Overheated Car CultureBy Jane Holtz Kay You don't need a weatherman to tell you that the whole earth has become the scorched earth. And you don't need a climate course to tell you that the temperature has become hot news. In the hottest decade of the millennium, "severe weather alerts" have become as constant as the calendar. It started at the first of the year with the headlines: "South Gets White Christmas and Loses Power"... "California Farmers Hope to Salvage Some Citrus..." continued with blizzards in the Midwest, tornadoes in Florida, and hot-to-warm climate quick steps in New England. By late spring, the Los Angeles cool and the East Coast steam had reversed the natural order of the continent and the summer made sizzle an understatement. And that's just the U.S. corner of the planet.
But if weather scares have chilled us out and heated our consciousness, there is one thing that the fluctuating thermometer and rising tides don't record. And that's the complicity of the car. Whatever the assessment of the damage of the capricious climate, the political and financial barometers have yet to register this largest single contributor to global warming. "Is your current car too closely related to the fossil fuel it burns?" asks an advertisement for a luxury automobile. You bet it is. By spewing as much as half the U.S. emissions that fuel climate disarray, our stock of motor vehicles is not only "related" to rising temperatures and erratic weather but a parent of the problem. In just one instance, the Atmosphere Alliance, has blamed a sharp jump of 3.4 percent in U.S. emissions--more than the total of most nations--on one automoted energy hog, the sports utility vehicle. SUVs on steroids are just the newest phase of U.S. auto-dependency, however. Clock the minutes. Every second the nation's 200 million motor vehicles travel 60,000 miles, use 3,000 gallons of petroleum products and add 60,000 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That's two-thirds of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. Even less noticeable, however, is the damage beyond these tailpipe discharges recorded as their soul source. The surprise is that despite the role of the motor vehicle in making the weather gyrate like a Dow Jones graph, the total contribution of America's auto-dependency remains a dirty but hidden secret. For even as the emissions as we drive to work or errands contribute five tons of carbon dioxide a year for every car, we ignore the better part of the exactions. The roads we build to serve the car, the fuel we extract, the industrial energy consumed in producing 15 million motor vehicles a year are enormous-and largely unrecorded. Intangibles weigh us down as we pay the car's share of municipal and state taxes and traffic congestion. Often lacking a dollar sign, their tally ranges from parking facilities to police protection; from registry operations to uncompensated accidents. Exactions from U.S. cars and trucks carry three-quarters of a trillion dollars in hidden costs. Nationally, that's 35 cents a mile; in dense urban zones up to $l.50. Parking given to Downtown employees alone is an 11 cents a mile subsidy to the driver, 16 times more than the federal gasoline tax he or she pays for the commute. Cars bought on the installment plan drive debt up by 40 percent making the General Motors Acceptance Corporation the largest consumer finance institution in the world. And we haven't touched such pricey corollaries as cellular phones to save time. Finally, there are the longtime unchartable environmental damages of dirty air and water or the human cost of 4l,500 lives lost a year, before we even come to the environmental cost of this global warming in, say, re-doing the New York subway or restoring the damage from floods and fires. Part of the reason for the social innumeracy on the true cost of global warming is also bureaucratic. Instead of slotting the car's plural contributions of CO2 into the "transportation sector" of the EPA listings, their compendium ignores most of them. By thus tucking them into the "industrial" or "manufacturing" category in its formal notations, the agency inadvertently helps the motor vehicle's harm elude detection, according to Cindy Jacobs of the climate change program of the EPA's mobile sources. Not only the motor vehicle and the highway's promethean influence avoid attention, however. Add production to this list. The car's production alone accounts for almost one-third of the its consumption of energy and resources, according to the Environment and Forecasting Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. Consider the parts of the motor vehicle-push buttons for its windows, air-conditioning units, computers to control the engines; the plastic, asphalt and aluminum industries-and you see burn, baby burn. Since "the transportation sector" thus escapes virtually unscathed, its perpetrators, the auto manufacturers can afford to do little or nothing. Few brakes are put on the ever-growing Sports Utility Vehicles and light trucks which now account for half of new motor vehicles sales. And, as their number grows, along with conventional cars, "it's hard to see what's going to slow growth," says the EPA's Jacobs. So it is that even as the Kyoto Accords encourage scientists to push for reducing the energy from carbon sources, even as the housing industry is coaxed to be energy efficient, even as other executives from utilities to manufacturing respond, if slowly, to the climate issue, the car and the pricey sprawl and energy consumption its roads augment also escape a reckoning. The 12,000 miles per person a year, and growing in both trips and heft, are not only stoking the climate's troubles at home but abroad. America's King of the Road lifestyle encourages non-industrialized nations to follow the U.S. model at an alarming rate. Consider the consequences of a billion Chinese buying cars fueled by climate-heating coal. Combined with America's role as car exporter, the U.S. rage for the road makes our sermons on energy abstinence, not to mention environmental good citizenship, hypocritical. Preaching what we don't practice deep sixes leadership as we "play God with climate," in the Worldwatch Institute's phrase. How do we right this equation, then? Since cost seems to be uppermost in reckoning how to avoid a climate apocalypse by curbing the car, we need to acknowledge the current exactions of our auto-based existence. The love affair with the motor vehicle that festoons our policy like a GM hood ornament comes at a steep price, personally (we pay $6,500 a year, and rising, to own and operate one) and socially or environmentally (it's $5,000...plus, by many accounts). Beyond the 93 billion dollars a year that local, state and national governments spend on roads, we must tally other expenditures from 4l,500 lives lost annually in car accidents, and far more in injury, to the automobiles and auto parts that account for two-thirds of our trade deficit with Japan. From 8 billion hours a year stuck in traffic to the $100 billion a year spent on the military budget defending our Middle East oil supply, the visible and invisible costs of the car mount. Count, too, the cost of that oil extraction which rises as we labor to clean or discover new reserves, reserves predicted to dwindle and become pricier on their way to exhaustion.
