Let the excuses begin.
The New York Times leads off:
more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and
oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil
fuel.
The Washington Post weighs in:
Many members of Congress believe they know what the car company of the future should look like. "A business model based on gas — a gas-guzzling past — is unacceptable," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)
said last week. "We need a business model based on cars of the future,
and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric
car."
But the car company Schumer and other lawmakers envision
for the future could turn out to be a money-losing operation, not part
of a "sustainable U.S. auto industry" that President-elect Barack Obama and most members of Congress say they want to create.
That's
because car manufacturers still haven't figured out how to produce
hybrid and plug-in vehicles cheaply enough to make money on them.
Expect to hear more in the coming days and months. We will see a potentially debilitating alignment of old thinking and old, yet still politically powerful, economic interests. If it succeeds, the country will face much worse pain in the years ahead.
As Rogue readers know, this crisis is not only about — or even primarily about — the financial system. It is about the weight of unsustainable activities finally caving in on us. Sprawl. Gas guzzlers. Peak oil. Water shortages. Global warming. Imperial overstretch. An economy based on clever financial swindles than actually producing things.
It's not surprising that people would look for an easy way out, an easy way back to the comfort zone. We are, after all, pleasure seeking mammals. That a vast part of the economy has been dedicated to the unsustainable gives this tendency even more momentum. But I hope Times readers also noticed the story headlined "Outlook Grows More Dire for Housing Market." There's no going back. But that doesn't mean we won't expend valuable treasure and time trying. We might even "succeed" for a moment, before the same forces reasserted themselves, this time with even more disastrous results.
So we will hear much about the jobs that will be lost in polluting industries, in house building, in constructing SUVs. We will hear about how it's too late to address global warming (how convenient, that argument), and even if we act, China and India won't. Blah and blah, will be followed by blah.
Little attention will be paid to the costs from global warming, which will rise in proportion to the degree that we fail to slow or stop it (even if one accepts the view that it can't be completely reversed, which is not settled science). Those costs won't all be for the people in parts of the world that ignorant Americans can't identify on a map. But even if they were, these consequences will radically destabilize regions where the Big Three hopes to sell cars, Microsoft software and Boeing airplanes — and from which Americans hope to keep getting their oil.
The media, and many "experts," are shockingly naive about the future of oil — even if burning it didn't contribute to the national security and economic danger that is global warming. We are at or near peak — and the other half of this one-time geologic legacy will be costlier and more difficult to extract, refine and transport. Trying to hang onto the 1965 transportation mindset has already proved geopolitically disastrous with Iraq. And no "alternatives" will be as cheap or energy effective as the light sweet crude we've already burned off. Prices may rise or fall, but this is a reality that no wishing away will change.
Little attention will be paid from practical jobs that could come from different thinking. It's not necessary to even get into speculative "green" industries, which may not be so (e.g. ethanol). For example, America has the capability not to rebuild its passenger rail network, to provide a much more energy efficient and climate friendly transportation system. Jim Kunstler, the only other writer who seems to get this, added this week:
California just voted to create a high-speed rail link between Los
Angeles and San Francisco. It's an optimistic sign, but it shows more
than a little techno-grandiose over-reach. High speed rail would
require a mega-expensive re-do of the tracks. We need to scale our
ambitions for this more realistically. California (and every other
region of America) would benefit much more from normal-speed trains
running every hour on the hour on tracks that already exist
than from a mega-expensive, grandiose sci-fi program that might not get
built for ten years. The dregs of the Big Three automakers can and
should be reorganized to produce the rolling stock for a revived
railroad system.
The greatest attention deficit is about this moment. We have a chance to begin the great transition that will be required to maintain American strength and prosperity in the 21st century. The old system is dead, it just doesn't know it. So are the jobs based on unsustainability and lacking the ability to reinvent themselves in the new reality. I'll write more about this in the coming months. But for now, gird yourselves for the cavalcade of excuses, and be skeptical.
Read Rogue's Sustainability archive here.
If you read Kunstler or Talton, you know the catechism by heart. Yet this current crisis has specific causalities independent of sustainability issues. True, those issues reflect attitudes relevant to the crisis but can’t fully explain it by themselves.
Maybe there is an opportunity here for those of us who hate sprawl. But as Phoenix shows, the worst exerts its own gravitational pull. Decades of autocentric growth command inertia in ways every urban planner and smart-growth advocate understand. We keep hoping some baby steps eventually become meaningful strides, or that light rail becomes the centralizing focus of metro Phoenix. Good luck with that.
We’re making political arguments here that seldom get heard above the din of mainstream-media conversation drivers. These arguments depend on logical progression and a basic understanding of thw world, including its history. Yet we also need to understand that the world’s basic requirement for pleasure and security foreclose systematic and multipart critiques of the modern predicament.
I think the best we can do is keep pointing out the advantages that occur where people put the commons above individual boot-strapping, with Phoenix being an example of the latter tendency. It’s too late for Phoenix but not to late for Denver, Kansas City, Nashville, or Seattle. This blog and Kunstler’s serve to remind us of meaningful distinctions. I wish they could also save us from the malady of short-term thinking but, in truth, nothing can.