BC: KAR KULTURE
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
I don't know what country you are from but people here in the US of A f'ing love their cars. It's more than love though it's an obsession, a fixation that goes beyond reason.
You're taking a detached sort of anthropological view of the situation, using reason to describe an emotional issue. Certainly nothing in human nature binds us to our car, just like nothing in human nature binded the egyptians to the pyramids or the easter islanders to the moai. That is beside the point. The point is what will people do individually or collectively to protect their sacred motor cars? The answer is they may do just about anything.
I was watching the evening news a while back and they were interviewing a guy at the filling station about high gas prices, his response was something along the lines of "it's like tobacco, it's just something you've got to have." The random guy on the street comparing gas to a drug is very telling of our current predicament. At about the same time somebody in an SUV ran over and killed a gas station attendant stealing 50 dollars worth of gas. In canada some guy beat the tar out of another guy with a tire iron over a gas line. The stories are endless, many came out of katrina about how dangerous filling stations became and how they had to post cops and troops there.
What will people sacrifice for their cars? Lets look at what they already have sacrificed:
-- some 40,000 people a year are killed in auto accidents in the US (an Iraq war of US casualties every three weeks, or a 9/11 every month or so). Per capita deaths are much higher in many other countries.
-- thousands of people back over their own small children!
-- thousands more injured, maimed or handicapped
-- a huge toll in wildlife deaths
-- widespread and massive loss of agricultural, forests and wetlands to parking lots, freeways and highway projects
-- severe water and air pollution (we've seen anti-smoking campaigns, have we ever seen anti-driving or anti-car campaigns, only by a small fringe of people)
If 40,000 people a year were killed by their microwave ovens exploding, do you think people would still use their microwave ovens? Would they take that risk of making microwave popcorn if it might kill them? of course not. Yet we have a blind spot in our brains when it comes to the automobile.
All of this and how often do you see corporate or government leaders discuss phasing out the automobile? Never of course. What you see out there, and on this forum, is people coming up with desperate measures and ideas to prolong the automobile age. We'll take anything! Ethanol, bio-diesel (rape the rain forests), hydrogen fuel cells, wind? solar? anything to power our cars, just don't take our cars away!
Many or most of the discussions on "peak oil solutions" and alternate energies boils down to people trying to save the automobile.
What will we do collectively? Iraq obviously comes to mind. Not only will we wage war in foreign lands to protect "our way of life" (our cars) but at the same time we will deny our addiction, our obsession. James Kunstler's neighbor who has an SUV with a "No War" sticker comes to mind. The same blind spot? Prior to the Iraq war I was walking through downtown seattle and I saw an anti-war caravan of SUVs plastered with "No Iraq war" posters driving slowly down fourth avenue by westlake honking their horns.
I wasn't well read on peak oil at the time, but every bone in my body ached with doomerism when I saw that.
We are entering the beginning of the end of the auto age. We are not entering the beginning of the hybrid age or the EV age or the car that runs on pixie dust age. This is when things will begin to get desperate, and we have already been given glimpses of what people will do individually or collectively to prolong the brief and ephemeral auto age.
We are still happily getting our fix though so all is well right now, but our dealers have supply problems themselves and everyone is getting a little nervous. With the all the traffic and the high gas prices, the high isn't as fun as it used to be.
..
..
..
..
..
and rebuttal
..
..
..
..
..
..
I understand that you view doomers (or realists as I like to call us) as hopelesssly pessimistic as well as secretly harboring a hope for the crash of this Kar-Kulture Dystopia and its greedy red state minions. But the truth is a little more subtle. Really it comes down to a realization that we can no longer expand and grow and maintain the status quo within a framework of finite resources.
Peak oil is just the big looming boulder right in front of us on the road. But peak-potable water, peak arable land, peak carrying capacity for this many humans are the boulders just up ahead. So yes, we critique a society that is myopic and headed for catastrophe because of a growth forever oriented philosophy.
When we read your arguments, we get angry because we feel like you are just defending the status quo. We see that as unfeasable no matter how many graphs and statistics you offer to back up your claims. It is a philosophical difference that we have, not a technical one. You believe we can "switch and grow" while we believe we have to "powerdown" and become sustainable.
As a "doomer", I am not hoping that we experience massive and quick die-off. I am hoping we can have a phased transition with the least amount of chaos. But my belief is that if we keep trying to live in your growth based, cornucopian world, we only put off catastrophe for a few more precious years in which we could have really made some fundamental changes.
..
..
..
..
..
People's desires can't change. Save the car
We've invested too much in sprawl.Save the car
There is no imaginable alternative way of life. Save the car
At all costs, even if we have to burn everything we can get our hands on, we must .. Save the car |