Then, there are the other untalleyed or hidden losses. The tragic loss of community and of future or present land use cannot be reckoned. The price of car-bred infrastructure subsidized to take us to the sprawling edges, in turn, demanding more pricey energy-squandering infrastructure of electricity, cable or sewage lines at the end of the road. Compute the price of 4000 "dead" malls and countless Main Streets, languishing in the wake of the highway-based exodus. Finally, consider that by asphalting for the automobile, we give over more than half our cities to roads and parking lots. Record how we subsidize the highway's giant gulp of three million miles of road covering 60,000 square miles of the nation with new NAFTA-inspired roads conceived to cover the continent from Canada to Mexico. Note how each automobile demands seven spaces move and park (one at home, one at work, one at the mall, and four for the road network). Chart our subsidies for such incidentals as parking; for some 85 million employees given free spaces valued at $l,000 apiece, amounting to an $85 billion lure - and $85 billion denied non-drivers. No other country carries our loss in property taxes from such "investments." What false economy allows us to dismiss these debts and simply credit highway-based transportation as 18 percent of our Gross Domestic Product, more than health and education combined? What perverse sense of the environmental balance sheet lets us tamper with the fate of the planet without noting these debts? In the end, then, our pro-fossil fuel government and industry underwrite the car culture that undermines planet preservation. It favors the private car vs. public transportation at seven to one, offers single-family mortgages and policies that undercut core cities and suburbs and puts a petroleum-free lunch on a silver platter. All these policies take a toll, a toll whose bottom line loss only matches its erosion of social and environmental values. Happily, the solutions make good economic as well as human sense. Curbing the car to protect the climate is good financial as well as environmental policy. Making the car pay its way by altering pricing policies to stop subsidizing the can reduce costs while cutting fossil fuel. Raising the tax on gas - or on carbon dioxide-spewing gas guzzlers or on number of miles driven - lessen auto use and impact. So do congestion pricing, toll and parking fees. It is time to follow the other industrialized nations of the world taxing gas to bring rates of $4 or 5-a-gallon gas and funneling these funds to good public transportation and lessening auto-dependency. To hit up the car and the highway to pay their way and restrict greenhouse gas emissions is not the only way or an easy way to slip money in the planetary bank, to be sure. Changing sprawl-inducing land patterns that have made two or three cars a (perceived) prerequisite in half our households is essential. By reinvesting in public transportation, good planning, mixed-use zoning and other improved land use policies, we create dense neighborhoods and urban infill for the clustered physical environment that supports that mass transit, trains, paratransit, bicycling and walking to ease us out of the car trap. None of these routes to reduce auto-dependency and halt global warming is built in a day, but they can begin instantly and on a personal and political level. They are not as high tech or "scientific" as the solutions mouthed by industry's do-it-ourselves approach to climate control or the build-more-if-"better" fakery of the auto industry's "clean car." But they are more economical and humane - and no slower. As Washington and Wall Street slouch our way to climate protection, we need to do more--far more - than give lipservice to this mindset. "Cogito Ergo Zoom," Automobile magazine described America's attitude to the internal combustion machine. More cogitating and less zoom would be better. So would activism from the bottom and leadership from the top to replace a mentality as stuck in traffic as our way of life. The Atlantic would be rolling across the Adirondacks and the glaciers melting into Miami before the people who brought us Exxon Valdez and the Corvair flipped the switch on their course to stop climatic upheaval. It is time for the rest of us to brake the automoted gluttons that fuel global disarray. Originally Published in In these Times, Summer 1999
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Beyond building and running our cars, there is the environmental and financial toll of car-bred sprawl. The land bulldozed into asphalt is a lost opportunity cost. The wetlands and farmland paved (two million arable acres a year), the open space or city split by an arterial highway or the hilltop sprouting the four-leaf clover interstate is, to say the least, a minus.