I Hate to Criticize Clooney/Electric Cars are the PROBLEM not the Cure
I love George Clooney, and this vehicle looks vaguely interesting. Yet, I’m waiting for George to stop endorsing electric vehicles (like this, the Tesla and the Tango) and start endorsing the immediate redesign of our urban and suburban cities into, as Richard Register puts it, “Ecocities”. The solution is not to rework the car, but to eliminate the need for the damned things. Okay, largely eliminate the need. We don’t have time to screw around with electric cars. Converting them all to electric will do far less good than reworking our cities. In short, alterna-vehicles are the wrong tree up which to bark. Okay, maybe not entirely wrong, but I sure wish people would be paying equal attention to the other side of the equation. Did you like that? “Up which to bark?” Oh, what a lovely language we speak.
Register puts it this way:
The car is part of a whole “living system” with all parts integral to one another, not unlike a literally living organism. The built infrastructure of our current city/town/village is this: Cars/sprawl/paving/cheap energy infrastructure. It happens to be a pathological system, but nonetheless it functions basically like any living organism with integral organs, one of which happens these days to be cars. To “improve” the car is to fool ourselves that we are improving the whole system. In fact we are making it possible for people to expand sprawl development because these parts of the whole do not exist in isolation from one another any more than do our organs, bones, muscles, sense organs and so on do. Thus “bettering” the car expands geographically and perpetuates in time the disastrous infrastructure we have now that is gobbling land, killing 500,000 people in “accidents” facilitated by policy (that which builds roads and promotes car ownership), paving agriculture, competing with hungry people for fertile soil as ethanol production from agriculture surpasses food production in many parts of the world so elitists can continue driving while many of those 90% of the world’s population who don’t own cars are hungry and some of them actually starving.
The eco-blogosphere is filled with drooling descriptions of vehicles these days. Isn’t that just fundamentally wrong? Eco-bloggers high-fiving each other at car shows? Our energies are being diverted. I hope we wake up fast. We’re almost out of time. No, really–we’re almost out of time.
For all you ‘baby-steppers’ out there, spare me your baby-steps bullshit. We were supposed to take those thirty years ago. If we can’t sprint, we’ll die.
Tags: celebrity, environment, Ruminations