Trick-or-Treating for Auto Fuel Efficiency

Dressed as energy-inefficient Ford vehicles, members of Harvard’s Sierra Student Coalition (SSC) went door to door in various Houses and Yard dorms Wednesday evening, seeking through preemptive “reverse trick-or-treating” to raise student awareness of alternative energy options and persuade Ford to make these options available in their most popular cars and trucks.

Sixteen trick-or-treaters, motoring through campus in groups of two, gave students bags of candy in exchange for their signatures on postcards to Ford asking that the company implement the national Sierra Club’s “Freedom Option Package,” a two-page proposal suggesting that manufacturers offer cars equipped with certain technologies designed to increase fuel efficiency.

Cardboard-encased SSC members picked up between 500 and 600 signatures as well as several new members after canvassing the first-year dorms, the DeWolfe complex, and Quincy, Mather, Leverett and Currier Houses, SSC leaders said.

“Most people were supportive, by and large,” said SSC Co-Director Joshua Suskewicz ’05.

The activist arm of the Environmental Action Committee, Harvard’s umbrella environmental organization, the SSC is in general most concerned with off-campus issues.

Dressing up in costumes and distributing candy is something of an annual Halloween tradition for the SSC. Last year, members wore faux caribou antlers in protesting proposed drilling of the National Arctic Refuge.

SSC leaders said their caribou impressions drew the ire of pro-drilling students last year. But no such hostility met their efforts Wednesday.

“It’s a pretty uncontroversial and obvious—once you hear it—idea, so most of them were willing to sign their name and get candy,” Suskewicz said. “We’re not asking for radical wholesale change. We’re just asking them to implement existing technology as an option.”

The SSC is focusing this semester on alternative energy sources.

“Coal and oil are perishable sources, so we want more sustainable or renewable sources of energy that don’t have a negative environmental impact,” said SSC Co-Director Sarah H. Abel ’05.

The SSC decided to join the regional effort to promote the Freedom Option Package at the suggestion of the Boston branch of the Sierra Club

The Freedom Option Package suggests that manufacturers make avail able a number of existing technologies, including continuously variable automatic transmission, variable-valve-control engines and integrated starter engines.

“First, this would save American consumers millions in gas,” Suskewicz said. “The miles these cars would get per gallon would be nearly doubled. Second, it would really cut pollution. And third, and most relevantly in today’s climate, it would reduce our reliance on foreign oil.”

Suskewicz said it was definitely feasible for Ford and other car companies to follow the Sierra Club’s proposals.

“These technologies already exist, are in place in some Japanese companies and are easily implemented,” he said.

“The big three automobile companies just haven’t bothered because they haven’t had to and no one has pressured them yet,” he said.