McKibben: Engine trouble

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If there were ever a book outdated by the pace of events, this is it.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.”

Or take the authors’ consideration of the responsiveness of motorists to changes in the price of gas. They spend several pages insisting that consumers don’t drive much less if the price goes up. They add a paragraph noting that this changed in the spring of 2008 when prices soared toward $4 a gallon, but they speculate that we will likely be turning back to driving SUVs if prices fall, and they dismiss the reduction as minimal in any event. But in fact 2008 seems to have marked a real turning point—for almost the first time since we began mass-motoring, we drove significantly less. Detroit has now all but ceased producing SUVs. Even as gas prices fell, the resale value of the old behemoths remained deeply depressed.

Christian Century