{"id":32554,"date":"2018-03-20T06:35:11","date_gmt":"2018-03-20T11:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32554"},"modified":"2018-03-20T06:35:33","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T11:35:33","slug":"speeding-down-a-dead-end-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32554","title":{"rendered":"Speeding Down a Dead End Road"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Speeding Down a Dead End Road<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Since the birth of car culture more than a century ago, lavish consumption of energy has not been a bug but a feature. That\u2019s now a feature we can ill afford, as we attempt the difficult and urgent task of transition to renewable energies.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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Notwithstanding all the superlatives lavished on Elon Musk by mass media, one of his great achievements has gone unsung: his ingeniously simple contribution to the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI).<\/p>\n

I refer, of course, to his\u00a0donation of a used automobile<\/a>\u00a0to the possible inhabitants of outer space. If there is intelligent life out there, they will recognize Musk\u2019s Tesla Roadster as a typically energy-guzzling death trap of the genus known as \u201ccar\u201d, and they\u2019ll promptly return it to sender, COD.<\/p>\n

Wait a minute, Musk\u2019s Roadster is\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0a typical car, some might protest \u2013 it\u2019s\u00a0electric!<\/i>\u00a0True enough, but the Roadster, like its newer sibling the Model 3, was designed to seamlessly fit into and extend our current car culture. And one of the key features of car culture is that it was structured, from the beginning, to consume energy with careless abandon.<\/p>\n

That giddy attitude to energy was understandable in the early days of the age of oil, but it will make our current transition to a clean-energy economy far more difficult if not impossible.<\/p>\n

The invention of car culture<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Americans did not invent the car, but they quickly came to dominate both car production and car consumption \u2013 and more than any other country, they put car culture at the centre of a way of life.<\/p>\n

In his excellent book\u00a0Consuming Power<\/a>,<\/i>\u00a0David E. Nye notes that<\/p>\n

\u201c[By 1929] there was roughly one car for every five Americans, and an astonishing 78 percent of the cars in the world were in the United States. In France or Great Britain there was only one car for every 30 people, and in Germany only one for every 102. The automobile had become the central American consumer good and the engine of the American economy, stimulating a wide range of subsidiary industries and suppliers.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The pattern continued after World War II. \u201cAmericans drove 75 percent of the world\u2019s automobiles in 1950,\u201d Nye says. \u201cMoreover, they wanted\u00a0big<\/i>\u00a0automobiles.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Speeding Down a Dead End Road Since the birth of car culture more than a century ago, lavish consumption of energy has not been a bug but a feature. That\u2019s now a feature we can ill afford, as we attempt the difficult and urgent task of transition to renewable energies. Notwithstanding all the superlatives lavished […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11879,11876,19353,5930,328,643],"class_list":["post-32554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-an-outside-chance","tag-bart-hawkins-kreps","tag-car-culture","tag-energy-transition","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-power"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32555,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32554\/revisions\/32555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}