The Car's the Thing

I'm as fond of blaming Big Oil for climate change as the next person, but this thread by a Twitter user named Michael Sweeney makes some really good points. Sweeney appears to be a television editor... not a planner or anything like that. Just a guy who has thoughts that make sense:

A really potentially bitter debate (already frequently cropping up) that we need to be ready for is "charging the actual costs of driving means only the rich can drive, which is unfair, therefore we must continue to subsidize driving."

Automobile dependence is literally killing the planet that we live on, we have no choice but to reduce it. The rich will get privileged access to continue driving despite eliminating subsidies, because the rich have more money. That sucks!

But the solution to this problem is well known: progressive income and wealth taxes to reduce the level of income inequality combined with government provision for people's basic human needs: education, food, medicine, housing, transportation.

This solution works so much better than "fight for lowering the gas tax and untolled freeways and free parking spots" in terms of protecting poor people and hurting rich people (by the way, very few of the poorest people in the US drive compared to the general population).

Locking working Americans into car dependence isn't freeing them. It's chaining them to an extremely expensive consumer platform whose costs are designed in many cases to bankrupt them despite the enormous subsidies even poorer people pay to keep the system going.

This is why, across the world, left-wing parties fight for increased access to public transportation (and in the US that means fighting for increased density as well to make transit viable) everywhere they can. I don't know why American leftists do not understand this.

Imagine if the situation were reversed and we had great public transit and the alternative being proposed was "the private sector will compete to sell you a $20k vehicle with Wall Street financing, then you can go on a marketplace to insure it for several hundred dollars a month. In addition to your car payments and insurance you'll be on the hook for thousands of dollars of gas and thousands in maintenance and replacement parts over the life of the vehicle."

It would look like an insane neoliberal plot to rob working people of their wages.

This is the system I see many leftists step in to defend when they oppose high gas taxes or tolling freeways or congestion charges or charging for parking in the name that "it hurts the poor more than the rich."

Sustaining this system is a disaster for the poor!

That's even leaving aside the even more pressing issue that the survival of Planet Earth hinges on us not pumping carbon into the atmosphere and we can't stop with radically reducing auto dependency.

Anyway, please do not be one of these people!

Fight to liberate working people from the poisonous serfdom of car dependency, not to make the chains cheaper.

Combine that with this thread by Matthew Lewis, an energy analyst:

It looks like I’m on track to spend about $250 on gasoline this year. That’s not some sign of my environmental purity. I hate driving, and have built my life around avoiding it at all costs.

But it’s crucial that the climate movement get its head out of its ass on this topic. It keeps attacking the oil industry — an industry entirely tertiary to oil burning.

The primary cause of oil burning is land-use patterns; the secondary cause are carmakers who enable those patterns.

If you change land-use patterns, you drastically undermine the auto industry. I’m living proof. Like I said, $250 this year on gas, mostly to visit family in Oregon or friends in Mari.

If you decide changing land-use patterns is not your thing, then you can change the auto industry by forcing them to make cars/trucks that either don’t run on gasoline at all, or run on very, very little. Both approaches are failing, so far, though we’re told that will change soon.

But the oil industry shouldn’t even factor into this fight and I’m honestly embarrassed we keep focusing on it. They sell a product that’s only needed because we buy another product that we only need because we got fooled into thinking car-dependent suburbs are groovy.

And honestly, we have so many other campaigns where the (correct, in my opinion) solution is “stop buying the product that causes harm.”

CARS ARE THE MOST DEADLY PRODUCTS IN HUMAN HISTORY, HOW ABOUT WE START THERE?

Nah, let’s go after the magic water we put in these deadly devices.

Anyway, yes, I’m aware some people like driving and others “have no choice” and so forth, not everyone lives the same way. But you don’t solve problems by focusing attention away from their root cause.

And where we live is the root cause of oil consumption. Who’s fault is that?

I 100% guarantee you, it’s not the oil industry.

As long as our cities and urban areas are built to require car access, and car (and truck) manufacturing is seen as a key job sector both economically and by labor unions, not much will change until it all comes tumbling down.