WHAT'S YOUR ALTERNATIVE?

Earth Day always brings out the sort of people who would like to scold us for being prosperous.  Carbon Outfront! by Lloyd Alter identifies those things we most deserve to be spanked for.  "Our planetary boundaries are being breached by cars and cows."  The author confesses to "spitballing."  Read his conclusions though, and ask yourself whether he wants the ongoing energy crunch to continue or not.

I taught my students about planetary boundaries because I realized I was too carbon-brained and wasn’t giving them enough information about many of the other problems we face. But after a week of thinking about them, I realize how interrelated they all are, and they almost all come back to the problems caused by cars and cows, both of which are directly or indirectly products of the fossil fuel economy.

I know it is a simplistic view of things, but we may see it play out in real time if this stupid war continues and the cars have no fuel and the cows have no feed.

Then I suppose we'll all live like it's 1825.

Then comes Yale Climate Connections, with Michael Svoboda offering "The problem with cars in six books."

1.   Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon.
2.  Saving Ourselves from Big Car by David Obst.
3.  Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationships with Cars by Henrietta Moore & Arthur Ray.
4.  Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do about It by Daniel Knowles.
5.  The Expressway World by Richard Williams.
6.  Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar.

The blurbs to the first four books concede, if only indirectly, that the personal motor car is a Marshallian improvement, even if their more widespread use than was possible with horses let alone horses and carriages led to congestion and storage problems that people, whether thinking systematically or not, had no prior experience with.  The titles of the second to the fifth books combine academic snobbery (carmageddon, toxic) with what might be dawning understanding of rent-seeking or of the limitations of road socialism.  So too it is with the sixth book, which I have alluded to on occasion.  It might be in the ever-increasing stack of stuff begging to be read.

I submit that more good will come of treating streets, roads, and parking spaces as productive assets and pricing them accordingly than out of Mr Svoboda's call for "True carbon solutions for transportation will require that we rethink more than our fuels and engines."  It's that sort of Technocratic Rethinking that gave us snarled highways in the first place.