Their Energy Policy-and Ours

...But as congestion mounts, those caught up in an increasingly hostile, highway-bound environment will feel more isolated, more cut off...

...All of which is simply to say that America, with its lavish highway system and endless parking lots, has gone to staggering lengths to promote and accommodate the automobile...

...As long as each working adult can afford a set of wheels (an increasingly expensive proposition these days with new-car prices averaging $18,000), they'll at least have a degree of entree into the economy...

...75 Energy Policy worse...

...Where an element of lonely individualism has long been central to a certain vision of American life, the new system has institutionalized it and carried it to extraordinary lengths...

...The result, paradoxically, is that the more oil the world uses, the more it seems to find...

...Considering that Americans consume 140 billion gallons of highway fuel a year, this means that motorists, truckers, and so on are operating at a deficit of anywhere from $4.50 to as high as $10 a gallon...

...It tells them that sidewalks are a luxury because no one walks anymore and that bike paths are for nature lovers and fitness buffs...

...So the standard view is that things are going pretty well, which just goes to show how impoverished the conventional wisdom can be...

...They live in a perverse economic system in which motorists receive up to 62 cents in government benefits or abatements for each of the 2.3 trillion highway miles they rack up per year...

...To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a picture of the future, imagine the Long Island Expressway at the start of the Fourth of July weekend—forever...

...Expressway Forever As American capitalism continues to hemorrhage money and wealth in this manner, its chances of surviving as a first world economy grow ever more dim...

...Subsidized energy inefficiency retards technological development and inhibits the flow of goods, which is why the industrial consequences are not likely to be pretty either...

...But, then, the Democratic party is incapable of thinking anything through or, for that matter, of doing anything other than falling back on an increasingly shopworn set of political clichés...

...In fact, by Lovins's own admission (see his and L. Hunter Lovins's article, for example, in the January 1995 Atlantic on "Reinventing the Wheel") such a vehicle will do nothing to alleviate problems like chronic traffic congestion, social isolation, and urban disintegration—and indeed, by diminishing costs for the motorist, could make them SPRING • 1997...

...Soft-path" guru Amory Lovins, for example, is a leading environmentalist obsessed with the goal of a low-emission, ultrahighmileage "supercar" as the solution to America's transportation miseries...

...Rather than Mideast oil potentates, the villain is a heavily subsidized consumer sector whose energy appetite is apparently insatiable...

...Through massive highway construction, tax incentives for suburban homeownership, and the like, it used Hamiltonian means to create a kind of mass-produced Jeffersonian social order...

...Although Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Newt Gingrich were all shocked, shocked, at how gas prices had risen, the real story was how far they had fallen behind those of comparable countries...

...Where the rail-and-coal system of the Victorians gave us the industrial metropolis, the urban proletariat, and an ethic based on the overriding importance of capital accumulation, the car-andpetrol system developed in the twentieth-century United States has given us the suburban middle class, the artificial separation of production and consumption, and the latter's elevation to a kind of raison d'étre...

...76 • DISSENT...

...Rather than walking or cycling to a nearby store to pick up a quart of milk, it tells them that it is more efficient to drive several miles to some hangar-like supermarket off a crowded commercial strip...

...The party's automatic response to any and all social problems—even by big-city Democrats who, one might think, would know better—is not to rethink this "American dream," but to try ever harder to extend it to all...

...This could mean hiking gas prices to upward of $12 a gallon or, what would probably be more efficient, taxing vehicles not only according to how much fuel they consume, but according to how much they weigh, how many miles they travel per year, how much pollution they emit, and so forth...

...For working families out in the 'burbs, the prospects are somewhat brighter, but not much...

...A worker who is barely able to keep the family car in running order will blanch at the prospect of having to spend hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege of driving to a job that barely pays a living wage as it is...

...This assumes, however, that working people quietly acquiesce...

...Rather than abandoning internalization, socialists have a responsibility to come up with a detailed blueprint as to how it might be implemented...

...The very idea of community as something in which people can meet face to face in a public space without a windshield to mediate will recede ever farther in the distance...

