The Car and Global Warming

By Jane Holtz Kay

As the nineties began, a degree of alarm not heard in years issued from the nation's earth stewards. True, America had doubled its fuel economy and cut per-car emissions. Yet by doubling the miles driven in the past two decades, drivers had totally outstripped such advances. In 1991, the Union of Concerned Scientists moved from focussing on nuclear energy to censuring the internal combustion machine.The Natural Resources Defense Council concurred a year later that the car was "the worst environmental health threat in many U.S. cities." The most rapidly growing source of U.S. emissions, Worldwatch concluded the following.

Despite new environmental controls, reductions were down a scant one or two percent and the car's list of pollutants were filling the graphs. Even the EPA which boasted that each of our cars produces 60 to 80 percent less pollution than 30 years ago, was admitting that, all in all, "most types of air pollution from mobile sources have not improved significantly." The environmental watchdogs were holding motor vehicles to blame for up to half of smog-forming volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxides (NOx); more than fifty percent of hazardous air pollutants, and 90 percent of the carbon monoxide found in urban air despite.

"What went wrong?" the EPA asked.

America's urge for mobility taken to the extreme was the answer. Dirty trucks, dirty diesels, dirty cars--and, of course, their drivers whose new muscle cars and vans were slurping more gas and accumulating more mileage en route to an estimated three trillion miles a year by the millennium.

And there was, of course, one more thing: global warming. In the mid-'90s, computer modeling, while not definitive, suggested what had looked ever more likely: an overheated planet. With more burning of fossil fuels, more destruction of the tropical forests, and pollution of the ocean pollution killing algae, temperatures were rising. (NY Times/9/10/95&9/18/95) Science was confirming the car culture as culprit. Our fossil-fuel vehicles were not only consuming more than one-third of all U.S. energy but exhaling two-thirds of its carbon dioxide emissions, one-quarter of its CFCs, more than 50 percent of methane and 40 of nitrogen oxides, plus most of the contributing carbon monoxide.

Taken together, such gases were trapping heat on the planet. Sealing the heat of the day and seething, this lid of greenhouse gases was baking the earth. Fears of melting ice caps, coastal flooding and climate change grew, as reports emerged. With every roll of the rubber wheel, with every spit from the nation's tailpipes, the thermostat spins; the earth's climate is endangered. And the aberrant weather persists...

EXCERPT on global warming from Asphalt Nation, chapter five, "The Environmental Cariban".

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