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This page contains all of the posts and discussion on MemeStreams referencing the following web page: The Myth of the Efficient Car. You can find discussions on MemeStreams as you surf the web, even if you aren't a MemeStreams member, using the Threads Bookmarklet.

The Myth of the Efficient Car
by bucy at 6:21 pm EST, Feb 6, 2009

The personal automobile must be abandoned, and quickly.

What's the point in writing an article like this? Your base is going to applaud and everyone else is going to ignore you because this is not remotely constructive.


 
RE: The Myth of the Efficient Car
by noteworthy at 11:51 am EST, Feb 7, 2009

Alec Dubro wrote:

The personal automobile must be abandoned, and quickly.

Bucy responded:

What's the point in writing an article like this? Your base is going to applaud and everyone else is going to ignore you because this is not remotely constructive.

By way of reply, I'll quote Orwell on Dickens:

Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for instance. Reade was a much better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited. He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable, and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp that, given the existing form of society, certain evils cannot be remedied. Fasten upon this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it. Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting them off. In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks "Which root?" that one begins to grasp his position.

The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as "human nature". It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like Our Mutual Friend, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of course one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again from the remarks about Bounderby's will at the end of Hard Times, and indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of laissez-faire capitalism; but Dick... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]


The Myth of the Efficient Car
by possibly noteworthy at 7:46 am EST, Feb 5, 2009

Alec Dubro:

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.

Even on its face, this seems like a tepid response to climate change. In fact, efficiency has always led to more production and consumption.

Cars don’t move people, cars move cars.

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.

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.

From the archive:

The greenest thing you can do in your kitchen is not tear it up and put in a new one.


 
 
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