Happy Hour for Petroholics: We Can’t Afford Cheap Gas

posted by Rainforest Action Network

How Ford and GM can possibly frame their latest auto buying incentive as helping anything but foreign wars and global warming is totally beyond me.

On my way to work this morning, I heard a GM commercial state that if you buy a HUMMER by July 5th, you will pay only $1.99 per gallon of gas for an entire year. A Hummer! So GM is incentivizing the worst gas guzzler known to humankind by offering discounts on the gas that fuels this country’s oil addiction. It’s like a happy hour for petroholics!

Yet the auto companies are framing this as “fuel protection.” Of course, this short term subsidy will save the Hummer-driver a few bucks during the first year. But at what cost? The Hummer-driver will go on polluting our air without any consideration, since the one factor that might have made them think twice (the high price of gas) has now disappeared. Not to mention that after that first year, your 10 mpg Hummer is going to cost a fortune in gas.
How about instead, Ford (who is offering similar incentives and is the automaker with the lowest fuel-economy of any automaker) and GM build more fuel-efficient cars?! GM touts its fleet’s great gas mileage in the very same promotion it offers its free gas for Hummers. I’d say the the two cancel each other out.

Not to mention that today Ford reneged on its commitment to build 250,000 hybrids by 2010.

The hangover from this one’s going to suck.