Cruising for Dystopian Burgers OR The Drive-in at the End of the Universe

My friend James Howard Kunstler is not impressed with recent efforts at improving automobile fuel efficiency. In his view, anything short of ending our dependence on cars for personal transportation is a doomed enterprise.

In a recent email he wrote, "Personally, I've been carrying on a low-grade war with some of the more high-toned Greenies. Much of the green program these days is about making people feel good.  People come up to me after my college blabs and brag that they just bought a Prius and I refuse to give them the brownie points they long for.  I tell them they're just part of the problem --thinking that car dependency by 'other means' is great for us. Then, of course, there's Amory Lovins and his hyper-car (beloved of the Aspen Enviro Institute). 

IMHO anything we do to try to prolong or extend car dependency is a tragic act of futility. Walkable communities is the key to being "green." And public transit that really works. If Mr. Obama's big stimulus initiative ends up being about highways, he will be making a tragic error."

He continues the argument this week in his blog, Clusterfuck Nation. (Jim doesn't mince words)

I've been skeptical of the "stimulus" as sketched out so far, aimed at refurbishing the infrastructure of Happy Motoring. To me, this is the epitome of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable -- since car-dependency is absolutely the last thing we need to shore up and promote. I haven't heard any talk so far about promoting walkable communities, or any meaningful plan to get serious about fixing passenger rail and integral public transit.

Has Mr. Obama's circle lost sight of the fact that we import more than two-thirds of the oil we use, even during the current price hiatus? Or have they forgotten how vulnerable this leaves us to the slightest geopolitical spasm in such stable oil-exporting nations as Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, Libya, Algeria, Columbia, Iran, and the Middle East states? And we're going to rescue ourselves by driving cars?

I know it is difficult for Americans at every level to imagine a different way-of-life, but we'd better start tuning up our imaginations, because endless motoring is not our destiny anymore. The message has not moved from the grassroots up, and so at this perilous stage the message had better come from the top down. Mr. Obama needs to go on TV and tell the American public that were done cruisin' for burgers.

Click here to read the entire post.

This is a good week, by the way, for fans of James Howard Kunstler. He is the central focus of Ben McGrath's piece, The Dystopians in the Jan. 26 issue of The New Yorker.  Definitely woth reading.