AFTER THE CAR

AFTER THE CAR

KINGSLEY DENNIS AND JOHN URRY

polity

Copyright © Kingsley Dennis and John Urry 2009

The right of Kingsley Dennis and John Urry to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5873-5

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CONTENTS

Preface

1   Changing Climates

2   The Century of the Car

3   Systems

4   Technologies

5   Organizations

6   Models

7   Scenarios

Notes

Index

PREFACE

We are very grateful to the following colleagues, mostly at Lancaster, with whom we have discussed these various post-car futures: Monika Büscher, Noel Cass, Tim Dant, Sergio Fava, Drew Hemment, Michael Hulme, Bob Jessop, John Law, Will Medd, Tom Roberts, Daniela Sangiorgi, Andrew Sayer, Dan Shapiro, Mimi Sheller, Elizabeth Shove, Bron Szerszynski, David Tyfield, Sylvia Walby, Laura Watts, James Wilsdon and Brian Wynne. John Urry is grateful for his involvement in the DTi Foresight discussions on Intelligent Information Systems in 2005–6, as well as recent research funding from the Department for Transport, ESRC and the EPSRC.

We also wish to acknowledge the research opportunities afforded to us by the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster. This Centre has stimulated much debate on the issues presented in this book. We are especially grateful to Pennie Drinkall for all her hard work for CeMoRe. Many similar issues to those discussed in this book are debated on CeMoRe’s blog at www.new-mobilities.co.uk.

Lancaster, September 2008

1

CHANGING CLIMATES

ENDING THE CAR

This book would seem to have an implausible title. How on earth can we imagine that there could be an end to the car, that we can envisage a system that is ‘after the car’? In some ways the car and its associated activities and technologies is the most powerful product or system there has been over the last century or so. Some have described the twentieth century as the century of the car.¹ Over a billion cars have been manufactured and over 650 million currently roam the world’s roads and streets. It is predicted that, if nothing changes, within a couple of decades there will be 1 billion cars worldwide, especially as China fully moves from a bike society to a car society.

Moreover, we do not think that we can turn the clock back and that the individual flexibility, comfort and convenience that the car provides is going to disappear. It is unlikely that everyone in the future will be travelling on foot and by bike, and especially not by public bus and train. So what could we be saying here if we claim that the end might be in sight for the extraordinary car system that has so far ‘driven’ out all its many competitors?

When we talk of ‘after the car,’ we are suggesting that the car as a complete system may be surpassed. The current car system involves a number of key features: cars are made of steel, mostly powered by petrol (or ‘gasoline’ in the US), each can seat four people, they are personally owned, and each is driven independently of others, although certain rules do need to be followed and enforced.

Our argument in this book is that some very powerful forces around the world are undermining this car system and will usher in a new system at some point in this century. The car system is based upon nineteenth-century technologies, of steel bodies and internal combustion engines, incidentally showing how old technologies can remarkably endure. We believe that this mass system of individualized, flexible mobility will be ‘redesigned’ and ‘re-engineered’ before the end of this century. This book argues that a new system is coming into being. It is a bit like the period around 1900 when the current car system was being formed: it was emergent, although no one at the time could imagine exactly what it was going to be like.

So, similarly, we hold that a wide array of changes are occurring across the world – changes of technology, policy, economy and society, which are all elements of this new system that is as yet nowhere actually in place. And it will be through the dynamic interdependence of the various parts that will bring into being this new system that is ‘after the car’. This book thus explores a new ‘socio-technical’ system that we believe is in the making.

In this chapter, we consider various dynamic changes ‘in the climate’ within which travel and transportation are being organized and implemented in the twenty-first century. If these changes converge and impact upon each other, they may generate shifts beyond the car that would involve a low carbon economy and society. We begin with an analysis of climate per se. This is followed by an analysis of the apparent peaking of the supply of oil around the world. We then examine some of the changes in the nature of the virtual world, of computers, software and security, before considering the growth of population and especially of mega-cities in the contemporary world.

This chapter thus examines the changing climates of change surrounding transport and energy and how they may be engendering a new system that will be ‘after the car’ and hence could entail a lower carbon future society, albeit one which is by no means a simply positive future. We will examine various futures and see that all possess a dark side due to the constrained choices that the high carbon twentieth century provided as a legacy going into the new century.

