Assembly Bill 1493 just signed into law by Governor Davis is one step forward and ten backward. Most environmentalists are wildly enthusiastic about it but it is a disaster for cities and environment like few in recent history. How could that be? How is it someone like Russell Long, Executive Director of the Bluewater Network could say the day of signing AB 1493 is the “most important day for the environmental movement in a generation” when it gives far more to automobile manufactures, gasoline companies, highway builders and sprawl developers than to clean air?

How could it be that Roland Hwang of the Natural Resources Defense Council could drive a big SUV to Sacramento for the signing ceremony and declare that making cars that produce slightly less CO2 per vehicle doesn’t have to get in the way of manufacturing massive gas guzzlers? If people should want to buy them that’s their business or if auto manufactures should want to spend millions advertising to convince the public to purchase them and daily launch tons of their steel, plastic and rubber into the public realm and natural landscape that’s their business. It’s amazing, the enormity of this compromise and the lack of understanding of what it means.

First, how bad is it? Then, how could so many good-willed people be so wrong? Also, if it is as good for the automobile manufacturers as I think it is then why have they been so energetically opposed? Finally, what is the global warming solution?

How bad is it?

Assembly 1493 can reduce CO2 production something like 5% to 15% in any particular vehicle according to the articles I’ve read. To accomplish this not-too-glorious benefit what’s to be done? Remind owners to fill their tires to higher pressure and more often so they roll more smoothly, losing less energy from friction and remind them to keep their engines tuned up. Also, various seals in the air conditioning system and crankcase can be built tighter.

Also, though not specified, any number of other steps can be taken if they are feasible and if “consideration” is given to show there will be no negative economic effects. What else? Well the bureaucracy and legislators have until 2005 to come up with specific plans to reduce CO2 production, and the auto industry can get around to dealing with it by 2009 and by the way, all this exempts big rigs and commercial vehicles.

That doesn’t seem like a whole lot to get excited about. Calling a slight increase in car efficiency a global warming solution seems to be all that’s new – if saying you were accomplishing something only made it so! We’ve had such increases in auto efficiency (if much larger) since the Oil Crisis of 1973 and it has produced more sprawl, longer drives, more cars and massive increases in fuel purchases and total CO2 output. For example, since cars became considerably more efficient following the Oil Crisis, California population went up approximately 50% while the land area of urban/suburban development went up 100%. Now, according to the National Wildlife Federation in its 2001 report “Paving Paradise,” 66% of all species in California on the endangered and threatened list are there specifically because of habitat displacement, that is, sprawl. That doesn’t even include pollution effects of car/sprawl smog and water runoff contamination, nor projected climate change. Would the figure then attributable to auto/sprawl syndrome then be 75%, 80%, 90%?

What’s the deal here, the trade-offs with AB 1493? Sensitive to the ever delicate feelings of the auto industry, oil companies, freeway builders and sprawl profiteers, there needs to be something for the environmentalists’ opposition so the legislators aren’t unseated in the next election by a multi-million dollar assault on their incumbencies. So the car/sprawl/freeway/oil cartel gets this: there can be no added future taxes on cars or gasoline, no type of vehicle can be banned no matter how damaging and no speed limit can be reduced. Read that again carefully and think!

This amounts to awesome concessions for very little in the first place. And what if that very little just convinces us that cars can be improved indefinitely so we might as well keep designing our cities and lives around them? All those changes that are banned could actually cut down on car usage and help reshape cities for a healthier future. Making cars a little more efficient will actually cause more sprawl. For those who don’t do systems thinking this seems paradoxical, that an improvement in a component could actually make the effect of the whole system much worse. But so it is!

How could we be fooled?

What’s really going on here? I think it is largely that the environmentalists are seldom ecologists. That is, they don’t necessarily understand “whole systems” or “ecological” thinking. They enjoy looking out over a beautiful landscape, as ecologists do too, but don’t necessarily understand how it got that way or how it works. They are even more adrift looking at the confusing tangle of freeways, sprawl and smog and understand even less how that works – or fails to work. The ecological lesson is that you can’t treat the car separately from its “ecology,” its system of roads, sprawl and cheap energy supply.

Make the car a little more efficient and people drive farther for less money while feeling righteous, as if they were solving energy problems – and after AB 1493 it seems, CO2 problems – while contributing to ever more sprawl, occasionally killing someone (half a million world wide every year), and paving agricultural and natural landscapes in the millions of acres annually.

