Capitalism Fouls Things Up
If you own and/or drive a motor vehicle, or simply rely on your bicycle or feet to get around, chances are that you have faced one of the following situations: being trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic jams that seem to last an eternity, semi-trailer tractor tires hurtling across several lanes of heavy traffic narrowly missing your windshield, or choking on diesel fumes when stuck in traffic or crossing a busy street on foot.
Sound familiar? It likely does if you live in the lower mainland of British Columbia, the golden horseshoe of southern Ontario, or the Montreal region of Quebec, the most densely populated regions of Canada.
In the short span of a century our world has changed from one in which the railroad was the primary choice of transportation, both for goods and people, to one overwhelmingly dominated by the automobile. In fact, as recently as the beginning of the 1900s, horse-drawn wagons and carriages still accounted for a sizable proportion of all transportation right across the world.
The automobile was originally hailed for the widespread freedom that it would bring. On the contrary, the automobile has evolved into one of the world's major environmental problems. The number of automobiles in the world has grown steadily this century to the point where more than 500 million automobiles clog the streets and highways worldwide. Current projections indicate that there could be 1 billion autos on the road in just 20 years1. As we explain below, the world is already faced with seemingly insurmountable problems associated with the current level of auto proliferation.
As the auto industry has developed, it has stimulated a corresponding development in a wide range of other resource dependent industries, e.g., iron and steel, rubber and aluminum. Unfortunately, the auto industry is still seen as one of the key driving forces to development by many countries. The words of a former president of the giant American car manufacturer, General Motors Corporation (GM), in the 1950s, still echo around the world, "What's good for General Motors is good for America". The question facing us now is whether this model of development can be duplicated, or should be, in countries which are not yet overwhelmed by the automobile and everything associated with it, e.g., China and India.
What social and environmental results can we expect if there are 1 billion autos on the earth's roads? Can the earth survive such a scenario? Can we even stabilize our climate at present levels of auto saturation? If not, what alternate modes of transportation need to be developed? How do issues of class, race and social justice impact on the sphere of transportation? What type of transportation will best meet our needs in the next century? These issues are the focus of this edition of Capitalism Fouls Things Up.
It didn't have to be this way. In the early decades of the 20th century most major North American cities had clean, efficient urban electric railway systems. As the motor vehicle industry developed however, particularly in the post-World War II years, the auto industry, dominated by GM and Ford Motor Company, was instrumental in the demise of these networks across the continent.2 In many cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco street car lines were bought, ripped up and replaced by bus lines. GM, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company and Standard Oil Company of California played a key role in the transformation from rail to rubber.3 The concerted actions of these companies can be characterized as nothing less than an organized conspiracy to gut America's electric transit systems.
The convergence of the move to bus transportation in cities, and the expansion of private ownership of transportation in the form of the family car, signalled the transformation from a system of transportation which had been dominated by networks of electric rail lines to a system of private ownership dominated by privately-owned cars and trucks running on a publicly-financed system of roads and expressways. The impacts of this transformation have been widespread.
It has been obvious for quite some time that the automobile is not a benign mode of transportation. On the contrary, the internal combustion engine, the driving force of the automobile, has proven to be a serious environmental problem on every scale imaginable, from local to global. Massive tracts of prime agricultural farmland have been destroyed to make way for the relentless expansion of the intricate networks of roads and highways. Urban neighbourhoods, often those that house workers and the poor, have been leveled to make way for motorways that can handle higher and higher traffic volumes.
Air quality in every major industrialized city has been compromised. Automobile traffic is responsible for most of the urban air pollution. Ground level ozone, particulate matter emissions and smog are all direct products of burning fossil fuels in the internal combustion engine. Each of these contribute to growing respiratory health problems affecting urban residents, with the consequent increase in healthcare costs necessary to treat the resultant illnesses. The cost of these impacts falls disproportionately on the poor and working class because they most often live in neighbourhoods suffering from traffic congestion and a relative absence of green space.
The negative impacts of the auto industry extend to the global sphere as well. World-wide, the burning of fossil fuels has pushed the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) to levels which scientists predict will cause significant devastation to global ecosystems in this century unless dramatic measures are taken immediately to reduce the world's combined CO2 emissions. In Canadian terms, the CO2 emitted by the burning of gasoline in automobiles contributes the largest share of Canada's total CO2 emissions from all industrial sectors. In spite of Canada's commitment at the Kyoto Climate Conference to reduce CO2 emissions, in fact our CO2 emissions have risen steadily since 1992, with the transportation sector recording the largest increase. Government projections indicate that by 2010 our CO2 emissions in the transportation sector will have risen 34 percent above 1990 levels4, a far cry from the reductions called for in the Kyoto agreement.
The international auto makers have belatedly recognized that their industry faces a major crisis in the coming decades. Pressure from environmentalists is finally forcing the industry to invest in the development of engines that operate on alternative fuels which have greatly reduced harmful exhaust emissions. At the moment they are banking on a range of options, from combined electric-gas powered vehicles with superior fuel efficiency performance to fuel cells based on hydrogen that are virtually harmless in terms of exhaust emissions. However, while these alternatives are a definite improvement over the traditional gas-powered engines, in reality they are nothing more than band-aid solutions aimed at fending off the inevitable for as long as possible. They do nothing to address the basis problem of too many cars and trucks on the roads.
