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TechnoratiWe have a dwindling supply, a hugely hungry demand and a government unwilling to act. I'm talking about oil, of course, and our head-in-the-Middle-Eastern-sand attitude. Just keep driving, we think, and maybe our grandkids will figure it out. A story to illustrate: In 1989, my wife and I bought our first new car, a cherry red Volkswagen Jetta we named Lucy, in honor of our favorite comedian. Nothing earth-shattering, or earth-saving, except for this: It was a diesel and got 43 miles per gallon.
After 237,000 miles and 18 years of hard use, the shine has evaporated, but this car still gets 43 mpg. And though it won't win any beauty contests - we had to bolt the bumper to the car because of a little rust - it chugs right along, giving us more than 500 miles for every tank of fuel.
Say we had bought instead a car that got 20.7 mpg, the average for all U.S. passenger vehicles in 1989, according to the Energy Department. We would have burned an additional 5,937 gallons - more than twice as much fuel.
Now, imagine that everyone in 1989 had a car as efficient as our little Lucy. Given the roughly 148 million household vehicles in the United States in 1989, and that each traveled on average 10,000 miles, we would have saved almost 40 billion gallons in just that one year. Multiply that by the 18 years since, and it is enough to make one stop the car and weep.
But an even sadder truth is that the United States hasn't changed its fuel economy standards for passenger cars in 17 years. And this leads to another story.
In 2004, our family needed another vehicle, something that could handle our long, steep driveway, even in winter. I wanted another VW but couldn't find one with both a diesel engine and four-wheel drive. So now a Subaru Forester parks beside the Jetta, the shiny green making Lucy's red even more dull. The Forester gets 27 mpg - not bad compared with other vehicles, family and friends point out. But I look at the VW and know better. If our country's standards had improved, we'd have more and better choices.
Other advanced industrial countries - the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan - use less than a third as much gasoline per person as we do, according to the World Resources Institute. They've accomplished this with a combination of higher taxes on gasoline and better fuel efficiency.
So, what will it take to make us change? And why should we care about our vehicles' minute mpg numbers?
Start with air pollution and the health problems it can cause. Then consider unregulated carbon dioxide, the leading driver of humankind's role in global climate change. The Energy Department says that vehicles emit about 25 percent of our country's carbon dioxide, and that if you drive a 25 mpg car instead of a 20 mpg car, you cut carbon dioxide emissions by 17 tons per year. What's more, boosting fuel economy saves us money and reduces the oil we import, bolstering our nation's energy security.
But simply improving efficiency is not enough. Historically, efficiency has led to even more consumption of resources, so we'll need to raise fuel taxes to ensure we don't drive away our efficiency gains.
When will we no longer be a lead-foot nation? When can I buy a 75 mpg, four-wheel drive vehicle? Soon, I hope. Slowly, the auto industry and our legislators are shifting gears - but we steer them as much as they steer us. With voices and wallets, we can speak loudly for more-fuel-efficient vehicles. The president and Congress are considering bills to improve efficiency standards; we can urge them to act instead of just consider.
Last year, my family didn't pay taxes on beloved Lucy. The assessor deemed the Jetta too old to have any value. Though I appreciate paying less in taxes, I disagree with the assessor's, and our country's, definition of value.
Jim Minick, a poet and essayist, teaches at Radford University in Virginia and also farms. He wrote this article for the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle.
Copyright © 2007, The Baltimore Sun
18 Comments so far
Show AllJim,
You may take solace that Lucy will have a younger, wiser cousin very soon. I have heard VW will introduce diesels in 2008 that get close to 70 mpg. Sadly, we know so much more than this is possible. And the US automakers are a miserable lot.
Bear in mind something Mike Gravel said in last night's debate, which I'm sure very few picked up on. The ACTUAL cost of gasoline, considering the war and other imperialist missions we fund to preserve the oil supply, is over $7 per gallon. We just don't know it.
cruxpuppy: As one with a very limited left brain (or understanding of technical gadgets) I appreciate the education as per "the model T." It makes total sense that this planned obsolescence would work in synch with the oil cartels. One fitting example. I was renting in the Florida Keys in autumn 2005 when a few ominous hurricanes came our way. The lines to get gas were impossible, sometimes going all the way down the street. As I watched these mega vehicles fill up I wondered if there'd be enough gas left for cars like mine. My Toyota Tercel tank maybe takes 8 gallons and can sometimes do 45 MPH. The greed was disgusting. SO many Florida Keys residents drive either large trucks or SUVS and too many don't realize this "consumer choice" is aggravating the very weather that sends them fleeing every other Autumn. However, the gas prices went up IN ANTICIPATION of the hurricane; the demand of course increased but this was an example, not unlike the games played by Enron, in manipulating the market. Free enterprise... what a thought!
I feel his pain. I also choose a 4x4, but was concerned with gas mileage. I settled on the Jeep Compass, which gets a respectable 29 mpg. Sadly, if I lived in the UK, I could have purchased the diesel version, which get 43 mpg. Here, we don't even have that choice. WHY?
