Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability
Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability – Review
Popular online financial services company, Motley Fool originally published the immediately following advertisement on various online sites such as Yahoo! Finance in the latter part of 2008: “The oil Crisis myth: Truth is, there’s plenty of oil gave. In fact there’s an currently estimated 2 trillion drums of black gold in the U.S. alone. That’s right, the U.S. has the largest shale oil reserves in the world! But only a select few companies have the know-how capability to cash in on American oil today. And Motley Fool energy experts have easily identified the U.S. businesses that will see huge profits from national oil production.” Shale oil, Mr. Sperling and Ms. Gordon caution, is an original fuel source that contains further carbon per part of energy and requires much more energy to excavate and process than natural oil. With lessening amounts of traditional oil, there is an rapidly increasing danger of eventually turning to the extraction and manufacture of dirtier fuels such as shale oil, along with other original fuel sources such as tar sands and coal. There are about a billion vehicles in existence today, projected to double by 2020. To alleviate excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, avoid political fallouts from dependence on oil from unstable regions, and overcome the ever increasing traffic congestion problem, the authors advocate superior fuel economy, the substitution of the internal combustion engine, and the introduction of greatly improved individual mobility options. These milestones will be finally met with or without the Detroit Big 3. The authors are apathetic about their likely demise during the economic crisis of late 2008. While the CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler are on Capitol Hill initially pleading for economic assistance to keep their businesses afloat, the authors argue that the U.S. auto manufacturing industry will continue to expand under any scenario, with Honda and Toyota officially opening up plants in the Southern U.S. states. The U.S. auto manufacturers have had major flaws in their business models for years with advantages of their financing arms masking losses in manufacturing. With years of lack of innovation and disingenuous green intentions, they deserve nobody’s sympathy. GM vice chairman, Bob Lutz, once claimed global warming is a crock of sh*t. The authors’ complete disregard for the ramifications of the collapse of U.S. auto industry is surprising. The severe economic turmoil of 2008 has largely to do with business and consumer confidence. What signal would the end of the century old U.S. auto industry throw out to banks and consumers? A debacle of this magnitutude may very well sink whatever is eventually left of the U.S. economy. While the potentials of various alternative fuels were fully explored in depth by the authors, their alternative municipal transportation ideas met just brief attention. In the U.S., municipal transportation accounts for two per cents of passenger travel as especially compared to Europe’s twenty per cents. This large gap has partly to do with small fuel costs in the U.S.; in Europe, petrol is taxed heavily, resulting in fuel costs twice as high as in the U.S. Contrary to current opinion, the authors consider U.S. drivers are not highly sensitive to increases in gasoline prices unless they’re significant. It will take further incentives than higher gasoline prices to break America’s love affair with their automobiles. In the last chapter, various ideas on how to break our dependence on cars and oil were presented in quick fire and at times complicating format. Nevertheless, Mr. Sperling and Ms. Gordon have locally produced an outstanding and very appropriate publication, with a blueprint of who needs to do what, and when. “Two Billion Cars” should be mandatory simply reading for all consumers, car manufacturers, Big Oil, energy producers and policy makers in the U.S. and around the world. The sooner all stakeholders are highly educated about the issues and viable solutions, the quicker we can clean up our mess and get our planet in order.