There are educated, intelligent people who do not think global warming is real or that humans are the cause. I look at the trend-lines of greenhouse gas emissions and feel comfortable saying that after a century of burning everything we could find, mankind is changing the global environment. Moreover it is easy for me to believe that those changes will ultimately prove catastrophic.
What really irks me though is that we will look back on today and know that not only did we see it coming, we chose to do nothing. One aspect of this "do nothing" approach is cars.
Our society is built around personal transportation. I get that. I am a part of that. I own a car which i use for transportation. When i lived in a large city, I used a motorcycle not a bus to get around. I have tried to use a bus (Seattle doesn't have a rail option) but I preferred a personal vehicle.
We can argue about whether personal transportation is the right thing and the effect PT has had on city design. On one hand, we prefer the perceived convenience of personal transportation, even as we spend hours a day in traffic. On another hand there is a cultural stigma that equates poverty with mass transit. We can also see our that our collective spending reflects this bias against mass transit as we have no trouble subsidizing roads and bridges for cars but expect mass transit to pay for itself. And a few argue that mass transit overall still pollutes as much as personal vehicles because the "energy has to come from somewhere".
These are old debates and I am willing to let them go. We are hooked on individual transportation but the thing that bothers me is the way we have chosen to implement individual transport.
Individual transportation could be completely different and still achieve the same functional results. We could all be driving zero-emission golf carts powered by low-emission or emission-free power plants. We could be driving motorcycles which get 40+MPG or super-high MPG gasoline cars or even biodeisel.
But we arent.
Instead we are driving larger and larger trucks and SUV's with lower and lower gas mileage. As the evidence for human-caused global warming gets more clear, we have increased not decreased our consumption of gasoline for individual transportation. When I drive on the freeway, 9 out of 10 people are alone in their vehicle yet vehicles continue to get larger with selling points like, "Room for 8 and 0 to 60 in 6.5 seconds." I spend much of my time on the roads in traffic going less than 30 MPH but even the new hybrid vehicles tout that they offer "V8 power with V6 MPG." Even these high-tech vehicles choose power over fuel efficiency as their selling point.
Like many other products, functional improvements no longer generate car sales. Cars are no longer about function so much as fashion. The question is not whether you can get from A to B but whether you can do so in style. And style is optional, ie a choice.
If we were willing to make due with less, our roads could be very different. And so could our impact on the environment. Time will tell how bad things will get. I just wish more people would choose to live with less today so that there will be more for tomorrow.
