The chief virtue of the automobile is the personal independence it gives the owner a car can go anywhere roads go and some places they don t, with a speed unimaginable in the pre-automobile era. Its secondary virtue is protection from the elements and from collision. In both a car and an SUV, passengers are protected by the vehicle s structure from the wind and rain. But in a collision, the SUV simply provides more protection than a smaller car does. Larger cars better protect the people in them that s why your father wanted you to get a huge, boxy old car when you were sixteen instead of a little Mustang so that you would live through your first accident.
Protection is a big advantage.
Wealth means that someone has changed their environment and improved it for human use. In fact, it is man's ability to adapt his environment to his own desires that sets him apart from other animals and has allowed him to prosper. The environmentalists respond that nature is intrinsically valuable, not for anything it does or can do but simply because it is. Since people disturb nature, people as such are a problem. Moderate environmentalists say that this is a straw man, that they do not hate people, they just want to protect endangered species and have clean air, water and food.