Michael Pollan's Prius-Hummer Blunder

Stop typing

Look, you want to do any sort of defensible comparison based on survey it has to be statistically significant, end of story. This is recycled BS. I could invent hours of rederic on demand.

I can provide data on demand showing Hummer's impact on the environment to be so insignificant as to invalidate the coverage it receives.

How about doing the world a service and weigh the fuel consumption vs. vehicle's sold vs. odds the vehicle will be used as intended. That would actually be interesting and informative.

Knarf of IL @ Oct 31, 2009 00:14:28 AM

Intractable opinions

First, the study did not use a survey. The authors used depth interviews, sometimes lasting up to 3 hours plus information (i.e. narratives) drawn from various pro and anti-Hummer websites. The authors are not generalizing to all Hummer owners,. Their point, again, was that Hummer owners can invert the ecological and social condemnations against their vehicles. In other words, they envision themselves as being heroic Americans who are standing up for freedom and holding the line against those who endorse un-American values.

The authors also suggest that is is not an arbitrary occurrence that H2 sales peaked soon after Bush's mission accomplished speech, when the euphoria of resurgent American exceptionalism was at a pinnacle.

For the record, the Hmmmer study made no comparisons of the carbon footprint of Hummer owners versus prius drivers, or vegans or any other eco-segment.

madtownpopulist of WI @ Oct 30, 2009 21:51:33 PM

Yes, ridiculous

They surveyed 20 owners. You can't even get a standard deviation with less than 30 and even then 30 is the absolute minimum. Therefore the conclusions are meaningless and cannot support a definsible position. Period.

Responsible journalism does not support or promote flawed information. There isn't even a disclaimer here stating the study's flaws.

Knarf of IL @ Oct 30, 2009 18:52:11 PM

Not so ridiculous

You are dismissing the Hummer study on brute empiricist grounds but that is never the game in anthropologically-culturally oriented work. There point was the the Hummer owners (and lets be clear politically conservative and devoted Hummer owners) are understanding their vehicles from a culturally pervasive narrative of national identity. The authors drew linkages between prominent cultural expressions of American exceptionalism, hummer owner narratives, and broader rebuttals of global warming, Al Gore, Prius owners that are widely expressed on Hummer websites as well as many conservative blogs. In many respects, it is a far more grounded and powerful mode of analysis than simply reporting we surveyed 1000 people and they on average circled 5.4 on our scaled response to a question.

madtownpopulist of WI @ Oct 30, 2009 16:39:44 PM