All fired up
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All fired up Monday November 28
Today's post is, in part, courtesy of Cake's most recent album Pressure Chief.
In New York City, the air isn't particularly great. Of course, it's a major city with taxis, traffic, buses, and plenty of trucks driving to and fro. However, I didn't really notice it when I was living there; I was usually taking the subway.
In Yokohama, I ride my bicycle. Many times, I literally have to hold my breath because the air is so thick with exhaust (I often am behind buses, the worst offenders). Today, for class I'm reading an article about the Kyoto Protocol meetings in the late nineties. Air pollution.
Now, I'm not going to hate on the automobile unnecessarily. It is, or should I say, the gasoline engine is, one of the most useful inventions in the modern era. However, I also encourage you to find another technology -- over 100 years old -- that is still more-or-less the same today. Telegraph? I don't think you can even get a telegraph line anymore. Telephone? We don't use operators, we have long distance codes; it's all automated. Recently, digital telephony even threatens the basic old POTS service we all know and love.
Competition, in a capitalist society, sparks innovation. New companies introduce new methodologies, improved products, and better ideas to gain market share. Old companies fight back by improving their products and slashing prices. Everyone is supposed to win: high-quality goods for cheap prices. Let's close our America Is Great textbooks for a moment and look at the real situation: the gasoline/diesel engine model is over 100 years old, and we still rely on it for most of our vehicles.
Certainly, efficiency has made great strides in recent decades -- but the major market force in that development was the cost of fuel in the latter 1970s. As my Dad has said about the days before that: "Gas was cheap."
I'm not necessarily saying that we should all go hybrid or natural gas tomorrow -- and I know there are huge barriers to entry. There are gas stations at every major intersection across America -- but there are relatively few natural gas or hydrogen stations. Those technologies have mostly taken off with public transportation units, which is a good start. Natural gas prices do not fluctuate the way that gasoline prices do, and thus it makes economic sense for a metropolitan entity to convert their transportation systems. Anyhow, that's a different conversation.
Let's return to the telephone industry for a moment. There was also a large barrier to entry for companies prior to the 1980s: AT&T owned everything, and thus could undersell everyone. The government stepped in to break up the madness, and now I can call people at home from Japan -- using a British company accessed through the Internet -- for less than 2 cents per minute. This is what I'm talking about: progress with a low cost. Don't hate on globalization -- it has positive influences, too.
America's land mass is too large to implement a full-scale, reliable rail system that would preclude consumers from needing their own vehicles (most other small, post-industrial nations can afford this luxury). America could eventually, and that's a different topic entirely, but I'd love to take it on. For the time being, we must focus on alternative energy technologies for the automobile: that's our current infrastructure.
As you can see, this isn't just about my lungs. It's about a lot of things, mostly political.
Why did we invade a country to ensure a consistent oil supply for both our economy and defense system? The costs of doing so have been tremendous: outrageous defense spending, political repercussions worldwide, and, naturally, over 2,000 American lives and the uncountable number of Iraqi citizens (estimates exceed 20,000) who perished in the "War on Terra", as President Bush would have you believe it is pronounced.
Forget the moral standpoint, I'm talking economics here. For the billions of dollars (soon to be trillions?) we've invested there, imagine the amount of government subsidies and incentives that could have been offered to both the oil and automobile industries to (1) promote new, efficient engine technologies, and (2) promote delivery of these new fuels and systems to places across the country?
Let's also not forget that those incentives would, in some cases, lead to the redeveloping of tens of thousands of gas stations: spending in local economies across the country. Sure, there's an inflationary risk, but in a post-9/11 economy, America could have used the injection of capital.
Am I having an "Emperor's New Clothes" moment here? Hasn't anyone else thought of this? Imagine the political image: "We're reducing America's dependence on foreign governments for oil, creating jobs at home by redeveloping our energy delivery infrastructure, and stabilizing energy prices that will help every hard-working American family save their hard-earned income." Tell me that doesn't appeal to the left and the right. Of course, the part that isn't included in that last bit is "...save their hard earned income for rising education and health care costs", but we'll tackle one issue at a time.
Let's not forget the environmental issue, too. We've already destroyed enough, haven't we? I'm not quite ready to colonize another planet just yet; I've grown quite fond of this world, actually. They've got some great food here.
So, I now leave you with my favorite lines from the Cake song "Carbon Dioxide":
I wish I was in that Mercedes Benz
Sealed away from my sins
I'd have the music high, going ninety-five
Aaaaahhh
Too much, Too much
Too much carbon dioxide for me to bear
I was honked at by a Mercedes the other day. I caught up to him in traffic a few kilometers down the road. I sneered as I passed him, and I certainly hope he saw me. I regularly beat cars because of the traffic and stoplights -- motorbikes usually beat me, though -- they carry the same advantage of being able to weave through stopped cars at red lights.
