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Whatever Happened to Ecology?
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Engine trouble
Posted Jul 15, 2009 by Bill McKibben
The book Two Billion Cars arrives in stores at the close of a quarter that has seen auto sales plummet 30, 40, even 50 percent, depending on the manufacturer. The Big Three went to Washington to plead for a handout (and Toyota has passed GM as the world's biggest automaker, even though its sales are also in steep decline). One imagines that auto executives now view the title of this volume—the idea that the planet will soon double its auto fleet from the current billion—as an unlikely prayer.
If there were ever a book outdated by the pace of events, this is it. In the months between its writing and its publication, one development after another has upended the old consensus about cars, about energy, about global warming and about the economic future.
Consider, for instance, Sperling and Gordon's treatment of peak oil production. They state categorically that oil consumption will continue to rise, "barring dramatic events such as wars, economic depressions, or newfound political leadership." We've arguably got those, but that's not the real reason oil consumption will start to slow. It's because oil fields are playing out. The authors pre sent this as a hypothesis that's been discredited—"the more dire forecasts of oil peaking are simplistic and largely incorrect." But in November, the International Energy Agency—the very conservative consortium designed to safeguard world oil supplies, which until now has been resistant to the idea that oil production has peaked—released a massive survey of the world's oil fields. It found that the natural rate of decline in production from those fields would be 7 percent or so a year going forward—and that in order just to maintain production at current levels through 2030 we'd need to find four new Saudi Arabias. Which isn't going to happen. As former energy secretary James Schlesinger said last fall, "The battle is over and the peakists have won."...
The book Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability is by Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon and published by Oxford University Press - "The authors provide a first-rate picture of what may come next in transportation both here and abroad, but they are never able to break out of their belief that we will live in a world with 2 billion cars." - Bill McKibben
Original article published in The Christian Century.
Get The End of Growth http://www.postcarbon.org/eog | Watch the animation Who Killed Economic Growth? http://bit.ly/whokilledgrowth
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