Toyota's Gas Guzzling Truck Criticized

Freedom from Oil activists at the New York Auto Show in spring of 2007 unfurled a 20-foot banner inside the front entrance to the Jacob Javits Center, challenging Toyota to become a true environmental leader. The banner parodied Toyota's current Tundra full-size pickup truck advertising blitz with a picture of the truck driving over a globe with the tagline, "Toyota: The Truck That's Changing the Climate." The banner flew at the entrance of the exhibition hall for several minutes before police arrested the two Freedom from Oil climbers who placed it.

"Toyota can't have it both ways," said Mike Hudema, co-director of the Freedom from Oil campaign for Global Exchange, an environmental activist group. "Toyota can't call itself an environmental leader while fighting legislation to curb greenhouse gas pollution and accelerating into the truck market."

The group is one of several that assert that global warming is being caused by human activity and that we must act now to curb it say thousands of scientists from around the world. The Freedom from Oil campaign said that if Toyota wants to take a place as a "true environmental leader" the company should stop lobbying efforts against new fuel-economy standards, lead the way in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and make a concrete production commitment and set a timeline for putting Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles on the roads as soon as possible.

"Building Priuses does not give Toyota license to mass-produce the Tundra," said Sarah Connolly, the co-director of the Freedom from Oil campaign for Rainforest Action Network. "If Toyota really believed in curbing global warming, why did they argue with the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in the Supreme Court that CO2 is not a pollutant and that the EPA should not have the right to help regulate greenhouse gas emissions?"

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