This is a man's world.
- James Brown, "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World"
I have seen enough of America to disagree with the Godfather of Soul. Our great nation is a Car's World. No physical object, with the possible exception of the television, symbolizes American culture quite like the personal, gasoline-guzzling, combustible engine vehicle.
Whether it's a desert-blanketing used car lot near Phoenix, the Pepsi 400 NASCAR race in Daytona, a Hummer rally in Pennsylvania, a traffic jam in Manhattan, a Wal-Mart parking lot in Kansas, or all the easy motoring in small towns in between, the manifestations of this symbol saturate nearly every corner of our built environment.
Variations of this reflection often run through my conscious and subconscious mind when I ride my bike around a city, and Friday was no different when in the early evening I rode out to a suburb of Milwaukee from the west side of the city. I mean, when you're in the middle of an uphill climb on a six-lane suburban thoroughfare with no room for bikes (the only feasible route to my destination), rush hour traffic zooming by at 50 mph, while you take heavy breaths of the exhaust-laden air, it's pretty hard
not to mentally acquiesce to the utter predominance of the car.
Even well-meaning interlocutors in the alternative energy debate tend to bow down to the automobile's ubiquity. The $64,000 question is: "What fuels can power our nation's auto fleet when the oil runs low?" Its meta-question - "Should we even have such a massive auto fleet?" - though being one of my favorites, is worth about $1.50 in today's mainstream environmental debates, or at least so it seems. Another variation of this cheapie is: "Should a transportation system be based predominantly around personal, private, engine-driven vehicles?" This one is worth a round of furled brows, or best offer. An offer, that is, to bring the inquirer back down to the ostensible reality that such a transportation system is inevitable, and that we'll never (nor should we ever) wean ourselves off of the automobile.
I know what they're worth, because I believe in questioning the extent of the automobile's presence in our cities, and thus do so in discussions with friends, family, or online with fellow Kossacks about the future of energy. But I feel a sharp tinge of isolation, of all things, when I criticize our car-dominant transportation system, kind of like the lone, crazy biker amongst the river of six-lane, suburban thoroughfare traffic. Isolation because who am I to threaten this sacred symbol of American hubris when its future is just fine in the hands of ethanol, hydrogen, and gasified coal? Isolation because it often seems like for every mention of walkable communities (i.e. communities where cars - no matter what fuel they use, no matter if they burn a lot of gas or a little less gas per mile - are much less necessary), there are hundreds of references to ethanol plants, and for every mention of bicycles, there are hundreds of allusions to hybrid cars. How many people know what a Honda Insight is, but don't know what New Urbanism is?
When Gov. Schweitzer diaried recently about the need to gasify coal to power our transportation sector, conservation was brought up as more of an afterthought. bincbom had one of the best comments in the comments section:
By now, it's getting pretty clear that demand reduction is more important given the rapid decline of the environment being caused by carbon emissions.
Conservation can go a long way and it needs to be taken more seriously than coal. [Emphasis in original]
But s/he was quickly corrected by several commenters who reminded him/her that (to paraphrase), while conservation should be considered, it should not be the first priority. These commenters included Gov. Schweitzer himself (or a staffer), who implied that unless we want to "live naked in a tree and eat nuts," we will be "forced" to grow large quantities of biofuel inputs and gasify large quantities of coal. In a Car's World, conservation becomes an "and also" energy solution rather than a "First and foremost," like I think it absolutely should be. (Let me also note that Jim Hill also voiced this sentiment in that same thread.)
In a Car's World, conservation has an ironic twist. You can "save the environment" by buying a hybrid SUV, as a commercial on CNN recently put it. Herein lies the symptom of planning our cities so that only one mode of transportation can efficiently move us from place to place: our frame of reference for energy conservation thus cannot extend beyond this singular mode. It becomes so narrow that too many people think they've done all that is required of them if they buy a hybrid car.
But the frustration that inspired me to write this diary stems from more sources than just my early evening bike ride, Gov. Schweitzer's diary, or twilight-zone environmentalism in TV commercials. When I lived in Juneau, Alaska, for the better part of the last 12 months, I took advantage of the downtown's compactness. If you make your residence in downtown Juneau, everything else in downtown is within walking distance, provided you are in OK shape. As it happened, I lived three blocks from work and three blocks from the grocery store. That said, I could have done a lot to reduce my dependence on oil, such as growing (or catching or picking) my own food (Southeast Alaska has a wealth of food sources) or using less oil-powered heat. So when I hear the notion that we are somehow "forced" to have this massive auto fleet, and "need" to power it in some way or another, I get frustrated.
In a Car's World, the principle of Ockham's Razor is shunned in favor of Ockham's Rogaine (something William of Ockham could have used) when it comes to energy solutions. In other words, growing (or chemically producing) more fuel instead of seeing if you need that fuel in the first place.
Unlike coal gasification, I'm not completely anti-ethanol or anti-hydrogen. In fact, I think that sustainable ethanol, possibly cellulosic ethanol, and smaller-scale, renewable-energy powered hydrogen projects can play a vital role in our energy future. But they are my "and alsos," where as conservation is my big, bold "First and foremost."
And if you think about it, even if there were no future supply problems for our World of Cars, would we even then want to maintain their predominance? We need automobiles for some essential services (of which the most important example is ambulances), but is it healthy to have such an "easy-motoring utopia," as James Howard Kunstler is fond of saying? Cars beget individualism at the expense of community, conservatism, safety hazards, and so forth.
I enjoy taking part in the energy debates on dKos. There are a lot of people much more knowledgeable than me about energy issues, like Jerome a Paris, A Siegel, Devilstower, and others, and it is enlightening to be able to tap into that wealth of knowledge.
But the discussions on how to power our transportation sector in the future are clearly discussions within the context of our Car's World. Would that they shifted such that eventually we could be talking about cars being the "and alsos" of how we move around.