Many environmentalists long for excuses to make the car more acceptable: energy efficiency is a good excuse and along with it comes a small savings in CO2 output, the emotional basis of environmentalist support of AB 1493. But even this small reduction appears to assume a steady number of cars, which is not the case: their numbers are sure to increase exponentially, especially in the developing nations, and their average size too, and that will be encouraged, not discouraged, by making people feel more righteous about driving a “better” car. Roland Hwang’s bigger better car at that.

Then there is the “tradition” of using the car and lack of imagination or memory to remind us that the alternatives are numerous and available. Many environmentalists say, as John Holtzclaw of the Sierra Club’s national office once told me, “sprawl BAD! But cars..., pretty good.” He meant most environmentalists want to get out into the environment in their cars. Sprawl’s in the way – can take hours to get across it – but cars are the means of people’s access to nature.

It never occurs to them that with a system of compact cities covering a far smaller area of land, and with trains, bicycles, horses and feet to get people out into some pretty great places, you wouldn’t need cars and the horrendous dislocations that ripple out all the way to the Middle East and Afghanistan, the oil war in 1991 and the terrorist war in Lower Manhattan. They seem to forget that nature-loving city dwellers on Earth were happy and got out into nature for thousands of years and that car-based cities, towns and villages didn’t even exist one hundred years ago.

Most likely, the average environmentalist’s biggest reason for embracing the “Global Warming Bill” (aptly labeled since that is what it will promote) is that we are addicted to cars. That is, we have something that is so deeply locked into our lives physically and psychologically we can’t imagine how to get rid of it no matter how badly it makes us act. I call it a “structural addiction” because it is built into the structure of the cities, towns and even villages we have been building over the last eighty years. It is not too different from a chemical dependency in an individual. Like a chemical addiction, it is ever so physical, involving not just the car but asphalt, concrete and gasoline – about 500 gallons of gasoline per average car driver in the US every year.

This addiction is structural in the sense that it is based on the structure of the whole city. It has several component parts, this structure: cars, sprawl, freeways, streets and parking lots, fuel and fuel supply systems, oil wells, pipelines and supertankers and the factories that manufacture them, insurance companies, hospitals, mortuaries, American and British bombers, television that makes it possible to live in otherwise abjectly lonely suburbia and so on. So much is sacrificed for this structure of interconnected parts, a real ecology in its own right even if pathological, that how else could you explain it other than addiction, especially when the alternatives are so good?

It could be the environmentalists supporting AB 1493 believe that even a small victory for global warming that “opens the door” to legal moves on behalf of cutting back CO2 is a great thing. Acknowledging the problem in the United States is a great idea and we need a start. With a carefully measured compromise that is probably not such bad reasoning.

But this is a gigantic compromise, ten steps backward for one forward, if you think a more energy efficient car is a step forward at all. If it is not, all the steps are backward. The kind of reasoning supporting AB 1493 is a continuing failure to understand whole systems – AKA ecological – thinking. It is profoundly destructive that the auto industry can now be guaranteed no ban on really bad vehicles, no reduction of speed limits and no new taxes.

They won BIG. Just add a hundred pounds to the vehicle, add 10% more horse power and the advantage is nullified – while meantime sprawl is magnified and more people drive farther, buy more cars to negotiate the distance and feel better about it.

Why does the auto/oil/sprawl/highway cartel oppose the “Global Warming Bill”?

If Assembly Bill 1493 will be as profitable for the auto manufacturers, oil producers, highway pavers and sprawl builders as I propose it will be, why would they spend a few million fighting it? Could they be so greedy they don’t believe in giving up a penny? That’s possible. Or could it be that they are making an investment in fooling the environmentalists, playing them (us – since I’m an environmentalist too, but also an ecologist) for suckers? Are they simply playing their role very well? I have no idea, but the latter motive is not outlandish to surmise. There is plenty of evidence for it.

You may remember the conspiracy of 1927 to 1955, in which General Motors, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum, Firestone Rubber, Mack Manufacturing (trucks) and Greyhound Lines pooled money and set up front businesses to destroy the urban rail system of 100 American Cities. The conspirators had violated the anti-trust laws in establishing bus companies called National City Lines, Pacific City Lines and American City Lines. They systematically bought up and scrapped the streetcars and urban rails of an entire nation over 28 years and very effectively replaced them with cars, oil, highways, sprawl – the works.

