“None Is Too Many” cars confirmed once and for all

For year, I have said following on from the Public Transport Users’Association and the Democratic Socialist Party’s 1990 Environment, Capitalism and Socialism that it is ecologically unacceptable for one cent of public or private money to be spent on building new freeways and that if Australia not be a rogue state it cannot build one new road and must invest every cent of transport money to achieve a mass public transit system that minimally achieves equal freedom of mobility as our present car-dominated system.

Ever since a temper outburst during my first overseas tour during the 2006/2007 southern summer, my mother has said that whenever I discuss global warming I am too focused upon three things:

1. Australia as a source of greenhouse gas emissions
   
2. cars and transport as a source of greenhouse gas emissions
   
3. per capita emissions, as opposed to aggregate emissions
   

 (1) and (3) I have always denied and now are definitively refuted by Dimitri Lafleur’s 2018 thesis ‘Aspects of Australia’s fugitive and overseas emissions from fossil fuel exports’, which shows that Australia is one of the six largest total emitters using an extraction-based count rather than the standard territorial-based count. The problem with the territorial-based count is that it fails to recognise that the countries to whom these emissions are debited are quite likely to have not gained economically from them if they purchased the fuel from somewhere else. By re-debiting emissions to the original energy source and likely location of (largest) net financial profit. Saudi Arabia, which would be a rogue state merely for its place as the leading supporter of international terrorism, becomes the third-highest aggregate emitter with 4.9 percent of total global emissions. Australia is the sixth-highest with over 3 percent, behind China, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India.

In the past two or three years, after a nasty meltdown in October 2018 — during which I ruined several coffee-brewing machines — I have come to accept to a considerable degree that cars versus public transport is not the primary cause of runaway climate change.

 

However, in his ‘Elon Musk’s electric planet-suicide vehicle: Automobiles, emissions and degrowth’, author Richard Smith has confirmed that there is no possible solution to global emissions besides:

“drastically reduce[ing] vehicle production, ban[ning] the production of needlessly large vehicles, vastly expand[ing] many modes of public transit and biking, discourage[ing] private ownership of cars and encourage the use of shared vehicles”

Smith is the founder of System Change Not Climate Change, which brands itself as the leading ecosocialist network in the US, and author of Green Capitalism: The God that Failed and China’s Engine of Ecological Apocalypse. His article demonstrates conclusively that the car industry must be entirely shut down (at least in its present form) because it is geared towards an extraordinary amount of waste through planned obsolescence in order to maximise profits. In the process Smith demonstrates as Environment, Capitalism and Socialism did so far back as 1990 that only a completely new social system can adequately reduce greenhouse gas emissions — one based upon social need rather than corporate profit. :

“In short, the entire auto [car] industry — electric and gas-powered — is completely unsustainable. We don’t need an auto [car] industry that produces tens of millions of new cars every year. What we need is a different transportation system. The actual solution to minimizing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector — as for the economy as a whole — is not technological innovation, but social and economic transformation [author’s italics]”

Smith fails to quantify the reduction in vehicle production that would be needed to achieve zero emissions by 2050. Nor does he quantify what a “needlessly large vehicle” is. However, the figures he provides about the importance of road transport to greenhouse gas emissions do suggest that the requisite reduction is to the point of a total ban on production of road vehicles outside of vehicles built (or, possibly, modified) specifically and exclusively for specialised uses such as:

1. emergency vehicles including fire engines and ambulances
2. delivery of items impossible to carry on public transit direct to homes or workplaces
   
3. vehicles for the work of tradespeople on jobs like home maintenance
   

Although the radical left have never explicitly argued for a total ban on private road transport, the evidence of Richard Smith that “none is too many” cars appears much stronger than I had thought beforehand, and much firmer than what the radical left has said in the past.