Indeed, it’s a trap; it’s a bribe.
As the guest commentator points out, if I
may paraphrase, we live in the age of petroleum. Everywhere you care to look,
with the exception of the remote wilderness accessed by foot, if you look for
it, you’ll see petroleum at play. Anyone who has taken the time to connect the
dots, has at least a good idea of just how intricately dependent we are on
petroleum from everything from transport to agriculture, plastics (including
textiles) to computers. What’s more, in ecological, anthropological terms the
energy flow that petroleum represents has facilitated a degree of
specialisation that no other civilization has ever known.
But stating indisputable facts such as these
does not necessarily prove that we have put petroleum to the best possible of
uses over the long run. Indeed, I would argue that we have squandered it, and
in the case of the personalised automobile, we have over-invested in a
fundamentally flawed living arrangement with a dubious future.
In his argument, Jean-Francois Minardi
states that car-use accounts for “only” 43% of the petroleum pie, making the
number seem small, as though it were a democratic vote. This rhetorical trick
fails to acknowledge that this is by far the lion’s share of petroleum
allocation, with at least another 30% dedicated to fuels that also go toward
transportation (namely diesel and jet fuel).
So, yes, the Personal Automobile has a lot
to answer to. We may well value the benefits and convenience of cars, but we
must learn to weigh them against the well documented drawbacks, starting with
pollution and GHG emissions, and including the dissolution of urban community
and the physical dangers that cars pose to people. Furthermore, while cars may
well indeed be useful, in the context of a finite resource (which petroleum is),
their misuse and overuse may well be a mistake of historic import.
When you stop to consider the context in
which we debate things like the tar sands, and “fracking”, as well as pipelines
and the price at the pump, you might like to take in a few salient facts: We
have already used over half of the known petroleum reserves in the Earth’s
crust; what we’ve consumed to date has been the “low hanging fruit” and what
remains represents the harder to reach stuff (i.e. the more expensive oil).
What’s more, we are hooked on the notion of growing the economy year after
year, always using more energy to do so. We are therefore committed to
extracting more and more resources, at a greater and greater cost for a growing
economy of a growing population. We may like to appreciate the benefits of
petroleum, but we may well need to get our heads around the basic principles of
sustainability first.
I have to admit, I do not know who
Jean-Francois Minardi is, but I recognise his basic argument common to
“cornucopian” economists, that states “since petroleum has delivered us what we
like, we must therefore deserve more petroleum; and since we deserve it, we
therefore will inevitably, rightly do what is necessary to ensure its
availability.” It’s a line of reasoning that assumes that Nature is obliged to
provide for us whatever our hearts desire. Minardi goes on to introduce a
particularly emotionally charged example of hard working women in Africa, who now benefit from the use of plastic jugs when
hauling water. Since I too benefit from various forms of plastic (as much as I
do try to avoid the stuff) I would be hypocritical to decry this benefit.
However, it is not a sound argument to point only to one feel-good story while
ignoring countless examples of the downside of plastic as a pollutant in the
biosphere – the tons of floating debris in the oceans comes to mind, as the
most glaring example… At least the clay pots traditionally used by the African
women in the example are biodegradable.
But the issue isn’t about any one
particular example. Of course there is a narrative of progress that we can
attach to petroleum. There is also the narrative of dehumanisation and destruction.
Take your pick. The real issue with this natural resource is that Nature has
the final say. Whether we want there to be endless supplies of petroleum or
not, we will inevitably be faced with reduced access though rising prices, and
eventually with global scarcity. This fact is so far off the radar of the
mainstream media that you have to wade deep into the marshes of the blogosphere
to get a good overview of this situation, while running the risk of being
bogged down by some very twisted and dubious interpretations of the facts as
well.
For my part, I mention scarcity not as a
scare tactic, or part of a conspiracy theory, but because, if we could start to
get our heads around it, we could seriously consider the importance of reducing
that 43% to something like half or less, along with the other consumptive
habits we developed in a culture of abundance and entitlement which is entering
the its twilight phase.
As regular readers know, I am an avid cyclist. But I do use a car
from time to time. I will not ever own one, and I may one day own as many as
five bikes, so it’s no secret where my biases lie. I have made my choices, and
I live by them as best I can. I happen to be well aware that the tires on my
bike are derived from petroleum. The entire existence of a “cycling industry”
is surely, wholly dependent on the stuff, I know. But there is no way to
justify the comparison of this dependence to the dependence of car culture on
the same resource when you look at the basic rates of overall consumption. Just
because petroleum delivers us some valuable goods, it should not be assumed
that cars, and the extravagance they represent, are beyond all criticism.
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