A few comments and observations from Hans Noeldner:
From "Running on Fumes", an excellent article in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert:
"Were China and India to increase their rates of car ownership to the point where per-capita oil consumption reached just half of American levels, the two countries would burn through a hundred million additional barrels a day. (Currently, total global oil use is eighty-six million barrels a day.) Were they to match U.S. consumption levels, they would require an extra two hundred million barrels a day. It’s difficult to imagine how such enormous quantities of oil could be found, but, if they could, the result would be catastrophe."
Several things are obvious:
(1) We must reconfigure our spatial arrangements in these United States so that far less motorized motion is necessary.
(2) Thus we must redirect our behaviors and municipal redevelopment toward proximity, access, and higher levels of local interdependence.
(3) Where cars are still necessary and useful (and they will continue to be an essential transportation mode for many people), we must deploy vehicles appropriately scaled for the job at hand. Right now we very often use multi-ton, fifteen- to twenty-foot-long behemoths as single- and double-occupancy passenger vehicles. Continuing to do so is insane and unconscionable.
(4) If the human animal is to choose these things proactively, we must VERY QUICKLY learn to separate our sense of identity, power, virility, and self-worth from our motor vehicles.
(5) Then we will have earned the right to suggest how China, India, and other developing nations might do their "fair share" to fight global warming and help wean civilization off fossil fuels.
(6) But of course we-the-people don't HAVE to reconfigure our way of life to accomplish any of these things. We can choose to ignore the problems or delay or do nothing substantial instead (merely issuing noble proclamations, for example). Then resource scarcities plus the desire of 6.2 billion other human beings for a more equitable distribution of wealth will do the reconfiguring for us.
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