Off Campus magazine: March 2007
Cover story:
OUR LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE CAR:
Heavy Traffic Ahead
by Matt Russell
We are a society deeply infatuated with our cars. We have the second highest per capita car
ownership statistics in the developed world
(just behind America). Car culture – in all its
various forms – is a national obsession.
Go to any small town and count how many souped-up Mazdas and restored classics you see, polished and gleaming, outfitted with neon lights and shimmering mag wheels. Pull into a city parking complex or supermarket and count the ostentatious luxury models and monolithic four-wheel drives. Ask any teenager how badly they want to get their licence, or, conversely, how badly any senior citizen wants to keep theirs. Along with the rest of the Western world, ever since those first motorised hunks of metal and oil rolled off Ford’s assembly line and into our ports, we’ve had our hearts stolen like so many chromium hood-ornaments.
It’s rather indicative that the automobile – although today viewed as a necessity on par with the toaster – was originally conceived as a luxury item, intended for the exclusive pleasure of the super rich minority. The essence of a luxury of course is that the pleasure one receives from it is in direct relation to how many people are using it. When we all have one, everyone who uses it ends up frustrating everyone else, and is frustrated in return. Now, faced with the sobering realities of carbon emissions and climate change, we are being reminded of this essential fact, even as we try our darndest to ignore it.
Today, New Zealand’s total CO2 emissions are approximately 80 million tonnes per year, a 21.3% increase over 1990 levels. Although the agricultural sector accounts for the bulk of these greenhouse gas emissions (49.4%), the energy sector, including transport, is the second largest emissions component, and is growing at an alarmingly rapid rate. Government statistics show that since 1990, emissions from agriculture have increased by 14.8%, while energy emissions have increased 33.8%.
When you crunch the numbers, it’s not difficult to see where the swell is coming from. Transport emissions have increased 61.6% from 1990, and in 2004 alone, private cars constituted an unnerving 87.4% of total transport emissions. Between 1990 and 1999 our vehicle fleet grew by almost 26%, and between 2001 and 2003 by a further 9.15%. Currently, there are around 3.7 million motor vehicles in a country populated by just over four million people. While public transportation recently enjoyed a minor upsurge off the back of rising oil prices, it still constitutes little over 2% of total trips taken. Walking and cycling are both down. What’s more, vehicle ownership is projected to rise a further 10% by the end of the 2012 – the same year the Kyoto Protocol requires greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced to 1990 levels.
While the numbers are hair-raising, they are hardly unique. Despite continually rising oil prices, the overwhelming trend we see globally is people walking less, using public transportation less, buying more cars, and driving them more often. In America - the world’s leading buyer and burner of crude oil – private vehicle ownership increases 1% each year. In the European Union, passenger cars are projected to grow at a rate of 1.4% per annum until 2010. Most industry experts believe the Chinese auto-industry – fuelled by an almost illimitable domestic market – will continue to expand in the 15% range annually for years to come.
In other words, we need to do something, and we need to do something fast.
The big irony of all this is that the clamour for the private car is increasing at precisely the historical moment when its sheer irrationality is clear to almost everyone. Anyone who has wormed their way over the Auckland harbour bridge in ranks of belching traffic and angry drivers knows how inhuman the system is. The technologies and economic policies required to address it have been available for decades, and far from costing us money, a rational system based on efficient public transportation and vehicle sharing would save us billions. However, the real barriers to a rational transportation system are not technological or economic, they are political, cultural and, most specifically, psychological. As the WW2 propaganda poster illustrates, to drive alone, is to drive with the enemy.
Back in 1973, French social theorist Andre Gorz wrote an essay called “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar”, one of the seminal texts on the cultural significance of the private vehicle. Gorz was a socialist, and he argued that the triumph of the car represented the triumph of liberal individualism, the idea that “the pursuit of individual happiness becomes the determining factor in human interaction, and comes to override all other factors, most notably social and communal”. It’s a given that most people, when they hop into their cars, transform into someone quite different from their previous selves. Society, (traffic lights, speed limits, other people) suddenly become the enemy, something that impinges on our autonomy as individuals.
For example, when Daimler Chrysler wanted to rethink the look and engineering of their PT Cruiser (a particularly popular model among Aucklanders), they sought the talents not of a topline designer, but of a Jungian psychologist. In a now infamous interview with Salon.com, Chrysler marketing director David Bostwick commented that, “The more we learn about [our customers], the more we see these vehicles fit into our psyche – the more we see how it is that we fit into an overall scheme of living … This is closely tied to the idea of freedom, autonomy and status. People want speed, to feel faster than everyone else … People also want something that offers protection from the outside, and comfort on the inside.” However, as UK journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot points out in his recent book Heat, there is a glaring double bind to our auto-psychosis.
