NO PROBLEMO-- Delusions Run Deep in the Easy Motoring Economy
Curmudgeon in the Wild- James Howard Kuntsler
If the the Devil himself wanted to design a perfect trap for attracting morons, he couldn't have done better than this season's New York International Auto Show at the Jacob Javits Center. While I am known to be judgmental by disposition, I honestly did not set out with this notion preconceived. I arrived at it only after interacting with some of the attendees, many of whom might have passed superficially for average Americans.
Perusing the various exhibits was like being in the world's largest auto dealership, nothing more -- which is to say, it was a surprisingly dull environment. It is, after all, just a trade show. Each brand of car had its little area with half a dozen models on view. Many of them had giant wall-sized plasma TV screens that played what amounted to extended TV commercials of the kind with which we have been so constantly bombarded over the decades that they barely register anymore. But it is interesting to actually pay attention, because they uniformly send a bizarre message: You are all alone in your car in a beautiful environment.
The cars on screen are generally depicted as swooshing along gorgeous winding rural roads, with no others in sight -- just you and the open road! This is obviously an old and alluring archetypal dream, and it is also obviously at odds with the more common reality of creeping down Route 17 in Hackensack, or some ghastly highway like it, with traffic backed up at the frequent stoplights and vistas of the entropic horror of American hyper-retail amid wastelands of free parking at every compass point.
The big news here was that there was so little news from the automakers themselves. Judging from the cars on display, they apparently aim to stick with the program of the now-ubiquitous low-mileage SUV war wagons as far ahead as anyone can see -- along with the still-popular gas-hogging pickup trucks based on the same chassis as the SUVs -- and the familiar cast of luxury sedans with jazzily updated electronics. There was remarkably little recognition that the civilized world -- the motoring world -- stands at the threshold of a new era characterized by the end of cheap fuel.
I hasten to add that there were nods to the notion that perhaps other fuels might come into play. There were several "hybrid" vehicles on display, and there was one cross-sectioned specimen of a hydrogen fuel cell car, which might have fooled most of the attendees but seemed to me an obvious hoax -- the fuel tank was misleadingly tiny, given hydrogen's peculiar characteristics. And there was no hint of cost. (The current Mercedes-Benz F-Cell prototype has a recently reported price tag of $1.4 million. If they got the price down by ninety percent, it would still be a problem for the average motorist). But these displays were little more than transparent public relations efforts intended to put across the message: No problemo!
This huge annual car event happened to be going on during a week in which the price of crude oil jumped above $55-a-barrel for the first time since the late summer of 2004.You'd think that this would be a signal to the American public that it was time to...uh...re-think our national obsession with easy motoring? Not so. At least not among the people I spoke with at random. Their delusions were strikingly florid, in fact, the most common and basic one being that America possesses a bountiful supply of oil -- if only the sundry enviro-freaks and corporate chiselers would let us at it.
The facts, sadly, belie that notion. United States oil reserves stand at about 28 billion barrels (if you include natural gas condensates). I am not speaking here of the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is a tiny fraction of this, but of the total amount of crude oil left underground anywhere in the fifty states: 28 billion barrels. Now, Americans use more than 20 million barrels of oil a day. That's 100 million every five days. That's a billion (1,000 million) every fifty days. That's -- give or take -- seven billion barrels of oil a year. If for some reason our oil imports were cut off and we had to depend solely on our own oil, our total reserves would last four measly years. Actually a bit less if you figure that a portion of that oil will never be pumped out for practical and economic reasons.
It so happens that we currently import more than two thirds of the 20 million barrels a day we use. Of that, about a quarter comes from our good friends in the Persian Gulf nations. More than ten percent comes from Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, despises America because we have tried to overthrow and kill him more than once. Another hefty percentage comes from West African nations so sclerotic in governance that the work of the oil companies can barely get done amid the political and social chaos. It's not a pretty picture.
My own bias, which might as well be revealed succinctly if you haven't already guessed it, is that the global oil peak problem (2006) will change everything about how and where we live, how we allocate and value land, what our economy will be about in the decades ahead, and especially how our social and political relations will sort out. Above all, apropos of the subject at hand, it will lead to a severely diminished presence of cars in our daily lives. And so it was exceedingly strange to find myself circulating around a massive show based on the assumption that the motoring life will continue uninterrupted forever. After two laps around the exhibits, I began buttonholing attendees and asking for their views on the oil situation.
