admission of hypocrisy herald the end of my three-month voyage from California to southern Mexico: I used a lot of petroleum.

The V8 Ford van that I drove, also known as El Hippo (why the name? see side note), had a hunger that was hard to contain. It got a pathetic 12 miles per gallon. Here I am, exploring the effects of climate, advocating solutions to improve the resilience of coastal communities, yet I’m also part of the problem. Nevertheless, as economics teaches us, the true cost depends on the alternatives. So, as an aspiring do-gooder, I’d like to know, “What is the balance of my evil-doings?”

For the nearly 5,000 miles from Santa Barbara, Calif., to Huatulco, Oaxaca, I used just over 400 gallons of gasoline. That has a carbon footprint of roughly 8,000 pounds of CO2 (according to Terrapass, a carbon-offset provider).

Worse, I had to purchase all the gas from Pemex, the Mexican state company that monopolizes the country’s fuel production and sales, and which has an atrocious environmental track record (an example here). Their facilities on the Gulf of Mexico have made rivers toxic, destroyed fishing grounds and contaminated groundwater supplies.

As observed in the Voyage of Kiri, preserving biodiversity and clean water are just as important as reducing greenhouse gas emissions for the long-term resilience of our communities. In that light, the worse-case scenario for the ecological impact of my journey is that it slightly raised cancer incidence in a Gulf community, accelerated the upcoming extinction of a frog species in that area and made the next flood in Bangladesh just a bit more devastating. Maybe I’m being melodramatic, but when my behavior is added to that of thousands of other people, those thin causal connections may not be such a stretch.

(In contrast to Pemex, multinational oil companies such as Chevron and Exxon maintain higher standards for legal and strategic reasons. However, they do tend to be abusive when regulations are lax, as shown in a notorious case from the Ecuadorian Amazon. Also, myriad oil spills and accidents like BP’s Deep Horizon invariably occur. Another big impact, less related to ecology but of undeniable importance, is the possibility that fuel usage may “fuel” terrorism and democratic repression. Most petroleum purchases support the coffers of military dictatorships and extremist supporters in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria, as outlined by Thomas Friedman’s article “First Law of Petro-Politics” (see PDF). A balancing point: Although Friedman’s argument is compelling, it has also been refuted with empirical studies such as one from UCLA (see PDF).

What were the alternatives to driving and using Pemex gasoline?

More contributors: Mark Frauenfelder (Editor-in-Chief, MAKE magazine), Kipp Bradford (Technical Consultant/Writer), Chris Connors (Education), Diana Eng (Guest Author), Peter Horvath (Intern), Brian Jepson (O'Reilly Media), Robert Bruce Thompson (Science Room)

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