Shut off your engines

I got on an airplane the other day and it wasn't one of these cases where you walk straight from the terminal right onto the airplane. We had to get onto shuttle buses which drove us about thirty kilometres out in the countryside before we got on the plane.

There was maybe four or five of these buses, took us about fifteen minutes to load up and they were idling the entire time. These were diesel buses so, of course, the emissions contained all these carcinogenic particulates - wonderful stuff - spewing all over the place. Maybe at an airport, it's not the place to be worrying about air pollution because of all the junk the airplanes are already spewing into the sky, but come on, can't you shut these things off while we're waiting?

The same with big trucks like these. You go to a truck stop, you see these things idling for hours and hours on end. What's wrong with these people? But the worst thing - the worst thing is, if you go to some beautiful national park, you're maybe in Banff and the wind is whistling through the pine trees and you hear the loons out on the lake calling to each other - and there's fifty tour buses idling, spewing this smoke into the air.

Come on, folks. It's not just the air pollution either. It's the fuel consumption. Mercedes Benz proved years ago that you can shut a diesel engine off, restart it thirty times in a minute and still use less fuel than if it idled for that entire minute. And all the engine manufacturers tell everybody, "Shut the motors down; you're ruining the engine." So why don't people do it, for all of our sakes? Now, you see this in Europe? Not a chance. If a vehicle is stopped more than thirty seconds over there, they shut it off. Are they so much smarter than us?

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