The Nissan Leaf: Polar Bears Get Too Much Credit

What was your initial reaction the first time you saw that Nissan Leaf/Polar Bear Hug commercial. Unless you are among the few remaining discerning consumers of popular culture, you were emotionally moved and felt a vague compulsion to buy a government-subsidized car that you could plug into a wall socket. I thought it was a brilliant manipulation of a poplar myth, used to sell a product whose widespread use will have the polar, if you will, opposite effect of that which is defined by it’s seller. If you have not seen this ad, it features a presumably grateful bear who embarks on a Marketing 101 version of Die Groot Trek to hug a Nissan Leaf owner. The message is: Thank you. Your selfless choice to eschew the use of fossil fuels will now guarantee the expansion of the Arctic Ice Cap and I can finally get back to killing baby seals and the odd slow-footed Eskimo. What the bear and the guy with the electric go-cart don’t know is that 68% of our electricity is created by burning fossil/hydrocarbon fuels (coal and natural gas) and another 20% is generated by nuclear fuel.

I will grant you that if 10 million people started driving electric cars there would be a corresponding decrease in the use of gasoline. But there would have to be a corresponding increase in the mining and burning of coal and the drilling and use of natural gas. We might even need more nukes. These are all things that environmentalists find to be unpalatable. So the question is: What would the realized net gain be from a country of people driving electric cars? I don’t know but I’m guessing that the carbon footprint would be about the same. The only discernible differences would probably be people silently whizzing around at 30 miles per hour and a major run on extension cords.

My main concern is that people don’t even take the time to think about these things. Intellectual curiosity has been dying a slow death in this country for decades. The mainstream media have contributed by devolving into conduits of nearly undiluted propaganda and a lazy and fat populace have become passive consumers of their product. It’s the rare individual that asks himself, “If this, then what”? We live in a society where the best commercial wins and the message of that commercial becomes the new truth. And that doesn’t seem to bother too many of us. Polar Bears are really kind of naive, but so are we.