The New Urbanist model of desigh presents a few useful- ideas, but all-in-all I don't think they have the big picture. For one, they so far have built only car-dependent exurbs, and single family homes using stick-building technics. Not very imaginative. They definitely are not shaping an ecocity. Again, I would recommend Richard Register's book, "ECOCITIES building cities in balance with nature". It contains the complex whole, a systems view, the big picture, with all the vital details.
It is no bigger task to remake the sprawl we now have than it was to create it in the first place. Let me add to what Walt Christensen and Iolellity said by suggesting that anyone could find some useful information and excellent guidance for remaking our cities and towns in the publications of Congress for the New Urbanism.
They have reconstructed a base of knowledge that used to be more widely used before the era of happy motoring and surburban sprawl introduced after WWII and predicated on cheap and abundant petroleum supplies.
Descriptions of their publications can be perused at:
http://www.smartgrowth.org/sgn/partpublist.asp?part=3&res=800
There is a wealth of recaptured knowledge that should be placed in the hands of all builders, financiers and (most importantly)area planning and development comissions.
Guyyys! Don't you GET it! It doesn't MATTER how fuel-efficient the gas run internal compustion engine is! It is an archaic technology. Even now, the auto cartel is planning to introduce plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, taking a small step forward. Perhaps also all-electric vehicles that plug in. Combined with solar panels on our homes, we may then have a carbon-free transportation system, but as I said above, this is NO SOLUTION. What we need in order to maximize energy and material use to reshape and rebuild the largest human made things on earth---the CITY, in other words, to make cities into ecocities. There IS no other solution, period.
OR we could simply apply this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/02/19/ccview...
to the solar surfaces of our ELECTRIC CARS (and homes) and thereby save a bundle, our children's lungs, our soldiers lives and possibly the future of our planet for US!
"They’ve accomplished this ( lower oil demand ) with a combination of higher taxes on gasoline and better fuel efficiency." Gas is already higher than it's ever been and you want to push it even higher with new taxes? What are you smoking, Jim?
It is not higher taxation that keeps European oil demand lower, it is the simple fact that it is possible for a very large number of Europeans to live and work without an automobile. There is good public transportation.
This is not possible for most Americans. Our economy has been constructed around the automobile and public transportation was mostly destroyed in order to create demand for more automobiles. Raising gasoline taxes will not appreciably reduce demand, but it will definitely impoverish many people already on the margins. Has the price gouging by the Oil Cos reduced demand? To no significant degree.
To conserve potable water, would you propose a tax, too? Do you believe people drink too much water, Jim? It is not a stretch to realize that gasoline is as necessary to our way of life as water. It is not a luxury as it is for many Europeans, it is a bare necessity of livelihood and living. Almost no one lives and works within striking distance of a bicycle or a fast horse. Think "suburb", Jim.
The effect of high gas prices is now becoming apparent. Wal-Mart is squeeling like a pig because its retail trade is falling off, though less than other big boxes which are all accessible only by the automobile.
To any thoughtful person who has ever done maintenance on an automobile and understands something about the way the internal combustion engine works, it should be clear that unlike other technology, telephone, television, copmputers and so forth, the internal combustion engine has not changed appreciably since the Model T. It has not become more fuel efficient, either. Did you know, Jim, that the fuel injection system that delivers the paltry 43 MPG on your Jetta, has been around since WWII, and yet was not deployed as standard equipment on American atuomobiles until the 80's? Fuel injuection, as compared with the carburetor, allows for significant gains in efficiency and performance and yet it was actively resisted by the auto companies and was implemented only when Congress began to take an interest in national fuel consumption following the Arab Oil Embarge of 1973.
One point Jim: It doesn't matter how much you increase fuel efficiency in the internal combustion engine, greenhouse gasses will still be released, and we'll only postpone the inevitable run-away global heating catastrophy. One right step would be, as Harvey Wasserman notes in his article, is to create a solar based economy, with solar-electric autos. This is not a solution, however. Even solar-elecric cars will postpone the inevitable, unless we begin to reshape and re-build our cities, as I mentioned above.
Add two dollars national fuel tax per gallon one to the federal highway improvements and one to mass transit
Poet is right. We must have walkable and bikeable cities with rapid transit, but transit that is solar-electric, connecting city centers to outlying cities, towns and villages. This must happen not only through rezoning, but also through the use of other tools, such as ecocity mapping to determine the appropriate places to build, and not to build. Also through Transfer of Development Rights so that inappropriate places to build may be transferred to appropriate places. Proper solar orientation must take place as well, to ensure maximum efficiency. There are all manner of other things to consider, but that is for a much longer exposition, at another time. Of course, these things must be accomplished in order to maximize efficiency of energy and material use by bringing cities back to human scale, built for pedestrian and bicycle use primarily, and as mentioned, the use of rapid transit for outlying areas. One of the great benefits of building ecocities is that of bringing people back into much greater face-to-face contact, thus helping to rebuild and repair our attenuated social networks. By doing so we will tend to maximize, as well, our human potential, whereas our present-day cities tend toward minimizing human potential. Any comments out there? By the way, the best book I know that discusses the building of ecocities is by Richard Register, one of the founders of the ecocity movement, back in the 70's. Richard's book is titled "Ecocities, building cities in balance with nature" It is very well written and passionately presented. Highly recommended.