CLIMATE CHANGE

We begin by paying especial attention to global climate change, reflected in 2006 in Al Gore’s surprising PowerPoint hit An Inconvenient Truth and his subsequent Nobel prize.² This film brought home to the world the fact that global temperatures have risen over the past century (by at least 0.74˚C) and this seems to be the consequence of higher levels of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. Even the Pentagon announced that climate change will result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. And they state that the threat to global stability far eclipses that of terrorism.³

Greenhouse gases trap the sun’s rays. As a result of this ‘greenhouse’ effect the earth warms. Such greenhouse gas levels and world temperatures will apparently increase significantly over the next few decades. Such warming will change patterns of temperatures worldwide and result in a greatly increased frequency of extreme weather events.⁴ Such climate change resulting from increasing greenhouse gas emissions constitutes the world’s major threat to human life and social organization.

The scientific evidence for climate change is now less uncertain compared with the time when the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report appeared in 1990. The 2007 Report makes a number of separate claims. First, in the 2007 Report the IPCC declared that the warming of the world’s climate is now ‘unequivocal’. This claim is based upon extensive observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, the widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea levels.

Second, the 2007 Report shows that carbon dioxide is the most important of the human-produced or anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Its concentration levels exceed by far the natural range identified over the past 650,000 years. Its high and rising levels must thus stem, it is concluded, from ‘nonnatural’ causes.

Third, there is very high confidence amongst the thousands of scientists involved in the IPCC that such global warming is the effect of human activities that, in many different ways, have resulted in dramatically raised levels of carbon emissions.

And fourth, there are many different physical consequences of global warming: increase in arctic temperatures, reduced size of icebergs, melting of ice-caps and glaciers, reduced permafrost, changes in rainfall patterns, new wind formations, droughts, heat waves, tropical cyclones and other extreme weather events.⁵ The IPCC projects increased risks of flooding for tens of millions of people due to storms and sea-level rises, especially in the poor south of the globe, in particular Bangladesh. In addition to increased fresh water scarcity, there may also be sudden rises in new vector-borne diseases (malaria, dengue fever) and water-borne disease (cholera). The World Health Organization calculated as early as 2000 that over 150,000 deaths are caused each year by climate change, such changes being global, cross- generational and highly unequal around the world.

Moreover, these IPCC Reports are based on reaching scientific and political consensus. They tend to the more cautious interpretation of the scientific evidence and do not factor in all the feedback effects that are occurring and may develop over the next few decades.⁶ Levels of greenhouse gases and world temperatures will significantly increase over these decades, but these increases will almost certainly trigger further temperature increases through what are known as positive feedbacks (see chapter 3 below). Negative feedback would restore the earth’s equilibrium, while positive feedbacks will move any system away from equilibrium. And according to James Lovelock ‘there is no large negative feedback that would countervail temperature rise’.⁷

The most dramatic of these positive feedbacks would be the melting of Greenland’s ice-cap, which would change sea and land temperatures worldwide, including the possible turning off or modification of the Gulf Stream. A series of diverse yet interconnected changes within the earth’s environmental systems could create a vicious circle of accumulative disruption occurring, as Fred Pearce expresses it, ‘with speed and violence’. Indeed the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet may happen very rapidly (and may already have started). The ice-cap will disintegrate from above and from below and this non-linear change further reduces the rate at which heat gets reflected back to the sun. The historic record shows that these ice-caps have historically formed and disappeared with ‘speed and violence’. If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to disintegrate, then rather than the sea level increasing by 18 to 59 cm over this century as the IPCC predicts, it could rise by many metres. As a consequence, most human settlements located close to the ocean’s edge would be washed away and there would be massive population loss around the world.⁸

The recent study of ice cores shows how previous glacial and interglacial periods demonstrated very abrupt changes in the earth’s temperature. Such rapid changes were the norm, not the exception. Moreover, the temperatures at the time of the last Ice Age were only 5˚C colder than they are today. And in the Arctic such increases have been really marked, with feedbacks creating local warming of 3–5˚C over just the past thirty years. Fred Pearce thus notes: ‘The big discovery is that planet Earth does not generally engage in gradual change. It is far cruder and nastier’.⁹

With ‘business as usual’ and no significant reductions in the world’s high carbon systems, the stock of greenhouse gases could treble by the end of the century. The Stern Review states that there is a 50 per cent risk of more than a 5˚C increase in temperatures by 2100. This would transform the world’s physical and human geography through a 5–20 per cent reduction in world consumption levels.¹⁰ Even a temperature increase worldwide of 3°C is completely beyond any recent experience of temperature change and would totally transform animal, plant and human life as they have been known.