The rapid rise in the price of gas in the winter of 1999-2000 produced cries from virtually every sector of the Canadian economy for a reduction in the taxes collected on gas sales. Is this, however, an adequate response to the real problems facing the transportation sector? What about the billions of dollars in subsidies that already benefit the sector in the form of costs that are transferred to the social sector i.e., the private costs of road construction and maintenance, traffic control and hospital bills resulting from traffic accidents? The real cost of operating a motor vehicle has been "socialized" through the system of taxes and hidden subsidies to private owners, i.e., those who are too poor to afford to operate a car are forced to contribute to the costs of those who can.
Clearly, the world cannot continue on its present path. A world of 1 billion cars and trucks careening across the landscape is neither sustainable nor desirable from the perspective of quality of life. The type of world that this envisions is one in which few of us would desire to live. Leaving aside the question of whether there are enough natural resources in the world to sustain 1 billion automobiles, there are several other issues that need to be addressed.
As the earth's population continues to grow, now having reached 6 billion people, we cannot continue to convert scarce agricultural land from crop production in order to build more highways and city streets. Every square inch of arable land will need to be devoted to producing food if the world's population continues to grow at anywhere near the rate of growth witnessed in the last century.
Major changes in urban planning are required to halt and reverse urban sprawl. This highlights one of the most significant problems that must be overcome if we are to overhaul our urban transportation system, i.e., the lack of a high degree of residential density in our sprawling cities. In order to both reinstall former streetcar lines and/or initiate new routes urban housing densities need to be increased to make the transition economically viable. This requires that city zoning and land use planning reorient away from development in the suburbs to concrete measures designed to encourage a higher intensification of housing densities in city cores.
Although, nominally, land use planners in most western cities are employed by local governments, in many instances they operate in close conjunction with private land development interests who are solely concerned with building the next suburban housing development.
The importance of addressing the issue of urban planning is highlighted by the incredible urbanization of the world's population in the past century. It is projected that by 2006, one-half of the world (3.2 billion people) will be living in cities.5 By contrast, in 1900 only 160 million people (10 percent of the population) lived in cities.
The world is moving fast to a network of megacities of multimillions of people, characterized by choking air and traffic congestion. It has been estimated that the average driving speed in many city centres is slower than a Sunday stroll on foot. The only way to change this is to make city centres automobile free. This has been done successfully in many European cities. It improves the quality of life of urban residents and also results in healthier conditions for the city's working class and poor.
The auto industry has been and continues to be a major contributor in terms of both employment and wealth in most western economies. Thousands of workers are employed in the industry and its spinoffs. Therefore, we need a two-pronged approach to dealing with this issue. First, if we are to seriously address the social and environmental problems that result from the widespread production and use of the automobile we need to develop a different mode of transportation that best protects our environment for the future. Second, we must recognize that the most appropriate alternative type of transportation, electric railways, will likely require a smaller workforce.
In order to avoid adding further stress to our already vulnerable environment we need to develop a realistic transportation alternative to the privately-owned automobile. We can begin this process today by a committing to a major investment in the establishment or reestablishment of publicly-owned electric streetcar lines in every city. This objective will undoubtedly require the investment of billions of dollars. However, as witnessed by the last Canadian federal budget, even in a country such as Canada where, according to the capitalist press barons, the so-called public debt is out of control, there are literally billions available to be invested in a public infrastructure program. Put the money into the transportation infrastructure. It will pay major dividends in the future. The environmental benefits of reduced auto traffic are obvious: less air pollution, less CO2 emissions and reduced traffic on city streets, resulting in a safer environment for our children.
The construction of a network of streetcar lines in cities across the country and the expansion and development of inter urban rail lines will require a skilled labour force. A major investment in rail car manufacturing can absorb a sizeable percentage of today's auto work force. Those auto workers that are left without jobs during the transition away from the auto economy, however, must be protected so that they suffer no diminution in their standard of living. Auto workers did not create the present mess in the world's environment. Auto workers did not make the capital investment decisions that have put the planet's future in jeopardy. Those decisions were made by the leaders of private industry and it is they that should pay the costs of rectification.
Today's auto workers have an opportunity to make a major contribution to protecting our environment for future generations by lobbying the federal government for a major infusion of capital into the railroad industry, both on the level of urban transit and on the level of a long overdue redevelopment of Canada's decrepit cross-country railroad network. By lobbying for investment today, autoworkers will be both protecting the environment and ultimately creating jobs in an industry that otherwise will have a problematic future. Let's create a clean, efficient, publicly-owned transportation system.
1. Tunali, Odil. "A Billion Cars: The Road Ahead", WorldWatch, Vol. 9, No. 1, January/February, 1996, p. 24.
2. Wolf, Winfried. Car Mania A Critical History of Transport. Pluto Press, London, 1996, p. 84.
3. Freund, Peter and Martin, George. "The Commodity that is Eating the World: The Automobile, the Environment, and Capitalism. Capitalism Nature Socialism. Vol. 7, No. 4, December, 1996, p. 16.
4. Analysis and Modelling Group National Climate Change Process. "Canada's Emissions Outlook: An Update", Natural Resources Canada, Ottawa, December 1999, p. 46.
5. O'Meara, Molly. Reinventing Cities for People and the Planet. WorldWatch Institute, Washington, 1999, p. 5.