Car Culture

'Car culture' is the name I give to the near-cult of individually-owned-and-operated cars pervasive to late 20th century and early 21st century America. It encompasses the idea that participants in car culture have a right to own and operate automobiles as much as they can afford and want. It is both a uniquely American philosophy, and one of our most popular ideological exports. At present approximately one billion persons on the face of planet Earth have some regular opportunity to indulge in this luxurious vice.

The cult of the car is characterized by the ubiquitous belief that one person requires continuous access to a ~2,000 pound mass-weapon powered by a 100+ horsepower engine to chauffeur their ever fatter and out-of-shape ass about town. Car culture is also characterized by near-daily multi-hour commutes, fatality rates of over 40,000 a year just in America, and oil wars in far off countries to fuel the mania. We are all at risk of losing our homes, but at least we have a car to live in if it comes to that. We have no power to maintain our jobs, our living standards, our weather, even fundamental details of our day-to-day lives, but we do have the control of the steering wheel, the radio knob, and the climate control mechanisms in our cars. This misplaced projective displacement of our fears, anxieties, and pains has put off the maturation of our species in favor of the momentary fix. Automobile as emotional addiction. Car culture

I contrast this ideology with observing that there are probably not enough ergs available and / or generatable on the surface of the planet to equip the two, three, four, or more billion persons who would like to partake, now and in the next couple of decades, in car culture. Not and provide, say, refrigeration and air-conditioning to the billions who will also want those luxuries. By 2050 it's estimated that this planet will hold somewhere on the order of eight or nine billion people; where will the power generation come from that would allow even half that many people to live lives as luxurious as the average late 20th century / early 21st century American? And where do we get the hubris to think that it's okay for a billion or more people to live in the abjectest of poverty while we live in decadent splendor finer than any monarch of old?

A very small portion of the Earth's population in the 20th century were able to attain a level of wasteful affluence immorally disproportionate to their numbers, and have exhibited an enormous attachment to a perceived right to continue this spendthrift wastefulness into perpetuity. The sunk costs of this belief system are so monumentally huge that the transition for these societies (most especially America) to a more equitable and sustainable future will probably be wrenchingly painful.