Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Mass Passenger Air Travel Has Always Been Both Economically and Environmentally Unsustainable

Air travel is an environmental catastrophe, of course, not only because of the rapidly growing share burning jet fuel contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, but considering the local ecosystems obliterated by vast airport construction, considering the noise pollution disrupting communities, and so on. But Matt Yglesias also reminds us of a relentless history of serial bankruptcies and bailouts that testifies to an economic catastrophe that may be more surprising still (not that many people seem particularly inclined to change their conduct even knowing full well about the environment costs of air travel anyway).

It really is so striking and so apt to contemplate the extent to which the monuments of the twentieth century have testified to our suicidal worship of petrochemical mobility, from the graceful bridges and cloverleafs of Robert Moses, hells of congestion and poison peddled as prayers to traffic flow, excuses to demolish vibrant communities, especially majority-minority communities, peddled as prayers to "urban renewal," to vast airport terminals whose steel and concrete and glass curves seem frozen in flight, distracted from the tarmac moonscapes that surround them for miles.

Although we tend to think the early metaphor of the "information superhighway" to describe online formations drew from existing experience to accommodate us to the new reality of the Web, I think it may be better in hindsight to realize the ways in which the ideology of the highway was instead a prefiguration of internet experience, a disavowal of material realities in the name of a fantasy of flow... I find I must stress time and time again to my students that cyberspace is not made up of spirit stuff, is not a techno-utopian Heaven of Mind, but is materialized in bodies whose fattening asses are parked in seats on solid ground and whose digits sear with repetitive stress disorder and whose eyes ache with strain, fueled on black coal soot and belching smokestacks, arriving on devices made by suffering hands and bored brains of toxic materials mined by human beings for pennies from tortured earth and destined after a sad season's fashion to linger for centuries in poisonous landfill. Information wants to be free? And how it lacks in wanting it!

On the Road -- the lie of freedom as white flight whether sung in the tonalities of the Beats or the Suits, whether fleeing from or to the water-fat arms of Suburbia, drinking up the freshwater and bringing on the salty skeleton-white desert; or In the Air -- the lie of freedom as passport, middle class air-travel bringing the world within reach while at once eating the world in a bath of acid, the oligarchs up front in Business class, while in Economy conferencing academics scribble last-minute notes for their "political" talks about globalization next to kids with backpacks stowed above...

So many lies the historical meta-bubble of Petrochemical Modernity told itself, so many monuments to those lies, so many lies we are still ardently telling ourselves.

4 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

I knew someone who engaged in a multiple day sit in protest at Heathrow protesting the construction of a new runway. After the protest ended she boarded a cheap flight to Goa straightaway.

People ask me if I have any foreign vacations planned and I tel them no, I actually take this whole global warming thing seriously and keep my emissions low. Even people who believe in AGW look at me as if I was a Jehovah's Witness when I say that.

jimf said...

> Air travel is an environmental catastrophe, of course. . .

Watch out, Dale! Them's fightin' words to the techno-utopians,
who see the abandonment of the SuperSonic Transport by the United States
(long before the economic failure of the Concorde) as evidence of this
country's decadent lack of nerve when it comes to facing the techno-future.
(And it's all because of those damned Berkeley hippies and
their pinko-professorial successors!)

Like the fact that it's 2012 and do you know where your
moon-bases are?

jimf said...

> . . .our suicidal worship of petrochemical mobility, from
> the graceful bridges and cloverleafs of Robert Moses, hells
> of congestion and poison peddled as prayers to a traffic flow,
> excuses to demolish vibrant communities, especially
> majority-minority communities, peddled as prayers to "urban renewal,". . .

Speaking of which, from your blog-roll:

"Bruce McCall explains the artist's drive for absurdist retrofuturism"
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/12/bruce-mccall-explains-the-arti.html

(While the front of the "'58 Bulgemobile" looks vaguely like a
cross between an Oldsmobile and an Edsel, the side-trim and the
model names ("Fireblast - Flashbolt - Blastfire - Firewood") are
DeSoto ("Firesweep - Firedome - Fireflite" ;-> ).
The trim is more '56 than '58, though.

http://www.secondchancegarage.com/articles/images/58desoto/58desoto1.jpg
http://www.fiftiesweb.com/cars/58.desoto.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13669419@N07/2398184568/

I have to admit I've always been in love with '58 DeSotos.

I used to have a red and black 1/25 scale model of one that I
took to bed with me (instead of a teddy bear) when I was 6 or 7.
It was one of those Jo-Han pre-assembled promotional models
that dealers used to give away (or sell).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_car
They're majorly collectible today. Mine no doubt all
ended up in the trash after I left home.

What can I say? I was also seduced when I was 12 by
the General Motors Futurama II at the '64-'65 New
York World's Fair (I didn't know that sophisticated
intellectuals already found the whole affair ridiculous.)

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/7/2008/04/35/d6/72ddfd2df8372b3763deb291887955ce.jpg

Dale Carrico said...

Watch out, Dale! Them's fightin' words to the techno utopians, who see the abandonment of the SuperSonic Transport by the United States (long before the economic failure of the Concorde) as evidence of this country's decadent lack of nerve when it comes to facing the techno-future.

Well, you know me... if I were to excise the words the techno-utopians would ascribe fighting to there would be little left to read hereabouts.

That said, I am of two minds when it comes to supersonics myself. Like the last shuttle flight, the end of Concorde felt like something like a dagger to the heart.

I can't say that I disapprove passenger flight absolutely altogether, supersonic or not. Indeed, I think it could reasonably exist as some rarefied and luxurious service for emergencies or frivolous rich people -- but what I disapprove the ongoing public subsidization of the fantasy of its mass availability. There has never been a business model for profitable affordable mass passenger airflight -- and the subsidized pretense to the contrary gets the lion's share of the blame for the environmental catastrophe as well.

In this it is rather like the meat industry -- I'm an ethical vegetarian myself, as you know, but I don't feel compelled to rail sanctimoniously about others drawing the line the same place where I do (after all, I didn't remain a vegan more than a few years myself). And even though I see the good sense in the claim that the best thing most everyday people could do to help the environment would be to stop eating meat, even so I think what should really change is the public subsidization of the meat habit. If the price of meat reflected its real costs I daresay people would adapt themselves in ways that would yield greater sustainability even if few went all the way to vegetarian conviction as I have. Airflight seems to me much the same. Come to think of it, private ownership and overuse of cars seems to me much the same, as well.

Just as we subsidized a fantasy of for-profit nuclear energy for years rather than face up to the sin of Hiroshima, we demolished superior trolly systems and continental rail to subsidize a fantasy of interstate highways to suburbia and global passenger airflight to keep the WW2 boom alive in a post-war epoch fueled by the petrochemical resources that were the real prize with which we dueled the Nazis in the horrific conflict.

Futurism from the Futurama (see the USA from your Chevrolet! peddled as freedom, consumer conformism peddled as individuality) to contemporary Singularitarianism (precarization peddled as accelerating change peddled as progress unto transcendence) has never been much apart from the hysterical hyperbolic sales-pitch with which the elite-incumbent powers of the postwar Washington Consensus extractive-petrochemical military-industrial complex that ate the world while pretending to feed it.