The Myth of the Efficient
Car
Nowhere is it more disingenuous than the pursuit of the
fuel-efficient car. In their effort to stave off collapse of their industry,
auto executives have continually cited their efforts are building the
high-efficiency cars of the future. The problem is, there are no cars of the
future, and the looming catastrophe of global pollution, including climate
change, will never be solved by building more cars - efficient or otherwise. We'd desperately like to believe that there is a way to
preserve our car-centered civilization, while simultaneously placating the gods
of atmospheric warming. Even the president-elect believes it, and Obama made
fuel-efficient cars a central part of his energy policy. He promised a $7,000
tax credit to hybrid car buyers, aiming for a million plug-in hybrids, getting
150 mpg, by 2015. He wants to put an additional million completely plug-in
vehicles by the same year. And he's willing to federal funds up for research,
or at least he was before we lost all our money. Even on its face, this seems like a tepid response to
climate change. At the moment there are upward of 250,000,000 registered
vehicles in the United States - more than there are licensed drivers. Converting
one percent or so of them to greater fuel efficiency is not likely to do very
much in the time needed to act. Nevertheless, the hope is that introduction of
a new generation of electric and semi-electric will eventually lead to a
replacement of our entire fleet of gas-guzzlers. Maybe. But the bigger problem
is that increasing fuel efficiency has never led to an overall reduction in
pollutants. In fact, efficiency has always led to more production and
consumption. But there's an even more profound problem with building
more efficient cars. In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons
discovered an efficiency paradox: the more efficient you make machines, the
more energy they use. Why? Because the more efficient they are, the better they
are, the cheaper they are and more people buy them, and the more they'll use
them. Now, that's good for manufac turers and maybe good for consumers, but if
the problem is energy consumption or pollution, it's not good. The so-called Jevons Paradox was resurrected in the 1980s
by a variety of environmentalists and is occasionally referred to as the
Khazoom-Brookes postulate or the more explicative rebound effect. It's been
neatly summarized as, "those energy efficiency improvements that, on the
broadest considerations, are economically justified at the microlevel lead to
higher levels of energy consumption at the macro level." Or, in short, you
make money on each transaction and lose it in volume. The rebound effect is not an immutable scientific law, but
it's a widely observed phenomenon and has held true in the most
energy-intensive consumer activities. The most commonly cited example is in
lighting. As the Encyclopedia of Earth puts it, "For instance, if a 18W
compact fluorescent bulb replaces a 75W incandescent bulb, the energy saving
should be 76%. However, it seldom is. Consumers, realizing that the lighting
now costs less per hour to run, are often less concerned with switching it off;
in fact, they may intentionally leave it on all night." I know I have at
times. The same effect has occurred with cars. Automobiles have
become more efficient over the years. Led by the Japanese, carmakers have
increased the fuel to weight ration, decreased damaging vibration and vastly
increased reliability. In the 1950s, a car that lived to drive 100,000 miles
was a rarity; today they routinely last 150,000. The20result? Increasing fuel
consumption. And not just because more people in the developing world are
buying cars, either. People everywhere are buying more of the better, cheaper
more efficient cars and - here's the problem - driving them more. And that was
even so when gas peaked there at $8 a gallon in Europe. The real problem is, though, cars don't move people, cars
move cars. The average car or light truck is two tons or so: 4000-plus pounds
to move 200 pounds of people. OK, everybody out of the SUVs and F-150s and into
a nice, green Prius. However, the curb weight of an unladen Prius is 2765
pounds, which means a ton and a half around to get you and a bag of groceries
home. Not good. Environmentalists like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain
Institute and green business advocate Paul Hawken have generated a lot of press
with a proposed 100 mpg lightweight, plastic composite called the hypercar. But
all the drawings of the hypercar very much resemble...a car. Tires, windows,
bodywork, engine and drive train. Even if everything is paper-thin - something
the public won't easily warm to -you're still driving five times body weight
around. Even if we were able to produce a 100 mpg, zero pollution
vehicle, we'd still need to maintain the infrastructure of roads, bridges, and
energy distribution. That means steel, concrete, asphalt and plastics. Just
concrete production alone generates as much as 10 percent of all greenhouse
gas. In 2007, the U.S. produced 95 million tons of cement by burning fossil
fuels and, according to the EPA, is the third largest source of greenhouse gas
pollution in the U.S. (Scientific America, August 7, 2008) The production of
asphalt - a petroleum product - also creates carbon. As does the production of
motor oil, tires, and on and on. And there's another intractable problem: the very thing
that makes tires so useful - comfort, stability, adhesion - also produces
immense rolling friction. In order for us to makes cars that are maneuverable
and relatively safe, they have to grip the road, which takes buckets of energy
to overcome. One reason trains are able to transport people using far less
energy per passenger mile is that there are fewer wheels per person and steel
wheels have much less rolling friction. Without divine intervention - which seems to be the basis
for most energy reduction schemes - there is simply no way to maintain both the
atmosphere and personal transportation. Even if the population were frozen at
its present level, even if economic growth stopped the sheer number of people
wanting - and under the present regime, need - personal transportation makes
any plan to reduce car pollution by increasing efficiency is futile. The personal
automobile must be abandoned, and quickly. It would be better to do this in a measured and humane
way, easing both automobile workers and users into a post-car world. It needs a
societal consensus, requiring major shifts of goals and expectations, and few
of us will take these steps on our own. But this change will eventually happen
to us whether we like it or not, perhaps in time to stave off climactic
disaster. There are already attempts at designing a post-car future.
City planners have been pushing the "20-minute neighborhood," where
home, work, shopping and recreation are all within a 20 minute walk. Places
like Portland, Oregon, are encouraging this kind of development with planning
codes and tax breaks. These more compact, walkable neighborhoods would seem to
point us in the right direction, but so far they're extremely limited. Most
people prefer car culture. And that includes Europe, and certainly Asia, as
well. Unless the various governments enact explicit and enforceable sprawl
restrictions, growth will trump any specific increases in efficiencies. The one step we ought to take right now is to withdraw our
support - financial, political and emotional - from the pursuit of an
energy-efficient car. We'd have better luck creating a perpetual motion
machine.
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