In a very short while the world will come to view car manufacturers as no better than the tobacco industry.
Actually, in some ways, the tobacco pushers are better: since the 1970s it has been pretty clear their products are addictive, deadly and with no redeeming features. Only the foolish or self-interested could deny it.
Is that not the same of the automobile? Forget, for the moment, the massive number of deaths from traffic accidents every year; forget the addiction to oil that they have driven the world to; forget even the irreversible environmental destruction that their manufacture and daily use is wreaking; they have reshaped our cities and towns so that we cannot imagine living without them. Suburban living is impossible without them. Could you get to work, go to the shopping mall, pick up the kids, do the supermarket run, buy some made-in-China products from the DIY superstore on a Sunday without one? In short, could you live your life without your car?
The answer for many in urban Japan is "yes". There is excellent public transport (at least in the most populated places) which means that you really can live without one. (Our Man knows, he and his family of five have lived without one for 18 months, and counting).
The answer for the rest of the industrialised world though is "no". The American city, a role model for all the world's cities since World War II, does not work without the car.
Our Man doesn't want to get into discussions of whether we have hit peak production of oil - we either have or we haven't - but at some point in the near future we have to accept there will be no more of the black stuff to burn and we have nothing even remotely close to replacing it as a power source. And here's the point: Propping up the Big Three (or Big Three Stooges as Japan Without the Sugar calls them) would be a woolly mammoth waste of resources. By all means, pass the $14 billion to the auto industry - but spend the money on closing it down and retraining the redundant workers to do something worthwhile to a post-automobile world. Think Our Man's lost it? Why not ask someone from Michigan what he thinks: Senate to Middle Class: Drop Dead.
3 comments:
I can't believe it Our Man.I agree wholeheartedly,$15 billion now and then some more in three months.
they should spend that money on hydrogen fuel cell research.the big three are dead,ford may survive but I doubt it.
the unions refused to let their members work for the same money as toyota workers in the US???????????you know they're going under and they still want the health benefits/pensions that tens of millions of americans can only dream of..even better they want the tens of millions to pay for theirs
Our Man's not sure about hydrogen fuel cells, the science behind it all sounds too good to be true. What needs to happen is a massive rethink of how we live our lives. No combination of new technologies can allow us to continue our current two-car-owning drive two miles for a pint of milk imported from abroad way of life. We may have to give cars up, which means we need our walkable neighbourhoods back. Perhaps the Michigan workforce could start by retraining as wreckers and start with dismantling the suburbs.
'No combination of new technologies can allow us to continue our current two-car-owning drive two miles for a pint of milk imported from abroad way of life.'great point.
'We may have to give cars up, which means we need our walkable neighbourhoods back.'I agree and thats something the developers in the UK have done a t great expense to themselves,is to build some urban housing.
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