James Barrett is an environmental economist for the Economic Policy Institute.

It isn't news to anyone. Everybody already knows that SUVs are horribly damaging to the environment, and Ford hasn't done anything to change that. If my memory serves correctly, Ford makes one of the highest-polluting vehicles on the market.

Talk is cheap. Until they do something about it, I can't see how this announcement makes any real difference. The technology is available for car companies to make vehicles of the same size and characteristics that are more fuel-efficient and less polluting. But every time we ask them to do something about that, they say they don't know how.

Currently, the problem is that American consumers are not required to pay the true cost of the gasoline. Nowhere else in the Western world are prices so low. They pay four times more in Europe, twice as much in Canada. Americans should understand that the true cost of a gallon of gasoline isn't just the fuel. There's the pollution, global warming, urban sprawl, the destruction of the wilderness, even the cost of our protection of the oil supply in the Middle East.

The way to remedy this is the "T" word: "Taxes." If we were serious about fighting the effects of these vehicles, we'd raise taxes on the price of gasoline. In that way, we'd align the market to account for the environmental cost of fuel consumption. But everybody screams bloody murder when the gas prices go up even a little bit.

The thing is, yesterday, everyone knew this was a problem, and nothing has changed. The Ford announcement is a drop in the bucket, but only that. Still, we probably shouldn't discount it 100 percent. Admitting that it's a problem is the first step in recovery in A.A., but after that, there are still 11 steps to go.

David Healy is an auto analyst at Burnham Securities.

Ford is probably a couple steps ahead of the competition in terms of environmental friendliness. SUVs are still gas guzzlers and emitters of a lot of pollution, and they're probably less safe to be in a collision with, but Ford has maintained higher standards on environmental issues and crash protection. Ford is probably just making a statement that they'd like to do better.

I don't know why it did this. You'd have to ask Billy Ford himself. The statement is a surprise, but this doesn't mean in any way that Ford is getting out of the SUV business. I think this might have some impact on the industry by ratcheting up environmental standards. It might speed up the pace. But the fact that this issue was raised is no surprise. Anybody who didn't know that SUVs are gas guzzlers and emitters of pollution is probably living on another planet.

Dave Snyder is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

Surprise, surprise. Of course they're not going to cut back on SUVs. In fact, the environmental irresponsibility of building SUVs is just slightly different from the environmental irresponsibility of building cars, period.

Ford and other car companies and oil companies and tire companies have yet to even come close to atoning for the dismantling of urban transit systems across the country, which they undertook in the '40s and '50s. Back then transit companies were privately owned; very few were publicly owned. A consortium of car-related interests essentially bought them all up and ran them into the ground, shut them down, basically to trap Americans into having no choice but to drive cars. And look where that's gotten us. They got us addicted to cars back when there was more room on the roads. Now I think everybody wishes we had the choice again.

Whether it's an SUV or a hatchback, it doesn't make much difference if you have no choice but to drive. It's understandable people want SUVs, because if you have no choice but to drive on crowded, busy streets, you can't blame them for wanting to be in the biggest car, so that if they crash another car, they're more likely to survive. You can't blame the people for it, you have to blame Ford. And I don't for a second accept their apology, if they call it that. I want them to return their investment into public transit so that people have choices.

David Horowitz is a Salon columnist and author of "The Fords: An American Epic."

This is not a problem that has easy solutions. Of course there are a lot of people who think they can rearrange the world according to abstract ideas. But it's very practical: Americans want SUVs. The left has an easy solution, which is to deny people what they want, but if you really believe in freedom and choice, then you have to face the fact that there can be conflict between what people want and other interests -- for example, the environment.

One of the virtues and problems of the market system is that it answers to people's demands. And if you believe in democracy and freedom, then you have to recognize that the people have voted: they want SUVs. It would be the height of arrogance and, in my view, an ominous precedent to say we ought to override what people want and give them what we think is good for them. That is the totalitarian mentality.

An awful lot of environmental problems have been solved by technology, something the environmental movement doesn't always want to recognize. So I noticed in the Ford statement that they're looking for technological solutions, and I think in the long run that's probably the best path. I don't know that Bill Ford is either a Republican or a conservative, but in a year when compassionate conservatism is becoming fashionable, it's interesting to see a kind of corporate compassion announced by one of the world's premiere corporations.

I actually own an SUV. If you have a family, you understand why people want SUVs. Safety is really important. My wife feels a lot safer -- she's higher up over the road, and it's harder to carjack. A lot of people use it to get out to the countryside, a lot of people who have kids.

SUVs are probably saving lives -- if you get into an accident, you're much safer. It's not like SUVs cost twice as much as a normal car; you can get an SUV for less than you can get a normal car. People make their choices.

Kevin Berger, the executive editor of San Francisco magazine, is the author of "Where the Road and the Sky Collide," a book about automobiles and the environment.

I have the cynical response: It's greenwash because they've known about the problems with SUVs for quite some time. The greenwash campaign on SUVs is pretty old. The automotive manufacturers started a campaign in 1993-94 called "tread lightly" that promoted conscientious use of SUVs in the outdoors and told drivers things like "drive slow when crossing river banks" and so on At the time I interviewed a botanist on what SUVs do to the countryside and he said that if you drive your SUV off-road, you're absolutely decimating river banks and the forest.

It seems to me just another whitewash. Especially if you've seen the 5-ton Ford Excursion -- they're like Mack trucks. It's like Ford said: "We just have to make a bigger Suburban." They're really going to cause problems because other cars don't fare well in collisions with the Excursion.

An insurance industry group, the Institute of Highway Safety, did their first report on SUV safety in 1995 or so. They did the first side crash tests outside of the ones done by automotive companies. The automotive companies issued this huge public statement that said "The Institute's tests were really skewed." Now they're acknowledging that the Institute of Highway Safety was right. So how can you believe them?

But I also think that Ford's statement is really cool, because it shows that all the grass-roots efforts by the Ralph Nader group and the Union of Concerned Scientists have made this a huge issue. All the gains in fuel efficiency made by small cars in the 1980s have gone completely backwards since SUVs took off. It's almost like they're saying, "We here at Dow chemicals think that it's terrible that we're pouring chlorine into the rivers, but we're making a lotta paint here."

Ford's response is pretty savvy marketing responding to the backlash. It's not as if they're going to stop building them. I'm glad to see that the backlash has made it to the mainstream.

It's not just that Excursions themselves are a joke, it's a purely market-driven model. The Ford people do this tremendous market research where they get all these people in focus groups and then they realize the importance of SUVs, and somewhere along the way they realized that they're not big enough so they built the Excursion, and now they're going to apologize for it? It's insane.

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