9/24: Cars and Capitalism -Stop Signs

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GRIID TV interview with Yves Engler vimeo.com27분 - 2011년 6월 1일 Yesterday, we had the opportunity to talk with Yves Engler, co-author of the new book Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the ...

April 14, 2011

Stop Signs entertaining, informative

Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay by Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi, 2011, co-published by RED Publishing and Fernwood Publishing, 259 pages, ISBN 9781552663844 (paper), $20, Scheduled for release May, 2011

Reviewed by Richa

The authors, who are based in Canada and do not have driver licenses, use a bus trip to various USA cities as a jumping-off place to look critically at the effects of cars on ourselves and our environment. Calling our car-dominated transportation system “irritating, irrational, irresponsible and increasingly inhuman”, they show how cars take precedence over people and our environment physically, conceptually, even spiritually.

A great deal of up-to-date and well-referenced information is often interesting, disturbing, enlightening. Moreover, it is presented in an engaging way, wrapped into an often funny or ironic personal narrative of the authors’ experiences as they travel.

The first of two parts addresses pollution and global warming, inefficiency and expense, using sex and other means for ubiquitous car advertising, deaths and diseases and serious injuries not only from crashes but from many aspects of car manufacture, use, and disposal, cars’ contribution to sprawl and a divided society, the car as a spiritual icon, and more.

The second part looks at the larger capitalist system and how it is intimately intertwined with cars; how gross inefficiency becomes “efficient” from a capitalist standpoint. That includes advertising and media, corporate and political power, and a brief look at the huge car subsidies. It ends with a call to action with some specific suggestions.

As one who has done some transport research, organizing, education, and advocacy, I am impressed by how well Mugyenyi and Engler have put their information together. Their ideas are clear but without dogmatism; they are open to and understanding of where people are at.

For instance — especially at this time of a sophisticated corporate attack on most working people — they state that employment must be taken into account, though they then note that mass transit employs more people than does road-building.

They also affirm that those who still drive can and should have a major voice in how we move to a more sustainable transport system. They recognize that the problems are systemic, making it difficult to do without a car the way things are now.

That said, I particularly appreciate seeing such a work from the perspective of others who choose not to drive; that is unusual in the USA and Canada, especially among researchers.

Stop Signs will both educate and entertain you; it is well worth the price and the time.

The most dangerous machine ever built

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By Erik Curren August 15, 2011

Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay, 2011, RED Publishing and Fernwood Publishing, 259pp, $19.95.

Are you a hypocrite if you criticize personal cars but yet own your own car? Do you have to achieve total transportation purity — relying only on transit, bicycling or hoofing it — to earn the right to open your mouth on all the problems that the automotive industrial complex has caused, from accident deaths and suburban sprawl to climate change and oil wars?

Thank goodness, no.

“There’s no contradiction between driving and opposing private automobility,” write Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler in Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay. “Most North Americans live on a landscape dominated by cars and to change this we need systemic transformations, not individual purity.”

Honk if you hate cars

It’s an obvious point but one worth stating: since most able-bodied US and Canadian adults are licensed drivers, any revolt against today’s all-pervasive North American car culture will have to include many car drivers in their roles not only as voters or shoppers but also as activists. Mugyenyi and Engler imagine, for example, “a suburban protest with hundreds of cars rolling slowly along — demonstrating, if you like — to demand greater rail or bus service.”

Dethroning King Car will take a truly gargantuan effort, given the hypnotic appeal of car culture over our hearts and minds as well as the formidable influence of Detroit, Big Oil and allied industries in Washington. It is an effort comparable to the abolition of slavery, according to the authors, who are anti-car activists living in Montreal.

Industrial humans have become Homo Automotivis. We worship our cars the way previous civilizations worshiped Baal or Odin. And over a century we have refashioned both our physical world and our economy so that we can’t live without cars. Most of us require a car to work. And all of us rely on cars to keep the economy going, whether we like it or not.

That’s why, even more than nuclear weapons and nuclear power, weaponized Ebola or the Eurovision Song Contest (Azerbaijan won this year!), the personal car may be the most dangerous invention in human history.

Just like doobies, they make you hungry for pizza

Cars are the ultimate gateway drug to the obscene levels of status-driven consumption that have sent industrial society into economic collapse and the world into ecological overshoot, helping give us the debt crisis, oil wars and climate change. And that’s just for starters.

If there are cars, then business can crank up car dealers, repair shops, gas stations and places that sell fuzzy dice for your rear view mirror. Then, government must build city streets, rural roads and interstate highways while staffing DMVs, police forces and traffic courts. Not to mention turning the military into an oil protection force, as General Smedley Butler explained in the 1930s.

