Peak oil?  Petro wars?  Climate change?  No plausible alternative energy sources?  Exploding oil rigs?  The human future?

Who needs ‘em and what of ‘em, when you’re a corporate shareholder?

It’s good times, baby, good times:

Honda

Kia/Hyundai

Hyundai

Ford

Nissan

Even, kind of:

Toyota

…and even…

GM

If the United States still had racial chattel slavery and you were thinking of becoming an abolitionist, would you join the cause via a group advocating new and improved whip-maintenance techniques?  More pointedly, what would you make of anybody trying to foist such a tactic onto concerned citizens?

That is precisely what the shysters at Green Garage invite would-be environmentalists to do vis-a-vis the number one ecocidal product on the planet:

Love that “they’re not going away anytime soon” line! Onward, mighty whip-softeners!

The automobile is the ultimate corporate capitalist product for a host of reasons. Among these is the fact that the car itself can serve as a Trojan Horse for duping prospects into making profoundly stupid but highly profitable extra purchases.

To wit, this report from Bloomberg Business Week, which elucidates one of the main reasons why Ford is about to post record profits in the middle of Great Depression III:

“Ford was among the first to recognize that making money is more important than moving the metal,” Johnson said. “There’s now a general level of pricing discipline across Detroit, which is leading to higher average transaction prices.”

The Fiesta subcompact, which went on sale in the U.S. in June, is fetching $3,000 to $4,000 above its $13,995 base price because buyers are ordering options such as leather seats, Pipas said. The Fiesta is commanding a higher average price than Honda Motor Co.’s Civic and Toyota Motor Corp.’s Corolla, Ford said.

Buyers are [also] paying more on average for Ford vehicles as the company introduces new…features such as voice-activated phone and stereo controls.

In other words, Ford finds itself enjoying renewed pricing power because it is using its automobiles as platforms to sell massively marked-up trivialities such as leather seats and (extremely dangerous) electronic toys.

And, in a hilarious note that speaks volumes about the myth that high social standing and academic credentials are signs of underlying intelligence and thriftiness, catch this explanation for it all:

George Pipas, Ford’s sales analyst, said in an interview. “People buying Fords today are generally more educated and affluent and they want and are willing to pay for nicer Fords.”

ROFLMFAO.

My great friend Douglas Pressman, who once escorted me into an ossuary located in the Czech Republic, conveyed this news item from the mighty USA Today:

Road accidents — not terrorism, plane crashes or crime — are the No. 1 killer of healthy Americans traveling abroad, a USA TODAY analysis of the past 7½ years of State Department data shows.

About 1,820 Americans, almost a third of all Americans who died of non-natural causes while abroad, have been reported killed in road accidents in foreign countries from Jan. 1, 2003, through June 2010. On average, one American traveler dies on a foreign road every 36 hours.

This, of course, is peanuts compared to the number of people killed here and around the world by cars when not on vacations or buying or spying junkets.

But it highlights the fact that our overclass simply suppresses rational public discussion of automotive death and dismemberment.

There were 2,996 people killed by the 911 terrorist attack. That is one-eleventh the number of people killed in U.S. car crashes in 2009, a year hailed by NHTSA officials and even Ralph Nader as a wondrously safe annum automobilis.

Despite their centrality to our transportation order and to ordinary people’s actual lives, the costs and dangers of cars-first transportation remain entirely “off the table” in our corporate capitalist, market-totalitarian society. Some deaths sell, and some don’t.

Today, we get news of the latest Obama bailout of corporate capitalists. Today, it comes in this form:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration has reached a deal on a $773 million environmental trust, the largest of its kind in U.S. history, to clean up dozens of former General Motors sites spread over 14 states, officials said Wednesday.

The funds will target automotive sites containing hazardous waste that were left shuttered by the auto giant’s bankruptcy last year. About half of the 89 sites covered by the trust are in Michigan and others are in Indiana, New York and Ohio.

At GM’s abandoned Massena, New York complex, the pool of PCBs is so deep it has not yet been (and possible could never be) even measured, despite decades of controversy.

One effect of this toxic lake? “[New York] State-conducted studies have found PCBs in the breast milk of nursing Mohawk mothers and in their infants.”

All this and more (dig the name of the bankrupt corporate shell of the “old GM” — Motors Liquidation Company (MLC) — where’d the “General” and the “GM” go, boys?) is interesting in its own sordid Obamian right.

But permit me to enlarge: The more general point is that manufacturing automobiles is inherently energy-, materials-, and toxics-intensive. “Green car” is an oxymoron, whatever motor ones stick in.

This from Ford (via Automotive News):

DETROIT — Ford’s growing reputation as a technology-driven brand is helping the automaker wring more money out of every car it sells, the automaker’s vice president of product development, Derrick Kuzak, said today.

