The Conspiracy Line

 

By the 1960s, of the hundreds of streetcar lines that had once been a primary mode of transportation in cities and suburbs across the United States in the first half of the 20th century, only a small fraction still operated, and usually only in city centers. Competition from automobiles and buses was one cause for declining ridership of streetcars, and supposedly the costs of installing and maintaining lines was higher than costs associated with infrastructure for cars and buses. The history of what happened in the major mid-century makeover of American urban mass transit is muddled, and one explanation for it that keeps popping up has to do with the machinations of the automobile manufacturers, chiefly General Motors (GM).

 

The idea springs from how GM bought out streetcar lines around the country, and then dismantled the lines, junked the streetcars, and signed city governments to contracts for purchase and ongoing use of the buses GM manufactured. GM also sold cars to urban and suburban commuters who found themselves with fewer alternatives than they had before the 1920s, when the streetcar lines were still thriving. That’s a neat story, and it certainly fits in with the behavior we have come to expect of large corporations and the executives who run them, but in this case it turns out to be a little too neat and only partially true.

Purchase Street, New Bedford, Mass (68412)
A postcard circa 1930-1945 depicts Purchase Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Photo from the Boston Public Library Tichnor Brothers collection.

Market forces generated by consumer preferences played the greatest part in the decline of ridership on streetcar lines starting in the 1920s and accelerating through the next quarter century. The streetcar lines were privately owned and the companies bore the costs of maintaining the tracks they operated on and other infrastructure costs, even though they used the same publicly maintained roads as buses and cars. The streetcar lines were more and more at a competitive disadvantage as public money benefited those other modes of transportation and as consumers came to prefer the relative freedom of driving their own cars or taking buses that weren’t restricted to tracks.

Comforting as it might be to blame the automobile and gasoline industries for ripping up streetcar tracks around the nation, depriving commuters of a useful commuting option, the truth in this case is that the public shoulders the greater responsibility. Individual consumers operating in their own self-interest took advantage of cheap gasoline and publicly financed road building, such as the interstate highway system started in the 1950s, to buy at least one car for every household. In most cities, taxpayers balked at public ownership of the streetcar lines, a move which would have saved many of the lines from the corporate scavenging that ultimately killed them off. In other words, GM and other auto and gas corporate interests didn’t precipitate the demise of the streetcar lines, but neither did they mourn their loss, and ultimately, of course, GM and the others profited greatly from the makeover of the American transportation system.

By the time of the 1959 release of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, the streets of Manhattan were dominated by vehicular traffic, and mass transit options for New Yorkers were limited to subways and buses. Bernard Herrmann composed the music for the film, and Saul Bass designed the titles. The director makes his cameo appearance at the end of the title sequence.

More than a half century after streetcars were all but wiped off the map in America, they are coming back in spots like Brooklyn, driven by the desire of some people to get around town without the hassles of car ownership, the pollution of cars and buses, the blight of enormous parking lots, and the swallowing up of green spaces for more roads to alleviate the congestion on existing roads, only to have the new roads fill up as well. Streetcars powered by electricity generate pollution at a remove, to be sure, but as more power plants use renewable energy sources, that problem should lessen. Meanwhile, building out more mass transit infrastructure should take off the road some of the oversized vehicles too many Americans appear to love, and which the automobile makers and the fossil fuel industry love turning out for them since they are highly profitable. It has taken a century for Americans to learn anew the value of mass transit options like streetcars, and perhaps soon, before we reach the end of the line, gridlock on the roads will clear, and so will the air everywhere.
— Vita

 

Racing Ahead

 

In the 1965 comedy film The Great Race, loosely based on a 1908 race around the world, the lead characters drive racing versions of gasoline powered internal combustion engines. That the earliest cars used gasoline would seem to be without question considering how things developed through the rest of the twentieth century. It comes as something of a surprise then to learn that electric cars were quite popular in the early years of motor vehicle development, and it was an electric car that won the first closed circuit automobile race in the United States, in 1896.

Halfway in their race around the world, the characters portrayed by Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk, Tony Curtis, and Natalie Wood are marooned on a melting ice floe in the Bering Strait. Though certainly unintentional in 1965 when the film was made, there is some irony to their situation given the perspective of today’s warming climate.

As anyone can tell, electric cars all but disappeared until recently, as infrastructure and cost improved for gasoline engines in the early twentieth century, overtaking the electric option by 1920. The price of oil went down, giving a boost to the market for gasoline engines, while the crude state of battery technology limited the appeal of electric cars. Environmental impacts were not even a factor in the equation for most consumers or manufacturers until late in the twentieth century. Even then, the initial assessments of the impact of vehicular pollution was limited to local problems such as smog. It wasn’t until the last decades of the twentieth century that at first scientists, and then the public, looked at the larger impact of tailpipe emissions on the global climate.

Now, in the early twenty-first century, after some halting steps by manufacturers to reintroduce electric cars, it appears they are gaining in popularity, particularly in places like China which face deadly levels of air pollution. Battery technology, the Achilles heel of electric cars, has made great strides lately. A question that doesn’t crop up often enough, however, is whether electric cars are as environmentally friendly as the manufacturers would have the public believe they are. In many cases, electric cars still run on power generated by burning fossil fuels, it’s just that they give an illusion of green running because they’re not emitting noxious fumes. The noxious fumes are instead displaced to a coal or natural gas fired power plant more or less many miles away. Out of sight, out of mind.