Indeed, in tough times, there’s no stimulus that governments love better than building roads as a way to put people back to work, and Detroit receives more subsidies than any other industry in the US (Big Oil is #2).

Meantime, as a car driver you can buy a heck of a lot more stuff than you can if you’re carrying bags on the subway or fitting a couple of panniers onto a bicycle. Of course, you can drive your Prius to IKEA. But first things first: just by driving at all, you can trade your tiny city apartment for a big house in the suburbs with plenty of space to fill with furniture, appliances and kids — who in turn, will want their own stuff and thus give you an excuse to take even more trips to IKEA.

And once you buy too much stuff to fit into your 5,000-square-foot ranch house or your three-car garage, you can drive over to your self-storage unit, thus supporting one of the fastest-growing industries in America.

So, there would probably be no better way to slow consumption, and thus gain some hope to head off catastrophic climate disruption and keep society from running off the cliff of peak oil, than putting the breaks on car culture immediately. Mugyenyi and Engler join the many authors of anti-car books who put forth many worthy policy ideas to clear the road. Some of theirs include taxing driving to support transit and limiting car ads.

I was so glad to see that they didn’t push the false solutions of electric cars, hydrogen cars, solar cars or any of the myriad quick fixes that the industry wants us to believe will make cars less harmful to humans. Even the cleanest car still requires resources to build and run, still creates dangerous waste and, worst of all, still serves as the linchpin of the consumer society.

Don’t be such a downer

The authors believe that activists can create a successful anti-car movement by skipping over what a bummer it will be to give up your Camaro and instead just talking up how great life would be without everybody else’s Camrys or Cadillacs stinking up the place.

“The anti-car movement need not focus on personal sacrifice. Let’s emphasize the positive,” such as how we’ll be healthier and have less debt or how kids can play in the streets again, the authors write.

But will such little niceties really be motivating enough for drivers, suburban homeowners and IKEA shoppers to give up the only lifestyle that most of them have ever known?

For my money, to get people to demand change on such a large scale, they’re going to need a pretty strong motivation. As any salesman can tell you, fear of loss is a much stronger motivator than hope of gain. And considering what’s at stake at this point — the survival of human civilization — a healthy sense of fear and urgency is also a more realistic reaction than warm-fuzzies about a higher quality of life.

Speaking of fear, the authors don’t have much faith in peak oil as a motivator because they think that industrial capitalism is resilient enough to continue its endless quest for profit even after oil peaks, by squeezing out tar sands, shale oil, GMO ethanol, deepwater oil and liquified coal. “From a human survival perspective, the planet has too many fossil fuels, not too few.”

Peak oil vs. the profit motive

Mugyenyi and Engler say that peak oilers don’t give this industry, which secretly bought up and dismantled viable urban streetcar lines during the first half of the twentieth century to deny the public any option but personal cars, enough credit for evil genius. But I think it’s the other way around. The authors give industry too much credit for being able to continue to run an oil-sucking enterprise like global auto manufacturing on junk fossil fuels.

Peak oilers understand that it’s not just about energy, but net energy. And until environmentalists can get the difference between 1) easy crude oil from West Texas or Saudi Arabia that gave us a fantastic return (or EROEI) of 30x or higher in the old days and 2) today’s junk oil from tar sands or deepwater drilling with a crappy return of 5x or lower, then these environmentalists will continue to lack respect for peak oil’s potential to bring global industrial civilization to a screeching halt.

Not to say that peak oil should be an excuse for complacency. We’ll certainly fry if we just sit around waiting for the oil crash to stop climate change and ecological overshoot on their own. But, when it comes to a conundrum as big as personal cars, activists are going to need to go negative to wake up drivers and suburban homeowners from their century-long trance.

And going negative here means talking about how peak oil will take personal cars off the road. It means telling the public the bad news that there just aren’t enough resources to run America’s car culture any longer.

“People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change,” uber-wealthy, eco-savvy Boston asset manager Jeremy Grantham told the New York Times recently. “Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice….Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan, but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.”

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

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Filed Under: Books Tagged With: auto industry, Bianca Mugyenyi, cars, Jeremy Grantham, unconventional oil, Yves Engler

About Erik Curren

Erik Curren is the publisher of Transition Voice. He co-founded Transition Staunton Augusta in December 2009 and serves as managing partner of the Curren Media Group.