The point is this - the automobile industry behaves like a monopoly, and is in fact an auto cartel. It has not developed the potential of the internal combustion engine because it has not been necessary to do so. There is no competition, only gentlemen's agreements in the auto market. It has been more profitable to sell the same tired technology year after year with new body styles and electric ignitions, windows, & such modest improvements that do not significantly effect the handling of the fuel and how efficiently that fuel is used. Your Jetta could be designed to get 100 MPG or more. It would be easy to do that from a technical point of view, just as it was easy to replace the carburetor with fuel injection.
For reasons that do not require advanced education in chemistry or engineering to understand, every automobile on the road today could be achieving 100 MPG, if the industry were to deploy existing fuel vaporization technology. The US Patent Office has granted over 900 patents for a variety of these devices. The automakers have never deployed this technology, however.
The auto cartel has never been interested in developing the fuel handling system for the internal combustion engine. Why?
Because it reduces demand for oil. The automobile accounts for about 40% of US demand for oil.
I don't think you would argue with that.
But you probably would get uncomfortable with the idea that the auto cartel has long been colluding with the oil cartel. They work together to control the demand for oil in the world market. They do this in part by controllinig the technology that uses the gasoline. Therefore, they control their profits which are guaranteed to grow larger, never smaller. They've got a good thing going, Jim. Now don't think "conspiracy". Think "gentlemen's agreement". Or, you could also think "robber barons'agreement".
So, Jim, rather than raise taxes, which would make me severely pissed off at you, I recommend that you think a little more deeply about what fuel efficiency means and who profits by the fact that we do not have it. Think "monopoly control" and "technology suppression".
America is purportedly the technological leader of the world, but it is also the home of the most sophisticated corporate rip-off artists the world has ever seen. Americans, ironically, are by and large the most technologically stupid people. Strange.
The USofA uses 40% of all the gasoline in the world. Yes, in the world (we use 25% of all oil, but we skew heavily to gasoline production with said oil). Nearly half of all of our oil consumption (9.2 out of 20.8 Mbpd) is to fuel our driving habits. Read the statistics at www.eia.doe.gov
The average mpg for all (including trucks, SUVs & minivans) US vehicles has pretty much stayed flat since 1983. Going from the current 23mpg up to 35mpg would eliminate ALL the oil we buy from the Middle East. Yes that means lots of little 4 cylinder cars (Corollas, Civics, Focus, etc). More hybrids. Less V8 pickups for suburban office workers; think smaller V6s, small diesels. Rent a 7.3l turbodiesel for the 3 times per year you haul your boat on vacation.
Even the car-loving, horsepower-happy, spread-out-continent Australians do better than we do. The question is do we love our country enough to reduce our driving 300hp cars and/or 15mpg SUVs/trucks? Is this too great a hardship for Americans to bear?
We can only hope to have standards as high as those of other countries. Even China's are higher than ours:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2004-10-08-china-fuel-efficiency_x.h...
The United States hasn't cared about being second-place (or fourteenth or sixty-third) since we beat the Soviet Union to the moon. Oh wait, we're number one in CO2 emissions. Yay?
the city i live in is building condominiuns like crazy. it is being sold as walkable, bikeable if you can afford to live there. they are building a rail that has all ready doubled in cost. the transit, well, not so good. watching this take place, i am more and more convinced that this is unsustainable. i know people that spend an hour on a bus to get to work. that does not add up. they have been forced to live on the affordable edge. i know people who can not get a handicap parking permit because their condition is not bad enough. so much for walking and biking. the idea of creating small towns within a large city sounds good but......never happen.
The solution to the petroleum problem is the same as the solution to the addictive drug problem--reduce the demand. The two things that would best do this are:
Restoration of mass transit and passenger rail service.
Rezoning inorder to have "walkable" and "bikable" communities instead of our current suburban sprawl .
Until these things are done we are simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We have already passed peak oil and we need to enjoy $3.00 a gallon gasoline as we are never likely to see it again after this summer. If we got real busy remaking our cities and suburbs we might be able to have a bumpy landing instead of a flaming crash of our persently unsustainable living arrangements.
I agree that public transit and passenger rail is the solution; and I don't want to hear any petty excuses either. I personally made the decision never to even get a permit let alone a license and car because I care enough about the environment. So I go places that will have public transportation, and I get plenty of exercise walking. It is a good way to live.
http://www.dreamingearth.net
Great article; couldn't agree more; it's a good exposition of a good solution who's time has come;
It'll never happen.