Does buying a hybrid car make its owner feel virtuous while helping the environment, or does it just make the driver feel virtuous?

According to an article in today’s New York Times, it may be the latter:

Each one becomes a free pass for its manufacturer to sell a few extra gas guzzlers. For now, this is less true for Toyota’s cars, because they’re above the mileage requirement. But Toyota’s trucks and the American automakers are right near the limits. So every Toyota Highlander hybrid S.U.V. begets a hulking Lexus S.U.V., and every Ford Escape — the hybrid S.U.V. that Kermit the Frog hawked during the Super Bowl — makes room for a Lincoln Navigator, which gets all of 12 miles a gallon. Instead of simply saving gas when you buy a hybrid, you’re giving somebody else the right to use it. The hybrid, then, is just about the perfect example of what’s wrong with our energy policy. It’s a Band-Aid that does a lot less to help the earth than we like to tell ourselves. When Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed conservation as “a sign of personal virtue” a few years back, a lot of environmentalists were disgusted. But that, sadly, is what a lot of well-meaning hybrid owners are driving: an expensive symbol that they’re worried about our planet, rather than a true solution.

Vice President Cheney’s 2001 comment about the “personal virtue” of conservation hit a raw nerve among many observers (see, e.g., this PDF for examples), but consider the quote in broader context,

Now, conservation is an important part of the total effort. But to speak exclusively of conservation is to duck the tough issues. Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for sound, comprehensive energy policy. We also have to produce more [energy].

In a passage that immediately follows the excerpt above from the New York Times today a representative from a leading environmental advocacy group says something remarkably similar to the Vice President’s 2001 comment,

You can consider yourself a conservationist and still see the logic in this. As Jon Coifman, the media director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, says, “We’re not going to kick our oil addiction with good will and personal virtue. You do need market signals, and you do need rules. And you need virtue. You need it all.”

Clearly, the Vice President and NRDC would disagree on what energy policy options make sense, but the fact that they have both signaled that new options are needed may be a sign that the status quo may be nearing its sell-by date. Could this be a sign of dramatic changes in energy policy to come?

[Note: We also discussed hybrids here.]