At first glance, the above choice seems pretty straight forward. A new hybrid, like the Toyota Prius, gets much better mileage, so how can it not be the greener choice? A recent article on Cut Your Carbon Footprint says that in many cases buying a used car is actually better for the environment.

How is this so? What your everyday mileage numbers don’t take into account is the amount of energy used up in actually building your car. If you buy a new hybrid, you drive it off the lot with a carbon footprint equivalent of burning 1000 gallons of gas. With a ten year old Tercel, for example, you don’t have to add that to your carbon footprint, giving you an instant advantage. It could take you years and thousands of miles to overcome that initial handicap before your ‘Eco-Friendly’ car is actually the better choice for the environment.

Certainly, this is simplifying the argument. There is something to be said for buying a hybrid car where the money you spend supports further products and investment in fuel efficient cars. As bad as most car manufacturers are for the environment, the truth is that if they didn’t make any money then we would be even further from having the more efficient and electric cars that are so badly needed to stop global warming.

Ultimately, the decision has to come down to the individual and there is no ‘right answer’ for everyone. But don’t get trapped by looking only at the mileage of a car when there are in fact so many other aspects of the car that contribute to your carbon footprint.

One of the greenest things you can do on a personal level is to stop using your car. Yes, wouldn’t that be nice. It all works out in that green version of reality I aspire to. Incidentally this is the same version of reality where a horse delivers my vegetables from a local farm.

Recently on the way back from holiday in Cornwall, my car’s engine died. The repair quote, £5800. I love my car, for one reason only, it emits 121g/CO2 per Km and I get 61 miles to the gallon. That’s 550 miles (approx 880 km) for £40. I don’t have £5800 lying around, and if I did I wouldn’t want to spend it on a car.

After a bit of research, I worked out that for the cost of my monthly fuel and insurance bill, I could go to work by train for the same price. Food shopping would be possible by using local shops and on-line shopping. My CO2 footprint would drop, my mountain bike would be given a new lease of life, and my doctor would love me for my new exercise regime. I had turned a nightmare situation into something positive.

But all was not well. With exams to sit, and a house move on the horizon, I couldn’t get away from a niggling feeling in the back of my mind. How I would cope without a car? I should add that during this time, someone I knew was also admitted to hospital, and the inconvenience of not having a car also became emotional. Not having a car was not going to be easy.

But then the answer came. I could resurrect the car with a second hand engine. Alleviating my guilt by the fact that I was still recycling (albeit still feeding my addiction to oil) I scoured the internet. My lifeline came from a engine part recycling website called 1st Choice Spares. Thanks to a good friend, before I long I’d worked out t that I could buy a recycled engine and get it fitted for a total of £1500. Less than it would cost me to get another used car of the same efficiency.

The engine took a while to arrive. It took a while to fit. During that time I lived out my green commute dream by train and cycle. The days were a lot less stressful, no idiots on the road to contend with, and I even caught up on my reading. My thigh muscles burned for the first couple of days, but all round I felt good and virtuous.

Fortunately I was never sold monthly ticket, because South West Trains were planning to strike. (This was subsequently called off). Daily tickets got me by, until a couple of weeks later, I got my car back. The price of diesel had risen, but it was nice to have it back.

I had a lot of time to think about the decision I was making. The fact that I was reading George Monbiot’s book, ‘Heat’ made my decision all the more poignant. Was it the lack of cheap reliable public transport, or the lack of clean cars that annoyed me? Who should I blame for the corner I found myself in. I felt disenchanted with the government for not doing enough to make public transport cheap and I felt angry that car makers for not doing enough to force me to buy a greener vehicles.

So what did I do? Well I channeled all that anger. I lobbied the EU parliament along with thousands of members Friends of the Earth to ask them to impose tough CO2 limits on the production of new cars, and made myself a note to talk about the train ticket price issue with my MP next time I saw him (this would have been another thing difficult to do without a car).

In reality we can all turn the lights off, buy green goodies and follow the grassroots movement for environmental improvement, but we still have to convince those that can make changes to the national grid or make deep structural improvements. With all the good will in the world, we still have to convince our leaders that there is no further wiggle room, otherwise everything we do today will be nothing but tokenism. It’s going to take governments and international agencies to make bold, unpopular decisions to save humanity from disaster.

Today I got stuck in a traffic jam.

Yours,

A guilty car owner.