World Student Community for Sustainable Development

Two short essays by Laurent Demarta

Cars as an Example of An Ill-Set Problem

I believe most environmental issues are not put into proper perspective. To give an example of what I mean, let me deal with an issue so overwhelmingly discussed that it seems everything has been said about it already: the car. Environmentalists talk too often about cars, stigmatizing them or working hard to reduce their consumption. I would like to leave for a while the ground of the for/against dichotomy on consumption and try to set the car issue in a different perspective.

The consumption by cars is indeed an important issue, but it is only one among others. I list below three other disregarded issues. Thus, even if we can someday achieve the theoretical goal of a zero-consumption car (or of a car that uses 100% recyclable fuel), only a quarter of the problem would be solved. Follow the other three aspects I count on why cars are a deserving target of most environmentalists:

1. A car is an object. It is physical thing, to be produced, maintained, and, at the end, recycled or scrapped. But a private car is used for only a small fraction of its actual lifetime: For perhaps 95% of a carâ€^TMs lifetime, it lies motionless. An individual car is totally misused. Only professional or collective use of cars makes sense.

2. A car needs physical infrastructure (roads) as fire needs oxygen: Who counts in the ecological footprint of cars the hundreds of acres of land every year turned to roads? How about parking? In France, for every car put on the roads, over seven parking spots are built. Seven parking spaces per car! Can you imagine the impact this creates?

3. A car is mainly used as an individual means of transportation. It is as much a prison as a protective nest; it is a symbol as well as armour. It is a paradigm rather than a tool. It destroys the social fabric and isolates individuals. Who can estimate the consequences of individualism in our societies? Philosophers? Or rather psychiatrists?

I do not disagree with the environmentalistsâ€^TM fight against cars, but I do disagree on the reasons they cite. I donâ€^TMt care about a carâ€^TMs exhaust, but I do care about the fact that people own a car, and that people use technology to isolate themselves from one another instead of building deeper understanding and relationship. I would personally carry on using public transportation as much as I can, just for the pleasure to see other people around me rather than things, and to feel I am a plain human being rather than a cyber-thing with super-powerish extensions, like in childrensâ€^TM comic books.

I believe ecology should leave the ground of technology and instead think in terms of society, relations, togetherness, and wonder what it is to be a human being.

Praise the Cars: What If Cars Were Less Controversial Than Pedestrians?

Wise men of deeper knowledge than I have kindly explained to me that a dishwasher consumes less water than hand-washing. Other, even wiser individuals show me that a pizza factory is more economical than as many people individually baking their pizzas. More individuals came along, with even sharper minds, and taught me how digital information saves paper and hence trees. Their colleagues were working hard to demonstrate self-evidences such as disposable coffee cups being, at the end of the day, more economical than washing big mugs over and over again, or disposable diapers better preserving the environment than previous generations did by washing them.

Enlightened with such bright evidences and stimulated by so many sharp minds, I took a paper and a conversion table and made the following calculation: Take four pedestrians. In a day, they would, at best, walk 30 km. On this purpose, they will have consumed 4 x 3,600 KCal = 14,400 KCal. If the same four persons had driven the same distance in a small car that gets, say, 20 km per liter, they would have consumed 0.3 x 5 L = 1.5 L of oil, which represents 1.5 x 9,000 KCal = 13,500 KCal.

My masters were right: A car with four persons aboard is more economical than walking. This was slamming all my ready-made ideas of teenage environmentalist, and finally rewarding all the ill-recognized efforts of humble scientists working hard on reducing the impact of our technologies.

Hence, I suggest environmental struggle should revise its aim, and fight for cars, against those selfish pedestrians who pollute in the peace of their mind, unnoticed and unblamed.