After the Car
Kingsley Dennis and John Urry
Polity Press
180pp
£14.99
The aeroplane has become, for many environmentalists, the symbol of all that is wrong with our oil-gulping world. Yet in the UK, almost 15% of our greenhouse gas emissions come from cars. With over 650 million cars already on the road today, predictions are that if nothing changes, within 20 years that number will go up to a staggering one billion – all burning oil and chugging out carbon dioxide like there’s no tomorrow. Worldwide cars generate 1.2 million deaths and 20-50 million injuries a year, many involving people who are not drivers. A book that takes on these four-wheeled environmental disasters is surely a welcome contribution to the environmental debate then?
‘After the Car’ sets out to do just that, arguing that the car has fundamentally shaped our society in the 20th century and has set us on the current path to climate change. Yet as a ‘system’ – a machine made of steel, powered by petrol, seating four people, personally owned and driven independently of others – the car is outdated technology and will need to be redesigned and surpassed before the end of the next century. Just as no one decided to become dependent upon the car in the first place, the authors argue that this new system won’t be brought into being by one or two deliberate policies, but instead by a dynamic interaction of various global pressures, such as peak oil and climate change, as well as new technologies, changes in policy and economics. The book examines the possible drivers of these changes in more detail, outlining the possible technologies in the pipeline and considering what these would mean through a series of future scenarios.
Throughout, the authors look at the notion of ‘system’ through complexity theory. Complexity theory, developed initially in the hard sciences, is a way of looking at how groups of objects work together to produce a result. It acknowledges that while systems appear to be regular and rule bound, through their workings they also generate unpredictable and unintended effects. We didn’t set out for the world to be built for the convenience of car drivers then, but we unintentionally became ‘locked’ into the current path that is taking us to a dangerous and uncertain future.
Such a view of environmental policy is interesting and relatively new, and the authors provide a good explanation of some difficult scientific concepts. They also give some surprising facts about the emergence of the car. For instance, the authors put the dominance of the internal combustion engine over other forms such as electric or steam engines, down to its success in popular public races in the late 19th century and its resilience on the battlefield in the First World War. They also claim that despite the car’s macho image, it was a woman who was responsible for ‘socialising’ it and making it such a vital part of our lives – Bertha Benz, who one day in 1885 took her husband’s car out of the workshop, for a drive to see her parents 80km away.
But despite such a promising start and premise, I was extremely disappointed with the final section looking at future scenarios. The overriding message in complexity theory is the element of unpredictability within systems. Throughout the book the authors also emphasised that we’re notoriously bad at predicting the future – which is why we are where we are with cars. So it seems very odd to end the book by arguing that there are only ‘three convincing scenarios for the period around the middle of this century’. Furthermore, while the scenarios are based upon the outputs of the UK government’s Foresight Programme, this evidence seemed to be heavily interspersed with science fiction and hints of conspiracy theory – the authors talk about ‘global forces’ that might find climate change helpful in providing the situation to allow the creation of ‘Orwellian networks of control’; one of the scenarios is described as being ‘foretold in the 1982 dystopic nightmare Mad Max 2’.
Most disappointingly of all though is the lack of progressive vision in the scenarios. The scenario called ‘Local Sustainability’ describes a future that approximates the life my grandparents led – where life is locally centred and long distance movement is uncommon, where you are extremely limited in your choice of friends, employment, pastimes etc. ‘Regional Warlordism’ describes a chaotic and divided world, where movement is hard to achieve because of the breakdown of any of the long-range systems of mobility and communications and travel is dangerous outside your own ‘fortress’. Personal freedoms are severely affected in the ‘Digital Networks of Control’ (the most optimistic of the three), where physical and digital movement are integrated to enable a fully functioning automated post-car system. Whichever one you pick, the assumption is that the world is going to be considerably worse for future generations, regardless of what we do. While the authors might be right that a series of path dependent systems have already been set in motion that left alone will take us to hell in a handbasket, this sense of inevitability completely underestimates the power of human ingenuity and people’s desires to improve their lot. More importantly, as I’ve argued countless times, it’s not exactly a view of the world that engages people or moves them to action.
‘After the Car’ begins an interesting perspective on the environment and transport policy – a perspective that deserves much further thought within political circles. But ultimately it doesn’t provide many solutions for our car-centred world, nor much hope of finding such solutions. As a holiday read, it’s not the most uplifting choice – but then again, it might do the trick if, like me, you’re trying to remember why you’re holidaying in a soggy Cornwall rather than sunning it in Ibiza.