essay

Pity We Can’t Drink Gasoline (It’s Cheaper Than Water)

Each gallon of gasoline requires 1,000 gallons of water to produce according to the U.S. Dept. of the Interior, but in our society the cheapest liter bottle of “drinking water” costs two to three times more per gallon. This reveals how all-important our car dependant culture is to us; we subsidize the gasoline “blood” of car-culture to the point that its smog and runoff pollutes our water to the degree that people feel they need to buy “drinking water”, which is then sold at highly inflated prices.

During the past 30 to 50 years car-culture has engulfed humanity worldwide with a profusion of high speed personal motor vehicles and the traditions that result: drive-through businesses, urban sprawl, and acceptance of large, sudden rates of change to all surrounding life forms (including death and destruction). Cars dominate most countries in fundamental ways, including being our leading cause of accidental death, claiming over 43,000 human lives in the US in 1999 (World Health Organization, 2003). Reports from The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change indicate these machines are one of the largest factors changing our planet’s climate; still we intensify our rate of use.

Car-culture encourages separation from the natural (sustaining) world; for example, people often travel great distances from home to work in a car, thereby separating them from travel by a physical or even more social means like walking or public transit. Also, being virtually closed off in cars, with climate control, music, telephones, and so forth, we create an illusory world while participating in direct and indirect destruction of our natural world. Acceptance of car-culture leads to an “everyone is doing it and I will be a low class outcast if I don’t” attitude that causes negative feedback. We feel we ought to be participating, but by doing so we are destroying more nature, which all life needs to survive.

Cars get more freedoms than people; their alarms can generate ear-piercing noise for no perceptible reason, sometimes for hours (if people did this they would be jailed). We allow them to be parked on sidewalks and bicycle lanes, but perhaps most appalling, without a second thought we consent to cars spewing deadly toxins into air and water while one quart of gasoline can make a million gallons of groundwater unfit to drink (Utah Dept. of Environmental Quality 2003). All evidence points to these machines being the most devastating weapons of mass destruction to the environment ever devised, yet we appear powerless to stop them because our global socio-economic structure requires more and more car-culture. If there were a recipe for natural devastation it could not beat the car-culture phenomenon.

Some suggest we should use electric zero emissions vehicles (ZEV) to get around, or hydrogen fuel cell automobiles, others argue for bio-diesel power. But all of these transportation substitutes will ultimately lead down the same devastating road; using tremendous amounts of calories to hastily move their bulk, while expanding damage to the planet. The erroneously named ZEV emits plenty of harmful pollutants from the power plant, the hydrogen fuel cell emits “pure water” but only after a tremendous amount of energy has somehow been provided, to separate hydrogen from a gasoline like molecule, (or with much less efficiency, though much more ballyhooed, water); bio-diesel could only supply a tiny fraction of what is even currently used because it requires so many crops to produce (USDA 2003).

These vehicles are all substitutes because people are unable to change; we live too far from our sustenance and, because there are no alternatives, we must use cars to do what we need for survival. We easily find ourselves going 60 MPH toting dozens of times our body weight (the car itself), just to get food and drinking water.

How better to manipulate the public than to provide so-called “freedoms” based on petroleum/car dependence? Such a system guarantees great wealth for the elite, and the hidden, irresponsible cost of monumental devastation to the environment, which we see today. Our predicament is so deeply ingrained that its solution can only be achieved by massive social restructuring which will allow serious changes in transit options. Since the bourgeoisie created car dependant transportation via undermining public transit (Klein/Olson 1996), a movement by the masses on a scale never before seen may be what is needed to instigate this reorganization. The proletariat must rise up to demand their chains of servitude, disguised as open roads and freedom, be lifted. This could be argued as giving up power (because cars are so very powerful), but with more honest and eco-logical education, youth may begin to understand that it is their own future, which is seriously jeopardized by car-culture.

Perhaps this paradigm shift is beginning now with the unprecedented demonstrations taking place worldwide against the Bush administration’s Iraqi war desires. Many of these protestors perceive car-culture, its need for oil, and this war attempt is integrally linked, though the administration denies any relation whatsoever. Regardless, the likely scenario for the future will be an increase in resource wars, major oil spills, death rates, and pollution because of the consumptive nature of car-culture.

Can we change? We have gone way too far to prevent further ecological calamity because the effects of our actions are not immediately observed; the damage has a repercussive lag time. But certainly we can do something to help slow down the future damage. Maybe all we can do is make changes in our personal lives and try a different, more benign lifestyle that reflects our realization that we have been duped into this self-destructive path. Eventually more sustainable, locally based movements may develop, each region with a slightly (or greatly) different form but on an immensely smaller scale than what we now see with globalization of car-culture.

Works sited

Pacific Northwest Region Water Conservation Field Services Program 24 December 2002. U.S. Dept. of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation, <http://www.pn.usbr.gov/project/wat/facts.html>, 28th Feb. 2003.

IPCC 2001 Climate Change 2001 The Scientific Basis Contributors of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, [Houghton et al.], Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK and NY.

WHO Statistical Information System (WHOSIS) Evidence and Information for Health Policy 2003. World Health Organization: <http://www3.who.int/whosis/menu.cfm>, 28th Feb. 2003.

Promoting a Healthy Environment Reducing Water Pollution 2003. Utah Dept. of Environmental Quality: <http://www.eq.state.ut.us/EQOAS/poll_prev/prevent_water.htm>, 11th March 2003.

Taken For A Ride. Jim Klein and Martha Olson, video recording, New Day Films 1996.

Campbell, John B., Vice President, Ag Processing Inc Agricultural Outlook Forum 2000 NEW MARKETS FOR BIO-BASED ENERGY AND INDUSTRIAL FEEDSTOCKS , Biodiesel Will There Be Enough?, Presented: Friday, February 25,2000, US Dept. of Agriculture <http://www.usda.gov/oce/waob/oc2000/speeches/Campbell.txt>, 11th March 2003.

Group	Endorse?	Comments
Comprehensive
Development
Organization
Local