During a speech to an auto electronics show here, Kuzak said Ford’s average revenue per vehicle jumped 14 percent from 2008 to 2009, to $26,100. He attributed roughly one-third of the increase to new technologies such as the Sync in-car communication system.

Kuzak said one-third of people who bought a Ford, Lincoln or Mercury said the Sync system helped sway their decision.

In 2009, 5,474 people were killed in car crashes caused by distracted driving.

Death and doohickeys — great for business at Ford.

I often lambaste “electric” cars in this space. My aim in doing that, however, is not to lend aid and comfort to petro cars, which are, in their actually existing form, even worse than “electrics” and hybrids, from an energy-use perspective. I am against “electric” cars because they are halo-ware, a carefully planned distraction from the only kind of reform that stands a chance of bringing transportation systems into line with the requirements of energy and ecological sustainability. Converting to “electric” cars is something that directly competes with radical reconstruction of towns and cities to favor walking, bicycling, and public transit.

Yet, as a kind email commenter on my recent re-post at CounterPunch pointed out to me, it certainly isn’t enough to observe that the energy efficiency of “electric” cars is vastly exaggerated. The same is also increasingly true for petro cars.

The reason for that is the same as the reason I discussed yesterday in relation to “electric” cars: Assessing vehicle efficiency from the point of charging or filling excludes the huge energy expenditures it takes to deliver the charge or the fuel to the plug or the tank.

In the case of the “electric” car, the amount of energy (in the form of coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind turbines, or solar panels) it takes to produce an electrical charge for the car’s engine is significantly larger than the energy embodied in the delivered charge.

But just as (contrary to the childish suggestions of corporate marketing on the topic) electricity is not magic, neither is petroleum. Just as it costs energy to get electricity for “electric” cars, so does it costs energy to discover, drill, process, store, and deliver every gallon of gas pumped into an automotive tank.

In the past, the EROEI for petroleum was extremely high. Over time, as the easy and obvious reserves have declined, it has taken much more energy to discover and drill for petroleum. As a result, oil’s EROEI has plummeted and will undoubtedly continue to decline into the future.

As this happens, it becomes increasingly misleading to use MPG as the basis for evaluating the efficiency of petro-powered cars.

If we had an actual (rather than merely a nominal) green movement in this country, it would be pushing for a universal dust-to-dust standard for comparing the energy-use rate of various form of transportation machinery, including all cars, whatever their engine type.

That, of course, would be purest anathema to the corporate capitalist overclass, which is institutionally and psychologically addicted to perpetuating cars-first transportation right up and into Carmageddon’s awful dawn. Ergo, it is squarely off-the-table, even among the greens. They prefer gestures and pathetic photo-ops and going along to feel like they’re getting along.

In his new book, energy scholar Vaclav Smil apparently discusses still more rather crucial but un-discussed aspects of the claim that “electric”[*] cars are anything but halo-ware:

The average source-to-outlet efficiency of U.S. electricity generation is about 40 percent, and adding 10 percent for internal power plant consumption and transmission losses, this means that 11 MWh (nearly 40 GJ) of primary energy would be needed to generate electricity for a car with an average annual consumption of about 4 MWh.

This would translate to 2 MJ for every kilometer of travel, a performance equivalent to about 38 mpg (9.25L/100 km)—a rate much lower than that offered by scores of new pure gasoline-engine car models, and inferior to advanced hybrid designs or to DiesOtto designs.

In other words, whatever amount of energy gets put into electric cars is only 4/11 of the amount of energy it takes to use it there, and the overall result is no miracle at all. 38 miles per gallon equivalent.

And Smil, by the way, estimates that a complete conversion to electric cars in the United States would require a 25% expansion of the existing growth requirement for U.S. electricity generation. This in a power generating system that is already at its limits. And without once again mentioning the incompatibility between widespread “electric” car use and the already past-it-limits electrical transmission grid.

Meanwhile, any wagers on whether Smil’s eminently simple analysis will wind up being the basis for the EPA’s forthcoming “much debated” MPG equivalent rating system for “electric” cars? On that front, the EPA is under immense overclass pressure to permit bogus measures that start only at the plug-in. Barring a straight version of that, look for EPA to opt for a “compromise” of issuing an intentionally complex car label that will exaggerate MPG comparisons, though not quite as radically as the car capitalists would have it, while deploying additional pro-EV “information” to prevent people from becoming aware of the uncomplicated comparison factors Smil explains in two short paragraphs.