“In managing our transportation systems, our governments must constantly negotiate the contradiction of mass-movement. They must create a system which, for the sake of speed and efficiency, treats us like a herd, constantly prodded and corralled into line. At the same time it must grant us the illusion of autonomy. The songs of the open road, the pictures in the advertisements of cars on lonely mountain passes, the names of all-terrain vehicles which seldom venture past their suburbs - Defender, Explorer, Pathfinder, Cherokee, Tourag – all speak of freedom which is not to be found on the highways. But this is the freedom governments and car manufacturers must strive to preserve.”
In that context, it’s not surprising to see that for democratically elected governments any real action against the private car isn’t on the political agenda. While most Western states now recognise global warming is a reality, and have adopted various policies to curb emissions, there is a general tendency to accommodate the private car into these policies, rather than formulate policy that will allow them to run a more feasible transport system.
Here, biofuels, (carbon-neutral fuels derived from plant and animal matter and blended with regular fuels), have been particularly useful. Originally the domain of bewhiskered hippies running Volkswagens on old chip-fat, biofuels are now a profitable capitalist enterprise. They have also allowed governments to pursue supposedly enlightened climate change policy, without interfering with their population’s automotive autonomy.
The European Union’s Strategic Energy Review published in late January states a binding minimal target of 10% of all vehicle fuels should come from biofuels by 2020. Biofuels and biodiesel are central to our own Government’s Draft Energy Strategy released in November last year, and when the document eventually transfers into policy at the latter point of 2007 it is likely we will see similar targets to the Europeans. Even the Bush administration loves biofuels, which are perceived as a way to help wean the country off its dependence on oil produced by recalcitrant Arabs. “Every gallon of renewable, domestically produced fuel we use is a gallon we don’t have to get from other countries,” effuses Congressman Kenny Hulshof, a Republican sponsor of the Energy Independence Promotion Act currently being considered by Congress.
Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Head of Massey’s Centre for Energy Research Professor Ralph Sims has devoted his entire career to biofuel research, and pioneered the use of tallow for biodiesel production in the 1970s. Today he sits on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based in Paris. He says that if car ownership increases at current levels, it will well and truly negate any potential emission cuts achieved through biofuel blends:
“For example, Germany, leading the world on research in renewable energy and biofuels, still says you cannot touch our car industry, and the car uptake in China and elsewhere is so rapid that emissions are rising fast. Even if all the current and proposed energy policies are brought into force and all these targets are met, then by 2030 the energy-related global greenhouse emissions will probably have nearly doubled from current levels.”
More pernicious is the way in which biofuel production has been integrated into the machinations of the global economy. In line with the dictates of the market, much of the Western world’s biofuel comes from where it is most cheaply produced, the massive palm-oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. In 2005, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production:
“Between 1985 and 2000, the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87% of deforestation in Malaysia.”
In Sumatra and Borneo, some four million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms by being burned to the ground. In 1997, the single worst year of deforestation, 2.67 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide were released by the enormous fires – the equivalent of 40% of that year’s total global emissions. Having used up drier lands, the plantations are now stretching onto into the pristine swamp-forests. It is illuminating that when formulating the 10% biofuel targets in the Strategic Energy Review, European Commissioners chose to ignore calls from over 200 NGOs to take certification measures ensuring palm oil imports had not been produced on deforested land. All biofuels are to count towards the target, no matter if they are linked to CO2 emissions, or whether they are produced sustainably.
Professor Sims says that smaller-scale, sustainably produced biofuel blends, in conjunction with plug-in hybrid vehicles and flex-fuel vehicles, are still essential in combating global warming, but will only be effective if they are employed in the context of an overarching reformation of our transportation networks which can get the majority of people out of private cars and into low-emission public commuter vehicles.
“Unfortunately,” he says, “restricting demand growth for vehicles is not feasible politically. Overall we have to be realistic about providing innovative solutions from technology, as well as try for behavioral change, which is the hardest. For example, the Chinese I meet through my work cannot imagine why I choose to ride a bicycle and do not own a car here in Paris. For them the status image of a car far outweighs their increased environmental footprint as a result. And who are we to say they can’t!”
It’s easy to be demoralized by the enormity of such a problem, especially living in a small nation such as New Zealand with seemingly little ability to sway climate change policy globally. But as Professor Sims points out, New Zealand has the ability to “punch above its weight” when it comes to environmental issues. “We are held in high regard internationally for our energy policies due to the fact that around 30% of our total energy, (mainly electricity) already comes from renewables, and because we are a relatively small and well educated population we can demonstrate change faster than others.” According to Sims, “New Zealand is uniquely placed to become a model nation on how to move rapidly and effectively on transport reform and energy efficiency.” The Draft Energy Strategy is currently out for public consultation, and it’s likely that its final form will determine the broad direction of our energy policy into next decade. Real change will only come from shifts in individual attitude, which will translate into shifts in individual behaviour.
Our predicament should perhaps bring to mind Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the alien “Ford Prefect” assumed the name of a line of cheaply produced automobiles because – viewing our congested cities and teeming motorways from space – he had perceived them as the dominant life-form. He was right of course, and now we are being forced to decide whether the prevailing auto-psychosis will continue to dominate our world and ourselves.
