On the heels of the Supreme Court’s monumental decision this week, Freedom from Oil activists stepped it up a notch at the first media day at the New York Auto Show unfurling a dramatic 20-foot banner inside the Javits Convention Center challenging Toyota to become a true environmental leader. The banner subverts Toyota’s gas guzzling Tundra advertising blitz with a picture of the truck driving over a globe with the tagline, “Toyota: The Truck That’s Changing the Climate.”
Check out more photos and video at www.freedomfromoil.org.
After 35 minutes, the two climate change activists were arrested by police for scaling the wall to drop the banner. They were briefly detained by the police and were shortly released.
As the biggest and glamorous events in the industry, auto shows provide climate activists with a major opportunity to draw attention to oil addiction and highlight the automakers resistance to increasing fuel efficiency and getting on the Road to Recovery.
Mike Hudema, co-director of the Freedom from Oil campaign for Global Exchange: “Toyota can’t have it both ways; Toyota can’t call themselves an environmental leader while fighting legislation to curb greenhouse gas pollution and accelerating into the truck market.”
The Freedom from Oil campaign believes that a true environmental leader would: drop the Pavley Lawsuit and let Californians breathe cleaner air; stop lobbying efforts against fuel-economy standards; lead the way in reducing GHG emissions; and make a concrete production commitment and set a timeline for putting Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles onto the roads as soon as possible.
“Building Priuses does not give Toyota license to mass-produce the Tundra,” said Sarah Connolly, the co-director of the Freedom from Oil campaign for Rainforest Action Network. “If Toyota really believed in curbing global warming, why did they argue with the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in the Supreme Court that CO2 is not a pollutant and that the EPA should not have the right to help regulate greenhouse gas emissions?”
While the automakers are using the New York Auto Show to promote eco concept cars, their fleet-wide production commitments are to gas-guzzlers like GM’s Hummer and Toyota’s Tundra. A huge thing to keep in mind is that car and truck tailpipe emissions account for about a quarter of the country’s GHG emissions, and the auto industry has argued against the landmark EPA case every step of the way, so we have to keep the pressure on auto corporations to produce better cars for the health of our future.
Check out more photos and video at www.freedomfromoil.org.
Thats freak’in awesome.
Love the visual. Keep the pressure on . . .’cause . . Pressure Drop . . . oh pressure drop . . . oh pressure drop a drop on you . . . . (Toots)
Here’s what someone from GM had to say about the recent Supreme Court decision while at the auto show:
General Motors’ vice chairman, Robert A. Lutz, today said he does not know yet whether the decision is good or bad for G.M., but he said reducing vehicles’ tailpipe emissions is not as easy or cheap as environmentalists contend. He did, however, remind reporters that carbon dioxide is not produced exclusively by the automakers and their vehicles.
“All of us standing here right now — anybody who exhales is polluting like mad,” Mr… Lutz said. “If we have CO2 limits, I think we should all contribute, and we’re all going to have to train ourselves to breathe fewer times per minute.”
Nice, huh?
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/environmental-ruling-fallout/#comments
Thats an awesome action…and I was glad to read about it in the NY times! The mainstream press keeps covering issues like this, which means that we are reaching the public. They even included the line Toyota: the truck thats changing the climate. Oh yeah