Serious, yet trivial in the big picture

A few days ago, I noticed discussion of how car companies have been trying to slow the shift towards electric vehicles, as has been discussed by Ben Cubby in the Sydney Morning Herald a couple of days ago as I type this.

Especially since car manufacturing in Australia has been closed down after three decades of trying to stop it, car companies attract relatively little attention in the mind of the Australian public. Even in countries that still manufacture cars, car companies are rarely major newsmakers, despite their immense wealth and vast output. The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, even without any local car manufacturing, is nonetheless an immensely powerful lobby group inside Australia, representing thirty-nine makes of car. Despite the undoubted influence, even control, of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries upon Australian transport and energy policy, the organisation’s name is not known to most Australians.

Despite being viewed by my relatives as propaganda, some quotes from Environment, Capitalism and Socialism continue to influence my thinking

Ever since I read the pamphlets of the Public Transport Users Association, and much more so again after reading the now-defunct Democratic Socialist Party’s 1990 (updated 1999) book Environment, Capitalism and Socialism, I have come to believe that the production of private cars is ipso facto unsustainable and unnecessary. That is to say, if every last dollar of public and private money devoted to road building and car production were redirected to mass transit, there would be large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions accompanied by zero loss of mobility for the majority of the population. The Public Transport Users Association — whom I came after reading the Trotskyists to regard as too lenient and compromising — nonetheless demonstrated in the early 1990s that a public transit system for Melbourne equal to the best in Europe and Japan would cost one-twelfth the amount actually wasted by the Kennett and other governments on the Scoresby, Mornington Peninsula, and Dingley Freeways, CityLink and the Western Ring Road. The evidence of the PTUA amply proved to me that the influence of the car industry must dictate transport policy in Australia, and that the most rational and logical policy would:

• put an end to all trunk road building whatsoever
• transfer all money spent on roads — excluding that spent upon their demolition and revegetation — to improvements in rail and other public transport
• have as its ultimate goal a transport system based upon 100 percent public transit modal share — initially in urban areas and subsequently elsewhere
• aim to develop communities without local roads for private cars
• homes would be instead connected by single-lane roads for special uses or better still exclusively by footpaths or tramways

After I heard that cars were not the major single source of greenhouse gases during a holiday in the Otways in 2001, I slightly lessened insistence on the phase-out of private transport until reading Richard Smith’s ‘Elon Musk’s electric planet-suicide vehicle: Automobiles, emissions and degrowth’ last September.

Smith’s article was published in Volume 3 Supplement B of the 2020 Ecological Citizen, and it suffices to say here that Smith demonstrated that to avoid catastrophic global warming:

1. the entire modern car industry must be shut down
2. vehicle production must be dramatically cut (by 99 percent or more) and all but the smallest vehicles banned from production entirely
3. there must be a complete transformation of the transport system to one based upon mass public transit for every journey

What Smith, alongside the Democratic Socialist Party and Public Transport Users Association, does demonstrate is that road lobby groups like the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries are a major factor in preventing urgently needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and that a strictly rational and logical transport system would have no place whatsoever for private motoring. Unless the car companies who support groups like the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries are completely nationalised and expropriated — and the resources and wealth they hold wholly redirected to the building of decades-overdue mass transit systems capable of surpassing the car in mobility — there can never be any reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The best hope from this news is that people recognise the car companies and their front groups for what they are — ecological criminals for whom justice means expropriation of their entire wealth and assets and complete dismantling of the industries upon which this wealth is built. The public have undoubtedly been naïve about the car companies for far too long and a change in image is many decades overdue. The requisite image of the car companies is one of corporate polluters as bad as (possibly worse than) the less low-profile fossil fuel corporations.