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Friday, August 14, 2009

Supporting Cash for Clunkers While Opposing Car Culture

Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot: some reader pseudonymously opined:
I understand that Obama supports the Cash for Clunkers program -- and I agree with Obama on most things -- but not on this. I think it's a sneaky way to give additional subsidy to the undeserving auto industry while also encouraging car culture. I thought you opposed car culture too, so I'm curious why you mention Cash for Clunkers here in a supportive way.

To begin where you end, and on an incidental point, I didn't actually say anything supportive of the Cash for Clunkers program in the post to which you are responding -- I pointed it out as a thing Obama wanted that Republicans opposed with rhetoric and energy analogous to that which they are presently expending against healthcare reform, and in which Obama got what he wanted anyway. I said that we should take heart from such victories if we are inclined to despair about the way the healthcare fight is playing out at the moment.

But, I guess I do support Cash for Clunkers so far as it goes. It's not something I'm dancing in the street about, exactly, but it seems to me to be a reasonably worthy program.

As you say, I do oppose car culture. By this opposition I personally mean to recognize the complex and catastrophic environmental impacts of a long history of urban planning and suburban sprawl serving the demands of the infernal internal combustion engine.

This opposition moves me to advocate a whole constellation of policies to ameliorate those ill-effects and facilitate shifts into a different transportation infrastructure and different transportation practices, involving bike-lanes, downtown car-lanes transformed into pedestrian malls, dense pedestrian friendly mixed use urban zoning regulations more generally, infusions of money into mass transit over highways, cleaner cars across the board, a whole host of things, all of which I fully expect to play out over long time scales through contentious processes involving many stakeholders and many disputes and many compromises and set-backs as real politics always does.

I'm not sure "opposition to car culture" encompasses for me exactly what it does for you, which of course is fine.

I don't have a car nor have I ever had one. I use mass transit and always have done, even when I lived in less mass-transit friendly places than the Bay Area. I support environmental organizations and environmental causes with money and time that for me are in limited supply.

But I also live in the world. The Cash for Clunkers program does many good things, even if it doesn't do all the good things I would like a program to do.

It provides a stimulus that yields economic benefits in a shorter time-frame than many other stimulus programs can do and that helps Obama to keep his approval numbers high enough to do more of the many unpopular and painful things our circumstances demand at the moment. I am quite sure that consequence inspired the program more than anything else, and if so it is doing exactly what it is meant to do.

However "undeserving" the auto industry may be -- and I can think of many reasons why you would say so, not least of which was its killing of the electric car and idiot worship of SUVs at a time when a shift from the latter to the former would have been as beneficial to the auto industry itself as to the environment -- the fact is that punishing one of America's last remaining actual industries just because it "deserves punishment" would yield at best shallow emotional satisfactions while yielding as well deep costs we would surely live to regret far more.

I'll draw you a picture. Environmental politics needs the Dems --> the Dems need the Unions --> the Unions need the Auto Industry. And there's an end to it.

As programs like Cash for Clunkers get re-iterated one would like to see the fuel standards and pollution standards skew ever further in the direction of the subsidization of ever Greener practices. But the program isn't the worst thing in the world as it is. Certainly it is nothing like subsidizing solar roofs across the country, investing in intercontinental high-speed rail projects, encouraging local-edible landscaping over suburban lawns, and so on. But nobody ever said or thought otherwise.

Politics is not aesthetics and it is not morals, both of which tend to thrive on purity in ways politics cannot without losing its way. The best can too easily become enemy of the good, as the saying goes, but this also makes one more susceptible to compromises that risk losing track of the best altogether, without which one cannot rightly identify the good at all. And so, to keep this relentless avalanche of cliches going, one must know how to walk and chew gum at the same time.

My partner sympathizes more with your take on the Cash for Clunkers program more than my own, I would say -- people of good will draw our lines and make our compromises in different places according to our various calculations of the expedients that will lead us closest to our ideals.

2 comments:

JP said...

Cash for clunkers is terrible. yeah let's destroy perfectly usable automobiles to put more energy efficient ones on the road. nevermind that the energy that went into making the destroyed cars and the energy used to create the new cars will far outstrip any meager gains in fuel efficiency the news cars save giving us a net energy loss for this whole exercise in entropy.

Dale Carrico said...

the energy used to create the new cars will far outstrip any meager gains in fuel efficiency

This is true as far as it goes but aren't your calculations truncating the virtuous circles too quickly to appreciate all the ramifications here that make this far more than merely an "exercise in entropy"? What if we're also rapidly bootstrapping the shift into a more Green US automobile industry with Cash for Clunkers? The Volt is one of a new generation of greener and greener cars in the pipeline, and once that next constellation of electric/hybrid vehicles arrives (this is a matter of months and years, not bs futurological timescales) I think if anything Cash for Clunkers should be infused with orders of magnitude more money to facilitate as quickly as possible the shift to that generation of cars... ideally made in the USA with Union labor bolstering a generation of Democratic party leadership in power long enough to move the US to a social democratic model with a progressive Court and a Republican opposition forced into something like sanity simply to survive. I don't think it is either plausible to expect or desirable to hope for a punitive disinvention of the US auto industry -- and I say this as somebody who has never owned a car as an ethical principle precisely because I know how pernicious car culture has been on our planet. I don't discount your viewpoint in the least, but I do think it's too easy to make economical/ ecological calculations that are too limited in their horizons to capture all the stakes of moves like this one on first blush.