An interesting memo from inside Mack Manufacturing surfaced at the 1955 U.S. District Court trial in Chicago. Mack, GM, Standard Oil and crew apparently lost money like crazy because the streetcars were much more popular than the buses that replaced them; most of the floundering bus companies were eventually bought out and bailed out by local governments’ tax dollars. Why would the conspirators knowingly lose money like that? Why bother to conspire and risk prosecution? As the memo said, “The probable losses” for investors in the bus companies would be “more than justified by the business and gross profit out of this move in the years to come.” Could it be builders of the car/sprawl/freeway/oil cartel are (still) sophisticated enough to think like that? Are they systems thinkers and environmentalists are not? Are they acting strategically and environmentalists are grasping at straws? Are they able to plan in secrecy and in concert while the environmentalists have to bring their case openly before the public, as if they had to show all the cards in their hand to everyone and the car/oil/sprawl/freeway cartel did not?

The auto/oil industry has one truckload of money, expensive hired help with real expertise and time to think through environmentalists’ reactions to their moves. They know that if they spend a few tens of millions of dollars to fool us into thinking we are winning a victory when actually we are setting them up for any car design at any speed with no new taxes, which we are – then doesn’t this mean they are winning? A few tens of millions of dollars so invested gets them hundreds of billions of dollars as we continue to build automobile dependent sprawl. Repeat, hundreds of billions of dollars. This is serious big business. They better play their hand stealthily.

An interesting side note: the car, oil, rubber, truck and bus companies lost their conspiracy case in that Chicago federal court – and had to pay $5,000 each and court costs of $4,220.78. Some loss! They made hundreds of billions that time around and may well be positioning themselves now for the big coup of the early 21st century: another few generations of building sprawl and car addiction and ironically championed under the banner of solving the global warming problem.

Solution?

So what is the solution to global warming then? To think ecologically. Recognize there is a system of interlaced components here, integral parts. First, save all the money, time and energy dedicated to “improving” the car and its highway/parking lot infrastructure and stop fooling ourselves – it will always have an intrinsically destructive role on the planet. Invest instead in several interlinked things. First, reshape cities for “access by proximity” instead of access by motorized transport: build and reshape cities, towns and villages so that compact centers-oriented development of great diversity of function is created to replace sprawl.

Create car-free-by-contract housing and pedestrian centers with ecological design in higher density buildings while rolling back sprawl – take every opportunity to remove low density development and return natural features to cities and suburbs, such as creeks, shorelines and ridgelines. This will take several generations. The auto/oil/sprawl/highway cartel took 28 years to destroy the American urban rail system and put in place a system in which members of the cartel are the main players. It is a system that is still growing rapidly. It will take us even longer to create again cities designed for people.

Second, supplementing such a compact walkable city, town and village structure of highly “mixed uses” with efficient transit is OK and bicycles are great!: zero pollution (except in small quantity in manufacture). Urban light rail systems must return.

Third, recognize that a major reason for owning a car, even if people live relatively close to their other life activities, is for shopping trips. Loads can be heavy and errands hindered by bad weather. Cars look useful in this circumstance, and in the short term, of course they are. But if there are good delivery services to efficiently bring your shopping items to your door, there goes one of the strongest reasons for owning a car. Create excellent delivery systems, especially pedal-powered ones.

Fourth, support proximity policies: governmental, personal – of any kind – such as hiring local, renting to people who don’t work far away and are dependent on a car, taxing land far from centers at a relatively higher rate than in good pedestrian/transit centers and the like.

Fifth, and finally, realize that we are living on a quickly changing and degrading planet, changing and degrading because of us. What we do today has enormous leverage on a future that is guaranteed to be different than what we see now. Giving the go ahead to the car/oil/sprawl/highway cartel for a tiny savings in CO2 as if we were making an improvement in a static situation is delusional. Climate change and its human causes have a historic context and are imbedded in rapid change in the wrong direction.

With the Global Warming Bill we are inadvertently encouraging that movement in the wrong direction. We could be moving in the opposite direction by taking steps one through four above. That seems to me to be the only way to stop pretending to make a difference and begin actually solving the global warming problem: don’t build a bigger auto/oil/sprawl/highway infrastructure monster by making it appear to work better in any one of its component parts and in ignorance of what those interconnections mean into the future.

Instead acknowledge that it is a fundamentally destructive whole systems infrastructure, a pathological ecology of interrelated parts, and take every step to reverse and shrink its trajectory of growth. Replace it with a built habitat designed around human beings instead of motor vehicles.