ISBN-13 978-0-7456-4422-6. "After the Car" written by Kingsley Dennis and John Urry was published by Polity Press in 2009. The paperback has 212 pages including preface, notes, index and 7 chapters. The authors are social scientists from Lancaster University rather than technologists. This could be a really good thing or a really bad thing. It would be good if it gave us a fresh perspective on the future of personal transport - in this they are reasonably successful. It would be bad if they were to underestimate the difficulties of developing hi-tech solutions in a low-energy world. This they also do. However it would probably be a mistake to think of this book being just about cars. Taken in its totality this book is far better than the failings within its individual components. Never before has the consequences of Peak Oil and Climate Change been applied and analysed for just one technology. The car would be an obvious starting point, we guess, but only as a by-word for almost all the technology that we take for granted in wealthy, industrialised, over-fed, northern/western countries. This book largely comes into its own when it isn't talking about cars. When it considers the wider aspects of technology in general and their inter-relationships with society, this book is on solid ground. However the authors' failure to understand the profound problems of a post-oil world is their greatest failing.
The authors accept the traditional orthodoxy of man-made climate change without question - but, heah, they are social scientists not climatologists. Their approach is less about understanding risk and more about examining systems. They describe climate change as the result of "enormously powerful systems" accelerating towards a precipice. It needs an equally powerful system to avert the abyss. What is needed "after the car" is a system that can provide the flexibility, comfort and secure personal mobility of a car, yet is entrenched in a low-energy, low-carbon world. In simple terms, it has to be sustainable - although these are our words not theirs. The authors do not underestimate the scale of what they are suggesting. On page 59 they write "Unlike the bus or train system, the car system is a way of life, an entire culture." They go on to point out how it has changed the "landscape for all other mobility systems that have to find their place within the landscape predominantly sculpted by the car system." Putting it simply; we live in an autotopia. We made the world in the image of the car. As the system is entrenched then it will take an unpredictable change (a "chaos point") to sweep it away. They also point out how dated the technology now is: "Well over a century old, and increasingly archaic because of its dependence on oil-based combustion, the car system is able to 'drive' out competitors... many homes in the rich north filled with the latest electrical and digital gadgets, and yet they sat alongside the oddly outdated petroleum-powered car." You could think of the car as an appropriate metaphor for our culture's entire addiction to fossil fuels. We should have moved on years ago if we hadn't moulded our society around an artificially created system of dependency. It isn't the car that needs to change - it is our relationship to it.
The chapter on "Technologies" covers just 30 pages. Of this space most of the technology is considered for its social impact. For example the geopolitical whelm is often invoked when describing the limitations of biofuels. There is not much in this section that most readers will not be already familiar with. It is all here from plug-in hybrids to hydrogen. What is also here is the "systems thinking" of the authors. Whereas we think of the car's technology being the nuts and bolts of the vehicle, these authors take a more holistic approach and consider the way cars relate to other cars within the road system. Future cars will know where they are and will know where all the other cars are around them. Hence a suitably intelligent car will know how to get you from A to B and may well know your priority in the pecking-order of the roads. If you can pay more you might get there a bit quicker - but only at the expense of other, poorer, road users. It is of concern to the authors that such systems might not come about because of the ethical dilemma of people sharing their private information in public spaces. On the face of it such a "social" consideration is the least of a future car-using society's problems. The car-system cannot become more complicated in a low-energy world. This is working against the rules of thermodynamics. Cultures that tend to increasing complexity in order to address resource constraints also tend towards instability and eventual collapse. This we know from the work of Jared Diamond. The authors of "After the Car" pay lip service to peak-oil only to act as if the problem is one of CCTV coverage. Where you are in the pecking order seems irrelevant if no one is on the roads because no one can afford to drive. The "systems thinking" here need to concern the transition to a world with a lot fewer cars. Indeed the authors don't actually explain how a digitised smart car system would solve any resource depletion issue. How does it save energy? Such systems are designed to shoe-horn MORE cars on the road and enhance safety. They are perfect for a packed planet with loads of energy. Only one of these two facets will remain true.
