Death by Car

How much lead would it take to build enough lead-acid batteries to enable construction of an all-wind-and-solar electrical grid to power the present energy use of the United States? My new hero Tom Murphy reports: Putting the pieces together, our national battery occupies a volume of 4.4 billion cubic meters, equivalent to a cube 1.6 … Read more

As part of their ongoing efforts to perpetuate cars-first transportation, car capitalists in the United States continue to spread the notion that there is or ever could be such a thing as an automobile that is a “zero emissions vehicle,” a.k.a. “ZEV.” As the slightest thought reveals, this is a 100 percent deceptive claim. We … Read more

Having everybody in the United States use automobiles to accomplish daily travel has always been a capitalist pipe dream. That is thanks to the laws of physics and the geology of our planet. It will simply never be remotely economical, sustainable, or sane to deploy 3,000 pound objects that sit idle 95 percent of the … Read more

In another piece of unsurprising news, AOL Autos reports that the voice-command media-control systems that car corporations and their various partners are pushing are quite crappy. Only the most sophisticated systems work consistently. And even the best ones have some persistent flaws: Women’s voices can be tricky for the technology to decipher, especially when using … Read more

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 … Read more

Under its state capitalist regime, China has certainly managed to capture a serious chunk of the world’s wealth. Unfortunately for China and everybody else, thanks to the imperatives of the economic system its market-Stalinist overclass has adopted, it has also managed to build its way into the cars-first dead end. Apparently, there has been a … Read more

The other day, I said that the Deepwater Horizon blowout would lead to six months of scapegoating and posturing about “our concern,” then yield to a renewal of deep-water oil drilling. Yesterday, President No-Change passively admitted the same: We owe all those who’ve been harmed, as well as future generations, a full and vigorous accounting … Read more

In his 2006 State of the Union speech, George W. Bush “admitted” that “America is addicted to oil.” Today, Barack H. Obama, speaking in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, concurred with the now-official diagnosis of what ails the nation: “We know that our dependence on foreign oil endangers our security and … Read more

Ivan Illich was certainly one of history’s greatest Catholic priests, right up there with Bartolome de las Casas, Oscar Romero, and Gustavo Gutiérrez. Take a look at what Illich had to say about the sanity of cars-first transportation, and you see why the CIA spied on him and tried to have him ex-communicated by Rome: … Read more

By now, it’s been abundantly revealed why our current president admires Ronald Reagan: affection for fairy tales. To wit, this amazing piece of Reaganesque wishfulness in President Obama’s 2010 Earth Day speech: obama fairy tale Think about it: roughly a century and a half ago, in the late 1850s, the Seneca Oil Company hired an … Read more