We Are Supposed to Kick the Driving Habit?

Commentary

Suddenly it occurred to me. We’ve been prepped for this shift for many years. It feels like a psychological operation.

It began decades ago with the undeniable reality that too many cars on the road with poor filtration systems creates smog in the cities. But that problem in the United States was largely solved with new cleaner technologies. As cars and trucks got cleaner, so did the cities.

These days, you don’t hear much at all about the smog problem. It still exists in parts of the world but the problem is reduced to mild annoyance in the more prosperous societies.

Wealth cleaned the environment, not the reduction in driving. Indeed, driving increased.

Related Stories

But then came the global warming issue, followed by the name change “climate change,” followed by the constant barrage about the carbon footprint and CO2. No longer is the damage from industrialization visible. It is not about pollution anymore.

Now it is said to be in the models that are owned and controlled by experts, and we are just supposed to trust them. They say the climate is changing, which is a non-falsifiable assertion. This is said to be scientific consensus and there can be no disputing it.

Then came the new orthodoxy: we must transition to “renewable” energy sources and away from “fossil fuels.” This means more wind and solar power and ever less digging in the ground for oil and gas. Every empirical analysis shows that breezes and sunbeams are simply not up to the task of providing energy for an advanced economy. Plus there is plenty of evidence that such methods are not sustainable (due to breakages), highly inefficient, and use more in the way of core resources.

And yet, the idea of the great transition has become something of a doctrinal postulate of 21st-century life, something that is preached to us so often in so many places that we no longer feel the freedom to question it. You can of course question it but then you risk being called a crank or reactionary.

And now we are at the end point: the moral injunction to stop driving.

There are a number of features of this exhortation that remind one of history. I’m thinking in particular of China’s Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong. He made the decision based on his vision for the future that the bicycle was the proper mode of travel for the whole country. He enacted a central plan to distribute them to the whole population.

The idea was that China was not yet ready for industrialization but there was more to it than that. He discerned that bicycles were more economically virtuous than cars, keep people fit and healthy, promote community, and level out the population in terms of class: everyone on a bike seems the same. He was the same dictator who decided that distinguishing between men’s and women’s clothing was also a waste of resources, among many other utterly crazy views that actually resulted in a calamity for the country.

When you hear people inveighing against the automobile, one does have to wonder. Is this a wild ideology at work—perhaps even an homage to Maoism, which was very popular in the West—having nothing to do with industrial or economic reality? Is this a philosophical stance against modern life and a longing for a more primitive form of existence? I’m leaning in that direction.

There is this fashionable idea out there called “degrowth.” The core of it is that prosperity has destabilized nature and the world. We need to turn back the clock. The only way to do that is by promoting misery and subsistence forms of living. For transportation purposes, this means bicycles or Flintstone cars, little carts resting on stone wheels powered by feet.

If you think electric vehicles (EVs) will satisfy the ruling elites, think again. They still use carbon, and the grid cannot possibly sustain the pressure. These new cars have an off switch that can be easily controlled by the central authorities. This is a major reason why they are being pushed so hard.

The irony of this whole change is that some 75 years ago, the Western world made a huge shift toward the promotion of the internal combustion engine and the automobile and away from trains. This was despite the huge infrastructure already in place for train travel. Now trains are mostly used for freight and not for personal travel, unless you live in the Northeast of the United States, where they work just fine.

This shift involved the creation of the Interstate Highway System, which was the largest and most expensive central plan ever enacted on U.S. soil. It was the equivalent of the “Green New Deal” except the opposite. The goal was to promote universal car ownership and driving as a sign of prosperity and personal freedom. The cost was the deprecation of train travel.

I personally very much regret the decision. It ruined many small towns and diverted traffic in strange ways that were very much influenced by politics. There wasn’t much political opposition to the system at the time but there should have been. The United States is no place for central plans, either for or against one mode of transportation or another.

The odd thing about this history is how it is being reversed now, a move against the car but not toward trains.