Should we vote to blow up some guy's SUV?

Trade in your gas guzzler for a hybrid, goes the green mantra, and you'll be doing the planet a favor.

Except that you won't. After all, when you trade in a car, somebody else will buy it and drive it. You may be reducing your personal carbon footprint, but so what? The atmosphere doesn't distinguish between individual footprints, only the net emissions.

Ryan Mickle recognizes this, which is why he is trying to take his Range Rover off the road. Permanently.

The San Francisco management-consultant-turned-do-gooding-entrepreneur launched the site One Fewer, where visitors can submit ideas and vote on what Mr. Mickle does with his 2006 Range Rover Sport, tricked out with heated seats, satellite radio, a GPS, and gas mileage of 13 m.p.g.

In the video on the site's homepage, he suggests flinging the vehicle – which I'm estimating is worth between $50,000 and $60,000 – into the Pacific Ocean with a catapult. Later in the video, as a Radiohead tune swells in the background, he suggests driving it off a cliff. Or blowing it up.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that tossing more than two tons of steel, plastic, rubber, and electronics into the ocean isn't the most eco-friendly choice. And loading it with explosives and watching it blow up, as immensely satisfying as that may be, isn't much better. Same goes for driving it off a cliff.

His site also suggests converting the SUV to biodiesel and giving it to a nonprofit. That may be a possibility: Prince Charles drives a biodiesel-powered Range Rover. If Mickle's SUV already runs on diesel, then converting it to run on vegetable oil should be relatively easy (relative to procuring a trebuchet big enough to chuck it into ocean). But if it doesn't, he'll need to spend a lot of money to convert it, money that might be better spent going directly to a cause.

[via Treehugger]