Here is a little story from BBC news that I didn’t see covered by other media. Irv Gordon, a retired science teacher from Long Island, New York was driving his 1966 P1800 Volvo coupe up Alaska’s Seward Highway last week when he passed another milestone. The car logged its three-millionth mile. Gordon bought the car new and has no plans to stop driving it. The car has been featured in the Guinness book of world records as the car with the most miles since 1998 when it had only 1,690,000 miles on it.

I’m pretty sure that I won’t be breaking that record. The car I drive has only a little over 219,000 miles on it and it is beginning to develop a few quirks. The main reason I will not come close to the record, however, is that I simply drive a whole lot less than Mr. Gordon does. I thought out usage of cars was relatively high. Many automobile leases surcharge for mileage in excess of 10,000 miles per year and quite a few car warranties are based on a similar level of driving. Living in Western South Dakota, we put on quite a few more miles than that. In the 14 years of its life, the car I drive has averaged 15,643 miles per year. But that is small in comparison with the 63,929 miles per year that Mr. Gordon’s Volvo has averaged.

It does bring up an interesting item of speculation, however. Which of the following scenarios consumes the least total resources: driving the most fuel efficient cars and replacing them as more efficient models become available or keeping a car a long time and purchasing less vehicles? Cars consume fuel and other resources not only by being driven, but also in the process of manufacturing. We haven’t gotten very good at knowing what to do with our vehicles after we no longer drive them. There are acres and acres of old vehicles in salvage yards around here. They do contribute a significant amount of parts to the market and some of the operators are good about finding ways to recycle the materials in vehicles. It does, however, seem that the process of recycling unused automobiles is a rather inefficient process. I see truckloads of crushed cars going by on the highway from time to time, but I have no idea how far they have to travel to a place where the usable metal can be extracted.

We invest a significant amount of energy in shipping automobiles from one place to another. Mr. Gordon’s car traveled from Sweden to the United States before it started to travel under its own power. My car made the trip from Japan to the U.S. It is not uncommon for a vehicle to have traveled by ship, train and truck before it reaches a dealership. I have heard that the process of importing vehicles and parts into the United States requires so much shipping capacity that shipping rates are much less expensive going the opposite direction because shippers have to discount the price in order to avoid having to run their ships empty on the return trip. There is far more capacity than demand going from the United States to Japan and China.

It isn’t just automobiles that we import. Have you tried to purchase a pair of socks that were made in America recently? Even after last April’s fire in Bangladesh that claimed over 1,100 lives, millions of workers are putting in 19-hour shifts in dangerous conditions to make low-cost clothing for American and European stores. We will occasionally pay brief attention to the human cost of cheap Western clothing, but then our attention is distracted and things go back to normal. Even with the lower labor costs due to the nearly slavery conditions faced in some places, it is hard to understand that it is cost efficient to ship clothing half way around the world. It may be the case that we could save more energy by the decisions we make on what clothing to wear than we can by decisions about what vehicle to drive or how often to drive.

I have read that one can save more energy through food choices than through choices about vehicle use. Much of the food in our supermarkets has traveled more in the past month than we have. Try purchasing a tomato that was grown in our state, or an apricot that was grown on our continent. Check out the distance the watermelons in the grocery store have traveled. It is wonderful having all of the choice in our stores and low prices for food, but it seems that there are hidden costs to our way of life.

When traveling in Washington State in the fall a few years ago, we were surprised to discover that there are large areas devoted to growing alfalfa hay for export. Hay is loaded into shipping containers and exported to Japan and Korea from the west coast of the United States. It doesn’t make any sense at all in my way of thinking to raise cattle and other food animals so far from the sources of their feed. Shipping hay or nuts or citrus or even wine to another country is not just consuming precious fuel resources, it is also exporting precious water. You can’t grow that alfalfa without a lot of irrigation. Who would have thought that water pumped from an underground aquifer in eastern Washington would travel to Korea in alfalfa hay? Am I helping the drought conditions in Australia by sipping wine that contains the juice of grapes grown down under?

Life in a global market is confusing and it is difficult to know what is the best choice.

It is not just commodities that we import and export. Go to the hospital in Rapid City and you will have to deal with a billing department in Denver. Purchase a computer that was designed in California and it might be direct shipped to you from China. And when you need product support, you might be talking to someone in India on the phone.

So we continue to make imperfect decisions with incomplete information.

Maybe, with careful maintenance I can get another 150,000 miles on my old car. That would at least allow me to put off the decision about what to buy next for another decade.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.