Editor’s note: This is in response to an online comment posted on Peter Kindilien’s column “What lack of sense has done,” published in Wednesday’s Daily Lobo. The column rewrote the lyrics of a song, changing them to comment on the woeful state of humanity and how it’s all our fault. Commenter “phillip howel” posed the question, “And your alternative is…?” This is Kindilien’s response.
opinion@dailylobo.com
During the energy crises of the 1970s, with the shock of gas rationing and escalating prices at the pump, much ado was made about how we could abate our thirst for Arab oil. The idea was that collectively we would all start driving smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. Automobile manufacturers commenced to proudly tout the remarkable reduction their new vehicles showed in gas consumption. With the warning that oil and coal reserves would start to run low in the 21st century, interest in alternative fuels and renewable sources of energy emerged. Former President Jimmy Carter even had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. But things quickly changed for the worse, as they so often do.
Business went back to usual. In fact, shortly after jumping on the “smaller is better” bandwagon, car makers realized they could make a much larger profit per unit on larger vehicles than they could on cute, little gas misers. Enter the most fuel-inefficient, gas-guzzling form of transporting a suburbanite the world had ever seen. Six-thousand-pound pickup trucks, Hummers, SUVs, you name it: Road monsters designed for you and me.
Consumer tests proved that most of the great mileage claims made for new vehicles had been inflated, and this trend has continued right up to the present day. The figures are sometimes so inflated that one can only assume the auto industry views its customers as laughably gullible and naive. Former President Ronald Reagan tore down the White House’s solar panels and then famously said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
With the collapse of our archenemy, the Soviet Union, advertising went into full gear, offering up all the accoutrements that, after all, were our just rewards for becoming the new kings of the universe.
“Conservation” disappeared from the nation’s vocabulary as quickly as it had appeared. With political influence over most oil-producing nations, we had access to as much black crude as we could pay for. To flaunt it, we would all receive an image makeover. Macho and cool became the norm, and a nation of bodybuilders and milquetoasts alike all climbed aboard their very own faux construction vehicles.
U.S. cars had been notoriously unsafe for decades, long after Europe had started building many of their vehicles with crush-proof passenger compartments in the 1950s. Detroit waited another 15 years until the warning cry of Ralph Nader’s book “Unsafe at Any Speed” shook the complacency of the industry and the nation.
The nasty Socialist countries across the pond all had national health systems that bore the heavy expense of increasing highway carnage. Therefore, their governments were highly motivated to encourage their auto companies to provide safer products for their citizens. U.S. companies routinely forestalled this approach by lobbying Congress to defeat stricter regulations on safety, until the tipping point arrived when large numbers of class-action lawsuits finally made it less profitable.
Big, heavy, steel-constructed trucks do have the benefit of being, in theory, much safer for interior occupants than the tin cans we’d been sold previously. Of course, that perception of advantage is rather reversed for anyone in a more petite vehicle who is unfortunate enough to be in a collision with a road-hogging behemoth. From a pop-psychology perspective, it is amazing how timid, supposedly gentle souls become transformed upon straddling one of these great beasts of excessive horsepower. Heretofore untapped sources of rage and hostility are unleashed as they cut paths of destruction, bullying and sometimes running over anything smaller that gets in the way — including bicyclists and pedestrians — all the while texting the word “like” 10,000 times a day to the legion of people surely destined to be their lifelong friends.
Under former President Bill Clinton, an energy policy of which we could all be proud was finally officially established. We would deplete the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves at an accelerated pace in order to prevent China’s economy from becoming greater than ours. At one point under former President George W. Bush, Congress offered a huge tax break to any business that purchased a vehicle which exceeded some ridiculous weight. You never saw so many pet groomers and party decorators storming the streets in what had been originally designed as all-terrain military transport vehicles.
I remember the first time I drove across this country, passing dilapidated shacks one could see all the way through, with shiny new Cadillacs parked in their driveways. On the road, we are able to assume the persona of who we imagine ourselves to be, as long as we convince creditors to cough up sufficient moola. But America’s love affair with the freedom of the road has ignored one very crucial fact.
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We see the same problem with all of our carbon-fuel burning inventions. There is a hidden cost to the environment that has not been accounted for in our thirst for development and growth, because it has not been figured into the price of the products and services we receive. Cumulatively, that cost is rapidly approaching the point where the ecosystem we exploit in order to maintain our way of life will soon collapse, with catastrophic repercussions. That is what “unsustainable” means: We will not survive in the long term.
So we are barreling downhill, with control slipping from our hands, toward a brick wall. We can tax the hell out of carbon, vastly expand public transportation, abandon our dependence on individual vehicles, filter and sequester emissions from modern coal-fired plants, retire the inefficient, old ones and walk away from poorly designed new plants that can’t be converted.
Without careful government planning, policies and industry regulation, it’s sayonara. As was clearly demonstrated by the biofuels debacle, subsidizing unproven technology that turns out not to be cost-effective is to pursue a fool’s errand of “doing anything, even if it’s wrong.”
So my answer to Phillip is that we should stop electing people who don’t give a rat’s a** about anything but padding their own pockets and providing huge tax breaks to big energy companies. We need to arrest population growth and take advantage of cleaner, renewable energy options. The greatest impediment, which no one wants to acknowledge, is that prevention offers no profit incentive to special interests. Exactly like health care.