Kintigh Generating Station - Somerset, New York
The coal fired Kintigh Generating Station in Somerset, New York, in 2007; photo by Matthew D. Wilson.

The batteries in electric cars don’t present as big a problem from an environmental standpoint as they used to, now that up to 98 percent of the materials are recycled. To make an electric car run truly green, the power source used to charge its batteries needs to come from renewable generators like wind and solar. Since most air pollution comes from gasoline internal combustion engine exhausts, it stands to reason that a major switch over to electrically powered vehicles running on renewable energy will make the single greatest impact on reducing air pollution, and with it the particulates and gases that are contributing to global warming.

Organizations like NASCAR and Formula One racing could do their part in flipping the switch by turning all or part of their circuits over to electric cars. Besides being a spectator sport, car racing has always served as a proving ground for manufacturers. The big racing organizations are still clinging to the old technology, which may be popular with fans who enjoy the noise and familiar smells produced by internal combustion engines, characteristics evocative by long association with high horsepower. To continue glorifying this outmoded technology means that well-known racing organizations have abandoned any meaningful proving ground aspect of their sport for the sake of pleasing the crowd with loud noise, fumes, and ludicrously low miles per gallon of fuel efficiency. Never mind tomorrow, they’re living for today, come what may.


Solartankstelle
Younicos Solar Filling Station at Solon SE Headquarters in Berlin, Germany in 2009; photo by Busso V. Bismarck.

Newer racing organizations are stepping forward with their own electric car circuits. As drivers test and prove the newer technology on the race track, manufacturers should be able to improve efficiency of the batteries and perhaps drop the price of consumer models to be on a par with, or even cheaper than, comparably equipped gasoline powered cars. When that happens, electric cars will start to overtake the old technology, the same way they were overtaken in their earliest form by the internal combustion engine in the early twentieth century.

The crucial piece of the puzzle needed to solve pollution problems comes from the power generating source, not the cars. That may happen on a more individual level than on a corporate or government level, as people will find it convenient to do most of their car charging at home, where they can be assured of a cleaner source by installing their own solar panels or wind turbines. Waiting for government to promote the necessary infrastructure changes to ensure cleaner power generation will not push improvements in transportation, decrease pollution, and ultimately limit the effects of global warming, not with the government currently in power.
― Techly

 

Sowing Doubt for Fun and Profit

 

The first frost of fall was late this year across much of the U.S., in some places by one to three weeks, depending on the source of average frost date information. People who spend a lot of time outdoors tend to notice this, and also that a trend has developed of fall frosts arriving later and the last frost of spring coming earlier. Even people who pay attention to climate only sporadically may have noted the muted fall colors of the trees this year in parts of the eastern U.S., a result of extended warm weather and drought.

Fall Colors, Interstate State Park (1502556726)
Fall Colors, Interstate State Park, Wisconsin and Minnesota;
photo by Tony Webster

 

Cumberland Power Plant smokestacks
Cumberland Power Plant smokestacks,
Cumberland, Tennessee;
photo by Steven Greenwood

The growing season has increased over the last forty years or so, but that is not necessarily a good thing considering that short-lived creatures, such as insects, adapt more readily to swift changes than longer-lived plants and vertebrate creatures. Forty years is swift in the long view of climate. The short view is called weather, or weather events. Adding up weather events over forty years plots a trend in the climate. Unfortunately for the sake of rational discussion, too many people fail to make the distinction between weather and climate.

 

Not everyone agrees that the climate is getting warmer, or that if it is then humans are the cause of it. Some of those climate change deniers are motivated by their religious beliefs, others by a suspicion of government regulators, and still others are unmoved by the weight of scientific evidence, citing doubt about the conclusions. Who has sown that doubt? As always, we are well advised to follow the money. It comes as no surprise then that Big Oil, following the example set by Big Tobacco with regard to the link between burning their products and cancer, has worked to sow doubt about how the burning of fossil fuels contributes greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and causes a warming climate. Where there is doubt, they know, effective action against them can be hamstrung, and profits will continue to roll in until we all burn up from second hand smoke on a global scale.

Cigarette smoke
Cigarette smoke; photo by Flickr user Challiyan

 

Again following the money, the insurance industry is coming around to the reality of global warming and the increase in expensive weather events it is causing. The insurance industry, conservative gamblers that they are, are most interested in the economic facts they can pin down so as to minimize risk and maximize profit. They are not swayed by emotional appeals to religious or political views, but only by appeals to their bottom line. Another group whose costs are affected by the results of global warming are states and municipalities. As seas rise and severe weather events increase, causing unprecedented flooding, these entities have to pay for infrastructure improvements and higher insurance premiums.

 

States’ attorneys general are beginning to go after the fossil fuel industry to recoup costs, much as they did to the tobacco industry in the 1990s. It will be an even more protracted fight in this case because of the gargantuan amounts of money the fossil fuel giants can bring to bear; not everyone smoked in years past, after all, but today practically everyone uses gas, electricity, natural gas, plastics, and the list of products goes on. Some of these products can be replaced by use of renewable resources like wind and solar, but ultimately, like the reduction in use of tobacco products due to increasing social opprobrium, the steps for overcoming reliance on fossil fuel products and thereby breaking the economic stranglehold of Big Oil need to be taken by consumers, and that will require some wholesale changes in lifestyle, especially in the industrialized nations.
– Izzy