Environmental group promotes new Ford SUV

• One of the biggest environmental activist groups in the United States, the Sierra Club, has stopped bashing Ford and taken the unlikely step of helping to promote an SUV.
• The Sierra Club has agreed to promote Ford's new gas-electric hybrid SUV, the 3,787-pound Mercury Mariner Hybrid, to its 300,000 members and will work with the company to educate consumers about gas-electric hybrids.
• "It ain't every day that we say something nice about Ford -- in fact it ain't every decade," said Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club's global-warming program.
• Becker said after years of criticizing Ford for not producing any hybrid vehicles, "we felt it necessary to recognize what they had done."
• The $30,000 Mariner went on sale this month and is rated by the Environmental Protection Agency at 33 miles per gallon in the city and 29 on the highway -- about one-third more fuel efficient than the gasoline-powered Mariner.
• He said Ford did not pay the Sierra Club for its marketing efforts.
• In November 2003, the Sierra Club staged rallies outside Ford dealerships and issued a statement claiming "Ford's vehicles release more global-warming pollution worldwide than the entire country of Mexico."
• Jennifer Krill, zero-emissions campaign director for the Rainforest Action Network, said selling a few thousand hybrid vehicles amounts to "baby steps when (Ford) should be taking giant leaps" in addressing fuel economy.
• Krill said Ford's fleet of vehicles has the worst fuel efficiency of any major automaker and that projected sales of the Mariner Hybrid will amount to "less than six one-hundredths of 1 percent" of the company's total vehicle sales.
• Lincoln Mercury public affairs manager Sara Tatchio said partnering with the Sierra Club gives the company access to people likely to buy hybrids.