[*]Why the quotation marks? Unless and until humans learn to catch and store lightning energy on an industrial scale, electrical current must be generated by capturing or burning or reacting energy-rich substances that are not themselves electricity. Contrary to the fairytale suggestions of corporate capitalist car marketing, then, “electric” cars are just as much coal or natural gas or nuclear or solar or wind cars as they are electric. In fact, given Smil’s finding that far more energy goes into making the electricity for “electric” cars than is embodied in the electricity finally dissipated by them, I hereby announce that it is DbC policy to use quotations marks for this particular form of vapor-ware/halo-ware from now on.

For any product that gets produced, green-ness involves four questions:

1. Material Intake: How much and what types of material does making the product extract from the environment?

2. Material Output: How does the product end up putting materials back into the environment, in the form of manufacturing, product operation, and garbage/recycling wastes?

3. Energy Use: How much total energy does manufacture, use, and recycling of the product require?

4. Alternatives: How does the product in question perform in the above three areas versus available alternative means of performing the same type of work facilitated by the product in question?

You may have already noticed that capitalists never publicly admit the existence and complexity of all four of these questions.  That is for the obvious reason that capitalism is virtually impossible if these questions are taken seriously.  Making big money almost always requires ignoring one or more of these questions, and the capitalist system as a whole is as heedless of ecological limits as just about any dystopian fantasy one could concoct.

Doubt this?  Then I would invite you to consider the emerging overclass proposition that cars with electric motors are green.

In order for this to be true, the manufacture, use, and eventual trashing of electric cars would have to:

1. Sharply reduce both the overall amount of materials and the level of non-renewable materials presently going into the making and use of personal transportation machinery;

2. Sharply reduce both the overall amount of materials and the level of toxic materials coming out of the making and use of personal transportation machinery;

3. Sharply reduce the overall amount of energy required to make, use, and eventually trash personal transportation machinery; and

4. Score better in all the above areas than alternative forms of personal transportation machinery would, if given the chance.

Electric cars, of course, could never satisfy that fourth criterion.  The laws of physics are very strict, and they dictate that each household or person using a 3,500-pound, 95% idled item to accomplish what could otherwise be accomplished with 1-pound walking shoes, 25-pound bicycles, and the use of shared, constantly operating public transit infrastructures is simply criminally harebrained.

Yet, despite this point, I think it is also very important to consider just how woefully electric cars will, if they ever achieve planned levels of distribution, perform in relation to all three of the prior questions.

Take, for instance, the claim that electric car batteries are somehow green things.

For starters, the $36,000 battery in the $115,000 (counting the charging equipment) Tesla Roadster contains 6,831 separate lithium-ion battery cells and weighs 992 pounds, or as much as 39 modern, medium-quality, 25-pound bicycles.

Lithium is a non-renewable resource, and is extremely likely to be desperately needed in the future for non-transportation energy storage purposes, in a post-fossil-fuel age of greatly diminished and much more intermittent electricity generation and use.

But, meanwhile, what about the recycling of this 992-pound object at the end of its expected 7-year useful life?  Battery recycling is a process touted by Tesla’s propaganda arm as being wondrously efficient and “non-toxic.”

Let’s take a gander, shall we?

The US Department of Energy has granted $9.5 million to a company in California that plans to build America’s first recycling facility for lithium-ion vehicle batteries.

Anaheim-based Toxco says it will use the funds to expand an existing facility in Lancaster, OH, that already recycles the lead-acid and nickel-metal hydride batteries used in today’s hybrid-electric vehicles.

There is currently little economic need to recycle lithium-ion batteries. Most batteries contain only small amounts of lithium carbonate as a percentage of weight and the material is relatively inexpensive compared to most other metals.

But experts say that having a recycling infrastructure in place will ease concerns that the adoption of vehicles that use lithium-ion batteries could lead to a shortage of lithium carbonate and a dependence on countries such as China, Russia, and Bolivia, which control the bulk of global lithium reserves.

When old batteries arrive they go into a hammer mill and are shredded, allowing components made of aluminum, cooper, and steel to be separated easily. Larger batteries that might still hold a charge are cryogenically frozen with liquid nitrogen before being hammered and shredded; at -325 degrees Fahrenheit, the reactivity of the cells is reduced to zero. Lithium is then extracted by flooding the battery chambers in a caustic bath that dissolves lithium salts, which are filtered out and used to produce lithium carbonate. The remaining sludge is processed to recover cobalt, which is used to make battery electrodes. [Source: Technology Review]

Tesla’s publicists, of course, do not mention things like the energy expense of cryogenic freezing; exactly what substances comprise that “caustic bath”; or whether industrial cobalt powder is really “non-toxic.”

Worse, even Tesla’s P.R. department admits this much:  “The result from this process is that we are able to recycle about 60% of the battery material.”

In other words, 40 percent of the rare and toxic and energy-intensive things that go into an electric car battery will be lost and injected as garbage into the environment after each and every 7-year manifestation of these things.

Such is the substance of “green” in our market-totalitarian epoch…Gods help us all.