Thankfully, by the next chapter on "Organisations" the authors land on their feet and normality is restored. Here they actually consider our urban and country landscapes. We won't need cars if you can walk and cycle to work and the shops. Why go THERE when THERE can be HERE through the redesign of our cities? On page 102 we learn about the Stockholm Environment Institute Report that recommends "urbanscapes that encourage closer proximity between places of home, work, shops and leisure activities. This would reduce car dependence while strengthening community." The authors note a page later that "the EasyJet generation in the rich north of the world is not easily going to accept the notion that friends should be chosen from among those near at hand". Therein lies the difficulty for the Transition Towns movement. To move forward we need to take note of the 2007 report "The Disrupters. Lesson for Low-carbon Innovation from the New Wave of Environmental Pioneers" (London: Nesta. Authors: R. Willis, M. Webb & J. Wilsdon): "In short we need disruptive forms of innovation - cheaper, easier-to-use alternatives to existing products and services often produced by non-traditional players..." This is a question of "wider forms of innovation, such as innovation in organisational forms and business models". Thus we need a movement towards the "new urbanism" or "transit-orientated development" (TOD); "The TOD movement promotes itself as a 'major solution to the serious and growing problems of peak oil and global warming by creating dense, walkable communities connected to a train line that greatly reduce the need for driving and the burning of fossil fuels'."
The Transition Movement itself gets a slot on pages 121 through 123 although the authors are largely dismissive: "this innovative movement is largely restricted to smaller towns, where civic engagement and localised sustainable practices from the ground up have some chance of success." There is a lot of merit in this sort of conclusion and the authors return to this critique later in the book. By Chapter 7 the authors move on to "Scenarios" where they describe the global issues that face humanity. This really is the "Oil Wars" section of the book where Urry & Dennis cannot contain their dislike for the neo-liberal foreign policies of the recent US administration. For the authors the war on Global Warming replaces the War on Terror and the USA is lagging behind the rest of the world in trying to fight the latter rather than the former. If anything, US attempts to keep their SUV's running on foreign Oil is increasing their insecurity, not enhancing it. This hubris must end. The War on Terror is, as the authors conclude, "outdated". On page 132 this "such high carbon forms of life cannot continue; there will be an ending to the carbon hubris that has been the overwhelming legacy of the last century." By page 149 they have returned to their critique of "Local Sustainability" which they conclude is "possible and not probable" simply because it requires "huge reversals of almost all the systems of the twentieth century". Of course it hasn't occurred to the authors that this transition is far easier in a low-energy world than attempting to create the more complicated high-energy system that they suggest in their "more probable" hi-tech scenario. The next scenario they consider is "regional warlordism" which is the "Mad Max" scenario by anyone else's language. It leaves little to the imagination. Then there is their favoured hi-tech "digital networks of control" that fails to convince the reader of how it solves any problem and how it can be implemented. In fact the three scenarios are not mutually exclusive. In the real world they will be laid over top of each other.
The inevitable destination on our journey will be a low-energy world sustained by a renewed localism. Sadly the political system may resort to the warlordism model whilst a few lucky places might attempt the hi-tech model only for it to not sustain and collapse. Does the work of these two social scientists boil down to Heinberg's "waiting for the elixir"? Their assumptions about what is 'probable' and 'possible' seems to be reduce to what people will accept as requiring this least amount of change or personal discomfort. This confuses what is nice to have and what is essential. The future of the car cannot be business-as-usual. This book gets so much of the analysis correct but then seems to reach the wrong conclusion. It is sublime of them to state that (on page 162) "the global war on terror may be 'won', but only by losing the war on climate change." There may also be a fundamental truth behind their assumption that the hi-tech solution is the least likely to lead to the Mad Max scenario. The post-oil localism is compatible with warlordism and this is the inconvenient truth of the Realpolitik. The car system needs taming through multiple measures such as personal carbon allowances. Their final analysis is spot on "if climate change became a matter of democratic politics and not just the opportunity for new corporate investment, then it is possible to avoid both regional warlordism and digital networks." It is up to us.
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