"The car companies know they can get seventy-five miles per gallon but the gas companies won't allow that because their stock might drop," said Jimmy Koutsoubis of Clinton, New Jersey. "We have all this excess oil -- we're just not using it."
Ed Picerno of Staten Island said, "The oil companies manipulate the price. There's plenty of supply in the world if we'd just start drilling in Alaska and elsewhere."
I asked one middle-aged gentleman, who didn't want to give his name, what he thought about America's dependence on foreign oil. "It's not because we're relying on imports," he said, "except it's cheaper to get from other nations, like buying pineapples from Costa Rica."
(If the reader is detecting a hallucinatory trend here, be assured your perceptions are functioning.)
Another anonymous middle-aged attendee -- they were overwhelmingly male -- said of the oil situation, "I'll leave it to the scientists. I can't see sticking a corn-cob in my carburetor... The oil companies are slowing the development of alternatives."
A life-long GM customer from Easton, Pa, Dan Belinski, said it would be ten years before we had any trouble with mass motoring and by that time it would be a matter of the highways being "overcrowded with too many foreigners." He thinks the solution is to "double-deck the expressways and get rid of the toll booths."
Peter Yannacci, from Plainview, Long Island, said, "I like the hybrids, but that's far off. I don't believe global oil is short. Not within my lifetime. We have oil we could get. We have all this oil in reserve -- hey, how many dinosaurs were there? [The recent oil price volatility] is all man-made like in the seventies. It gets fuel prices up there where they want them. There's gasohol. There's plenty of corn. We've been doing it for years."
Mark Hayes of Staten Island said, "I guess alternative fuels are good but I don't know if you can get the auto industry to go for it." Any troubles with America's oil supply, he said, "Depends on who is president. If we get enough Arab countries mad at us, they'd cut off our oil and we'd have to resort to our own supplies."
Eric Wittlinger, a tall, handsome recent graduate of dental school, looking forward to a substantially increased income stream from a new practice in orthodontics, had been driving a vulgar old Mitsubishi Montero and was hoping to upgrade now to his dream car, a Mercedes-Benz SL-500. He was unperturbed by any suggestion that there was a problem with the world's oil supply. "Hybrids are nice. They get you thinking of alternatives -- if only they could make more variety."
Rafael Piotrowski of Astoria, Queens, a young man who had come to America from Poland as a child was not troubled about America"s energy future. "We have a lot of time. Maybe our children will have to worry."
A character of particular interest was one Peter Hull of Kettering, Northampshire, England, a traffic engineer who travels frequently to the U.S. on business, and is a lover of SUVs. Hull himself commutes 140 miles a day by car from his home to London on British freeways -- which is extraordinary for a European. He said it costs him the equivalent of a thousand dollars a month for gas. Of the global oil situation he said, "There's a lot going on behind the scenes. The oil companies are limiting the use of alternative fuels and hybrids." I mentioned to him that England had just come off a twenty-year-long jamboree of cheap oil from its own North Sea fields, which were now in depletion, making England once again a net oil importer. To say he was mystically confident is no exaggeration: "We'll be getting oil in the future from Canada and Russia," he said, "and the prices will go down." I asked him what kind of plans his country had for the future vis-à-vis automobile use. "We've got to improve the roads."
It became painfully clear that the attendees of the New York Auto Show were a self-selecting group of people who were all reasonably comfortable with the belief that America's car culture has a big future. I didn't try to debate them; but I did wonder what the quality of their disappointment might be like later this year when the "summer driving season" gets underway and gasoline prices penetrate the three-dollar-a-gallon floor. They will blame the oil companies, the government, the Arabs -- they will blame everybody but themselves.
On the way out, my attention was drawn to an amazingly novel P.R. innovation: Volvo's new "partial zero emission vehicle." They even touted the not-exactly euphonious acronym: PZEV.
Next year, I suppose, they'll be showing a "partial infinite-miles-per-gallon" vehicle. You can drive forever -- up to a point.
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