Stop Signs

STOP SIGNS: Cars and Capitalism – On the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

By BIANCA MUGYENYI and YVES ENGLER

RED Publishing & Fernwood Publishing

2011, 259 pages, $27.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

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

The car, say Mugyenyi and Engler, two Canadians on a bus trip of the USA, 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 America’s noise pollution, 40,000 Americans die from car accidents each year (a million across the globe), and traffic congestion creates stress and induces aggression, particularly towards cyclists, pedestrians, traffic lights, speed limits -anything which 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 whilst “cars make you fat” with all the attendant diseases of obesity.

The car is a massive devourer of space - roads, garages, petrol stations and parking make up between one-third and one-half of the total space in American cities. The two million cars added to the US automotive fleet each year require asphalting the space-equivalent of 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) whilst 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”.

The ecological tyre-print of the car is massive even before it leaves the sales yard, each car requiring massive quantities of water, metal and rubber, whilst generating tons of solid and air-borne, often toxic, waste.

The car’s life-blood, oil, is one of the most environmentally dirty industries globally whilst 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” and corn-as-fuel takes up five times more land than corn-as-food.

Hydrogen or electricity to power the cars of America would need more dirty coal as an energy source 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.

Why then is the car such a protected species, culturally celebrated and immune from radical policy review? Because, the authors explain, 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 ten 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 which sell vastly more glass, rubber, steel, aluminium, plastic, paint and other productsthan the puny bike or efficient train can command. With this economic power of the“auto-industrial complex” comes political power and access to massive government welfare programs, offloading private costs of the car onto the public purse for roads, police, hospitals and environmental repair whilstgovernment 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. Increasing the costs of driving and restricting car space are necessary sticks to the equally necessary carrots of investments in pedestrian, cycling and public transport infrastructure and people-centric urban design. Making public transport free is essential, they argue, citing Belgium’s third biggest city (Hasselt) which saw a 1,300% increase in public transport use over ten years of free mass transit, andOckelbo in Sweden which had a 260% increase 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.