Capitalism's destructive car mania detailed

Sunday, February 5, 2012

By Phil Shannon

Cars cause about 40,000 deaths a year in the US.

Stop Signs: Cars & Capitalism ― On the Road to Economic, Social & Ecological Decay
By Bianca Mugenyi & Yves Engler
RED Publishing & Fernwood Publishing
2011, 259 pages,
$27.95 (pb)

The car, say Canadian authors Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler, who took a bus ride across the United States, is a doomed jalopy going nowhere. It fails, especially in the “home of the car”, on every green count.

Cars are the single largest contributor to US noise pollution and 40,000 people in the US die from car accidents each year (one million across the globe).

Traffic congestion creates stress and induces aggression, particularly towards cyclists, pedestrians, traffic lights and speed limits ― anything that might slow the mighty car down.

Toxic pollutants from tailpipe and particulate matter from tyre rubber (treated with dozens of carcinogens, neurotoxins and heavy metals) create health havoc from respiratory disease to cancer. Cars also “make you fat”, with all the attendant diseases of obesity.

The car is a huge devourer of space ― roads, garages, petrol stations and parking make up between one-third and one-half of the total space in US cities.

The two million cars added to the US automotive fleet each year require asphalting space equivalent to 400,000 football fields, paving over prime farmland. Parking is an omnipresent visual blight on the urban landscape and the car promotes an ugly urban housing sprawl.

The car is economically wasteful, chewing up 20% of GDP in the US (compared with 9% in Japan with its mass transport system). The cost of running a car soaks up one third of the working life of the average US citizen.

Inefficiency is its byword ― only 30% of a car’s petrol is turned into actual motion to carry just 10% of its weight, so only “3% of the fuel’s energy actually moves what needs to be moved”, Mugyenyi and Engler write.

The ecological tyre-print of the car is huge even before it leaves the sales yard. Each car requires huge quantities of water, metal and rubber, while generating tonnes of solid and airborne, often toxic, waste.

The car’s life-blood, oil, is one of the most environmentally dirty industries globally. The transport sector in the US is the nation’s leading source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The petrol-driven, internal combustion engine guzzles 63% of the 20 million barrels of oil consumed each day in the US. “Peak oil” and rising petrol prices are spurring on the rise of even dirtier “unconventional” fuels such as tar sands, shale oil, genetically-modified ethanol, deep sea oil and liquefied coal.





Importantly, the authors puncture the desperate delusion that “alternative” fuels can solve “the ecological catastrophe that is the private car”.

Corn-based ethanol produces more CO2 than oil-based petrol “if all the energy used in the growth phase is properly accounted for”. Corn-as-fuel also takes up five times more land than corn-as-food.

Using hydrogen or electricity to power US cars would need more dirty coal as an energy source. Either that or an area as large as the state of Massachusetts for solar panels, or New York State for wind turbines, or 200 new nuclear energy plants.

“There is no such thing as a green car,” the authors conclude. “Unsustainable” would barely describe the car’s environmental failure if the rest of the world were to adopt US patterns of car ownership and driving behaviour.

So why is the car such a protected species, culturally celebrated and immune from radical policy review? Because, the authors say, the car is integral to the capitalist economy and thus any criticism of the car is taboo.

Since 1925, the automotive industry has been the leading sector of the US economy, and, of the world’s 10 largest corporations, three are car manufacturers and six are oil companies.

The logic of maximising corporate profit through the car, they write, is compelling to all manner of capitalist industries that sell vastly more glass, rubber, steel, aluminium, plastic, paint and other products for the car than they ever would for the puny bike or efficient train.

With this economic power of the “auto-industrial complex” comes political power and access to huge government welfare programs. This offloads the private costs of the car onto the public purse for roads, police, hospitals and environmental repair, while government tax concessions, grants, bailouts and other subsidies are freely on offer.

Public transport, denied the aura of corporate profit, is the sickly runt of the transport litter whose strongest offspring gorge on the teat of public welfare.

This need not be so, say the authors. Raising the costs of driving and restricting car space are necessary sticks to the necessary carrots of investments in pedestrian, cycling and public transport infrastructure and people-centric urban design.

Making public transport free is essential, they argue. They cite Belgium’s third biggest city (Hasselt), which enjoyed a 1300% increase in public transport use over 10 years of free mass transit, and Ockelbo in Sweden, which had a 260% rise with half the new public commuters being former drivers.

All that stands in the way of a green transport future is the “concentrated private power of corporations” in the oil and auto industries.

The car and capitalism stand together. They must fall together too.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/49946