...Consumption taxes, which is what internalization would mean, strike hardest at working people who save little, invest less, and are forced into debt to put food on the table and provide shoes for the kids...

...Most greens are too Malthusian, too anti-urban, to recognize that re-urbanization and a conversion from private-cost to socialcost energy accounting represent a potential way out...

...Rather than just the amount of oil in the earth, they are a function of the rate of consumption, intensity of exploration, our ability to locate deposits under thousands of feet of bedrock and mantle, and our ability to bring them to the surface...

...This would not be popular, to say the least...

...Rather than $1.50, the real cost of driving is anywhere from $6 a gallon to $12...

...In recent years, a cottage industry has sprung up among green-minded economists dedicated to exploring the dimensions of this price-cost differential, particularly in the transportation sector...

...Unreality Index U.S...

...So long as the gap between the price of energy and its cost remains undiminished, we can expect further infrastructure decay, mounting pollution, accelerated global warming, and of course traffic, traffic, traffic...

...Although total geological oil resources remain finite, known oil reserves, as most people now recognize, are an entirely different story...

...The rest of the "progressive" ideological swirl is not much help either, what with populists blaming Big Oil for price hikes and feminists defending working moms' need for cheap private transport...

...The spread between the price of energy and its true cost to the individual, the environment, and society as a whole serves as a kind of index of unreality...

...We think not, despite occasionally hopeful signs...

...Indeed, things are going so swimmingly that even Congress can't screw them up...

...Ultimately, the only solution to the problem of mammoth energy externalities is to "internalize" them by requiring consumers to bear the full cost...

...Although you wouldn't know it from Washington or acclaimed energy experts like Daniel Yergin, America is indeed gripped by an energy crisis, one every bit as severe as that of the seventies...

...All reflect to varying degrees the blinkered, fragmented view of a fragmented society...

...Assuming they don't—assuming that the destruction of culture and society does not ultimately go unchallenged—neither the Democrats nor, needless to say, the Republicans will be equal to the task of leading Americans out of the consumer wilderness...

...Rather, they are predicated on the belief that people can be appealed to rationally in support of measures that are unpleasant in the short run but ultimately constructive...

...Although it sent the worst message possible about conservation, we can take comfort in the fact that a tax cut that saves a typical motorist $7 on a cross-country trip is not going to affect energy consumption much one way or the other...

...Rather than relying on governmental directives or environmentalist dogma, they can tell from their own pocketbook whether it is more efficient on any given occasion to walk or drive, build a house in the city or off a highway somewhere in the country, and so on...

...The numbers they've come up with are remarkable...

...With approximately two hundred million motor vehicles in this country, better than one 74 • DISSENT Energy Policy per adult, the auto is an all-important instrument of a social order based on orchestrated consumption and the de-urbanization and atomization of the working class...

...The consequences of such a policy go beyond the merely economic...

...society pays each year to ensure that the bulk of its population lives in detached, single-family homes, shops at malls, and gives the cities a wide berth...

...Adjusted for inflation, gas prices remain near their historic lows, supplies seem adequate, and while some commentators point to growing demand in India and China as evidence that the price of crude is heading upward, other developments, notably the United Nations' push to allow Iraq to resume limited oil sales, suggest the opposite...

...But if they can be shown how such policies can be used to rebuild shattered communities, to promote technological development and genuine economic growth, and to create a society that is more efficient, attractive, humane, and equitable for the people who create the wealth in the first place—then the foundation for a historic transformation can be laid...

...Indeed, even with last spring's short-lived uptick to around $1.50 a gallon, Americans were still paying two-thirds less than motorists in Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia...

...Regardless of the details, however, there is no doubt that this would mean an abrupt departure from decades, if not centuries, of American policy in which access to cheap resources has been seen as a basic social right to be guaranteed by government...

...society would be a very different place than it is today—that the bulk of the population would live in big cities and small towns, that Americans would rely far more on mass transit, bicycles, and ordinary foot-power, and that the automobile would remain a first-class mode of travel available only at first-class prices...

