The free market really can solve all of our problems. Guess what more and more people want to buy when they go shopping for their next car? Even Americans have started to lose their love for that great big gas guzzling SUV Detroit has been pushing on us for the last two decades:

Americans bought more Toyota Prius hybrid petrol-electric hatchbacks in 2007 than Ford Explorer sports utility vehicles, the top-selling SUV for more than a decade.

The change of fortune, buried in US vehicle sales data for 2007 and unthinkable a few years ago, will find an echo at this year’s Detroit auto show, which starts on Sunday. […]

While Prius sales soared 69 per cent in 2007, demand for the Explorer was less than a third of its 2000 peak. Many Americans are replacing truck-based SUVs with crossover vehicles, which are built like cars, thus offering a smoother ride and better fuel efficiency. Toyota began selling the Prius in North America in 2000, the same year Explorer sales reached a record 445,000 units.

“It’s a combination of an ascending star and a falling star,” says George Magliano, director of automotive industry analysis at consultant Global Insight.

I guess we have George W, Bush to thank for this, so credit where credit is due. His policies of endless war in the Middle East and massive tax cuts and subsidies for the rich and corporations have led to the devaluation of the dollar, frightened commodities speculators and also taken much of Iraq’s former crude oil supply off the international market. In his own inimitable way he has helped push the price of oil (and thus the price of the gasoline and fuel oil we use, too) up into the stratosphere. And by doing so he has finally unleashed the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith upon us.

So I give you President George W. Bush, unintentional promoter of technologies that use less fossil fuels, and help the environment by emitting fewer greenhouse gases. Surely that’s worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize or two. All Al Gore ever did was start a crusade to educate the world about global warming. Bush, clearly a doer, not a talker, has taken the more direct approach. Admittedly, his policies represent a harsher, more deadly, cure for what ails us than what Mr. Gore proposes, but as the man would say himself:

You can’t break a few eggs if you . . . can’t make scrambled if . . . Omelets need eggs, don’t they?*

* The above quote is completely fictional, but it was definitely intended to depict a specific living person.

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