[Carfreeliving] War against the car

[Brinkman, Cheryl]

I know it's the Wall Street Journal, not really a bastion of
progressivism, but it's still shocking to know that a presumably
intelligent person could engage in such simplistic thinking.
 
I love the idea that New Orleans could have been evacuated if only
everyone had a car.  Houston tried that, it was called gridlock.  We saw
friends from Houston last week, they told us about their experience
evacuating, 6 hours to go 30 miles, a total of 16 for a normally 3 hour
trip-  the kicker: they took both their cars.  Mom and son in one, Dad
in the other.
 
 
Sounds like the second graders are smarter then this guy.
 

The War Against the Car



November 11, 2005 ; Page A10
Commentary
<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB113167486376794406.html> - Wall
Street Journal 

A few years ago, I made a presentation to my second-grader's social
studies class, asking the kids what was the worst invention in history.
I was shocked when a number of them answered "the car." When I asked
why, they replied that cars destroy the environment. Distressed by the
Green indoctrination already visited upon seven-year-olds, I was at
least reassured in knowing that once these youngsters got their drivers'
licenses, their attitudes would change. 

It's one thing for second-graders to hold such childish notions, but
quite another for presumably educated adults to argue that automobiles
are economically and environmentally unsustainable "axles of evil." But
with higher gas prices, as well as Malthusian-sounding warnings about
catastrophic global warming and the planet running out of oil, the
tirade has taken on a new plausibility. Maybe Al Gore had it right all
along when he warned that the car and the combustible engine are "a
mortal threat . . . more deadly than any military enemy." 


* * * 


Welcome to the modern-day Luddite movement, which once raged against the
machine, but now targets the automobile. Just last month,
environmentalists organized a "world car-free day," celebrated in more
than 40 cities in the U.S. and Europe. In the left's vision of utopia,
cars have been banished -- replaced by bicycles and mass transit
systems. There is no smog or road congestion. And America has been
liberated from those sociopathic, gas-guzzling, greenhouse-gas-emitting
SUVs and Hummers that Jesus would never drive. 

It all sounds idyllic, but in real life this fairy tale has a tragic
ending. As Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, reminds us, if the "no car garage" had been a reality in New
Orleans in August, we wouldn't have suffered 1,000 Katrina fatalities,
but 10,000 or more. The automobile, especially those dreaded all-terrain
four-wheel drive SUVs (ideal for driving through floodwaters) saved more
lives during the Katrina disaster than all the combined relief efforts
of FEMA, local police and fire squads, churches, the Salvation Army and
the Red Cross. If every poor family had had a car and not a transit
token, few would have had to be warehoused in the hellhole of the
Superdome. 

This month we paid honor to the heroism of Rosa Parks for fighting
racism through the bus boycott in Montgomery. What helped sustain that
historic freedom cause was that hundreds of blacks owned cars and trucks
that they used to carpool others around the city. 

A strong argument could be made that the automobile is one of the two
most liberating inventions of the past century, ranking only behind the
microchip. The car allowed even the common working man total freedom of
mobility -- the means to go anywhere, anytime, for any reason. In many
ways, the automobile is the most egalitarian invention in history,
dramatically bridging the quality-of-life gap between rich and poor. The
car stands for individualism; mass transit for collectivism. Philosopher
Waldemar Hanasz, who grew up in communist Poland, noted in his 1999
essay "Engines of Liberty" that Soviet leaders in the 1940s showed the
movie "The Grapes of Wrath" all over the country as propaganda against
the evils of U.S. capitalism and the oppression of farmers. The scheme
backfired because "far from being appalled, the Soviet viewers were
envious; in America, it seemed, even the poorest had cars and trucks." 

It's not hard to imagine life in America without cars. If you travel to
any Third World Country today, cars are scarce and the city streets are
crammed with hundreds of thousands of bicycles, buses and scooters --
and peasant workers all sharing the aspiration of someday owning a car.
But in America and other developed nations, the environmental elitists
are intent on flipping economic development on its head: Progress is
being measured by how many cars can be traded in for mass transit
systems and bikes, not vice versa. The recently passed highway bill
establishes a first-ever office of bicycle advocacy inside the
Transportation Department. The bicycle enthusiasts seem to believe that
no one ever has far to go, that it never rains, that families don't have
three or more kids to transport, and that mom never needs to bring home
three bags of groceries. 

Similarly, there is now a nearly maniacal obsession among policy makers
and the Greens to conserve energy rather than to produce it. Even many
of the oil companies are running ad campaigns on the virtues of using
less energy (do the shareholders know about this?) -- which would be
like McDonald's advising Americans to eat fewer hamburgers because a cow
is a terrible thing to lose. A perverse logic has taken hold among the
intelligentsia that progress can be measured by how much of the earth's
fuels we save, when in fact the history of human economic advancement,
dating back to the invention of the wheel, has been defined by our
ability to substitute technology and energy use for the planet's one
truly finite resource: human energy. 

It is because we have continually found inventive ways to harness the
planet's energy sources at ever-declining costs -- through such sinister
inventions as the car -- that the average American today produces what
200 men could before the industrial revolution began. Studies confirm
that the more, not less, energy a nation uses and the more, not fewer,
cars that it has, the more productive the workers, the richer the
society, and the healthier the citizens as measured by life expectancy.
When Albania abolished cars, it quickly became one of the very poorest
nations in Europe. 

The simplistic notion taught to our second-graders, that the car is an
environmental doomsday machine, reveals an ignorance of history. When
Henry Ford first started rolling his Black Model Ts off the assembly
line at the start of the 20th century, the auto was hailed as one of the
greatest environmental inventions of all time. That's because the horse,
which it replaced, was a prodigious polluter, dropping 40 pounds of
waste a day. Imagine what a city like St. Louis smelled like on a steamy
summer afternoon when the streets were congested with horses and piled
with manure. 

The good news is that environmental groups and politicians aren't likely
to break Americans from their love affair with cars -- big, convenient,
safe cars -- no matter how guilty they try to make us feel for driving
them. Instead they are using more subtle forms of coercion. The left is
now pining for a $1-a-gallon gas tax to make driving unaffordable.
Washington has also wasted over $60 billion of federal gas tax money on
mass transit systems, yet fewer Americans ride them now than before the
deluge of subsidies began. When the voters in car-crazed Los Angeles
opted to fund an ill-fated subway system, most drivers who voted "yes"
said they did so because they hoped it would compel other people off the
crowded highways. 

To be sure, if the entire membership of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace
surrendered their cars, the world and the highways might very well be a
better place. But for the rest of us the car is indispensable -- it is
our exoskeleton. There's a perfectly good reason that the roads are
crammed with tens of millions of cars and that Americans drive eight
billion miles a year while spurning buses, trains, bicycles and subways.
Americans are rugged individualists who don't want to cram aboard buses
and subways. We want more open roads and highways, and we want energy
policies that will make gas cheaper, not more expensive. We want to
travel down the road from serfdom and the car is what will take us
there. 

Mr. Moore is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

 


 

 
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