...Rather than consuming up to twice as much energy per capita as the French or Germans because they want to, Americans do so, in effect, because they are paid to...

...Are environmentalists capable of providing leadership...

...Equally significant, the peculiar psychology of the seventies seems to have been broken for good...

...The problem this time around is not the price of energy to the individual user, which is indeed at a historic low, but the cost of energy consumption to society as a whole, which is shooting through the roof...

...Like Argentines when it comes to the price of beef, Americans have come to look upon cheap gas as something of a national birthright...

...Internalizing the cost of energy, of course, raises grave issues of social justice...

...Yet it is for precisely this reason that workers are the only ones with the moral authority to institute such a policy...

...Walter Russell Mead, writing recently in the World Policy Journal, was hardly the first person to observe that a transportation system is not just a means of moving about goods and people, but a basis for organizing society...

...policy is not just silly and provincial, but profoundly destructive...

...If the Democratic party thought things through, it would realize that compact, walkable, pre-auto urban centers are in fact islands of efficiency in an economy otherwise given over to consumption and waste...

...The Democratic party is inextricably wedded to a faux-pastoral social vision revolving around the private home and private car...

...In perhaps the most painstaking analysis to date, Mark A. Delucchi, a researcher at the University of California at Davis, has identified up to $892 billion in unreimbursed auto-related costs per year for such things as congestion-induced delays, medical costs for uninsured accident victims, air and noise pollution, and global warming, plus as much as $518 billion more for highway infrastructure, highway services, and publicly mandated free parking, costs borne at least partially by the public at large...

...But serious politics are never popular...

...This, of course, raises a number of problems...

...society somewhere on the order of $400 billion a year...

...Consumption, as a result, is rewarded, while conservation is penalized...

...In 1992, a study by the World Resources Institute looked at such factors as infrastructure subsidies, unreimbursed highway services, and environmental damage and concluded that over-reliance on the automobile was costing U.S...

...Working people will not support internalization if the only consequence is to leave them trudging in the dirt while the rich fly by on horseback...

...Despite the gloom and doom of such neo-Malthusians as Lester Brown and the Worldwatch Institute, this is why the problem bedeviling the energy markets since the early eighties has not been one of long-term shortage but of persistent oversupply...

...Nowhere is it zero, SPRING • 1997 • 73 Energy Policy but in those countries where it is relatively low— Denmark is perhaps the best example here—citizens are not far off the mark in believing that they are paying the full freight when it comes to energy consumption...

...It tells drivers that they are being taxed to subsidize mass transit, when in fact American motorists are beneficiaries of the greatest free ride since Cleopatra invited Marc Antony to spend the night on her barge...

...For innercity residents, the upshot is likely to be even greater economic marginalization and all the social afflictions that go with it...

...Only socialists are capable of an integrated social vision in which the urge for a cleaner environment, a strengthened sense of community, and technological progress are combined with the desire for equality, democracy, and genuine economic growth (as opposed to the phony kind in which social and environmental costs are systematically downplayed or ignored...

...Last year's bipartisan effort to repeal a 4.3 -cent-a-gallon gasoline-tax surcharge adopted just two years earlier was a classic case of election-year pandering...

...Subsidizing motor vehicles means not only subsidizing congestion, pollution, highway accidents, and so forth, but subsidizing an entire Fordist social vision built around the private car...

...By the same token, in those countries in which the unreality index is high—and nowhere in the industrialized world is it higher than in the United States—consumers are lost in an economic funhouse in which virtually everything their pocketbook tells them is wrong...

...A study by one of the co-authors of this article, in collaboration with Brian Ketcham, a Brooklyn-based engineer, estimated the total annual price tag at $730 billion, while another study by the Natural Resources Defense Council came up with a range of $378 to $629 billion...

...Indeed, after spurting as much as 40 percent last year, crude oil prices reversed direction in January and, by early March, had fallen back by 20 percent...

...If this network of subsidies did not exist, we can reasonably assume that U.S...

...The sum of all such auto-related costs or "externalities," not to mention various homeowner tax subsidies, is an index of how much U.S...