Some climate change effects are already being experienced in the world’s insurance industry. Due to increased risks of flooding, the Association of British Insurers may not be able to continue to provide cover since the £800 million a year pledged by 2011 for flood defences is deemed insufficient.¹¹ Insurance losses worldwide have seen a sudden rise, with much evidence that extreme weather is responsible for these globally rising costs. Since the 1970s they have risen around 10 per cent annually. Science writer Tim Flannery wrote recently that ‘such a rate of increase implies that by 2065 or soon thereafter, the damage bill resulting from climate change may equal the total value of everything that humanity produced in the course of a year’.¹²

According to Fred Pearce, insured losses from extreme weather in 2004 hit a record $55 billion, exceeded a year later by $70 billion.¹³ And the costs associated with cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina could run to $100 billion. And the future only looks set to see trends of rising insurance claims from extreme weather. In 2001, Munich Re (the world’s largest reinsurance company) estimated that by 2050 the annual global damage bill from climate change could top £250 billion, with insurance industry leaders doubting that they can absorb these claims for much longer. More generally, the UK Stern Review argues that taking no action now with regard to climate change will ultimately prove to be much more costly than the sums that are required for taking immediate action.¹⁴

Various macro-scale technologies have been suggested to combat climate change, such as seeding the ocean with iron filings, spraying nano-chemicals into the atmosphere, or putting sunshades in space. None, however, could be implemented on a sufficient scale to combat climate change for many decades.

There is also the danger that proponents of climate change neglect other processes producing climatic variation.¹⁵ But as one commentator recently stated:

It may not matter any more whether global warming is or is not a by-product of human activity, or if it just represents the dynamic disequilibrium of what we call ‘nature’. But it happens to coincide with our imminent descent down the slippery slope of oil and gas depletion, so that all the potential discontinuities of that epochal circumstance will be amplified, ramified, reinforced, and torqued by climate change.¹⁶

So overall consequences of such unique changes are global and, if they are not significantly reduced, they will very substantially reduce the standard of living, the capabilities of life around the world and overall population as catastrophic impacts begin, starting off in the ‘poor’ south. The planet will endure, but many forms of human habitation will not if business continues as usual.

And to slow down, let alone reverse, increasing carbon emissions and temperatures requires nothing more and nothing less than the reorganization of social life. The nature of ‘social life’ is central to the causes, the consequences and the possible ‘mitigations’ involved in global heating. Yet nowhere in the major analyses of climate change are there good understandings of how to bring about transformed sets of human activities. Most official reports are written by scientists for scientists and governments and are uninformed by social science. This is true even of the very significant Stern Review, which does not develop an analysis of how human practices are organized over time and space and how they might be significantly transformed. Changing human activities is mostly seen as a matter of modifying economic incentives through, for example, different tax rates.¹⁷ And to be fair, the social sciences have engaged little with the sciences of climate change, although Ulrich Beck published his pertinent text on risk society well over twenty years ago.¹⁸

Around the world, there are many organizations and a few governments that are making it clear that there is a window of opportunity of maybe a couple of decades during which to intervene on a major scale to slow down global heating. James Hansen, Bush’s main climate change adviser, is very clear: ‘We are on the precipice of climate change tipping points beyond which there is no redemption’.¹⁹ After that window of opportunity, the various ‘human activities’ that are generating increased carbon emissions will make further warming of the planet inevitable and probably catastrophic. This is what James Lovelock terms the ‘revenge of Gaia’ that is engendering ‘global heating’.²⁰

The approach we adopt in this book is one of analysing system developments and system changes. Climate change we see as the outcome of enormously powerful systems that are rather like a ‘juggernaut’ careering at full speed towards the edge of a cliff.²¹ And slowing down the juggernaut even slightly requires the engendering of equally if not more powerful systems than those currently powering it towards this fast approaching abyss.

The futurologist Buckminster Fuller famously said: ‘You never change anything by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’.²² Our concern here, then, is not analysing what some refer to as the gap between values (to slow down climate change) and behaviour (continuing to drive or heat one’s house to high temperatures). Rather, we examine the potential of system change. Is there a new model that could develop here? Could the car system come to be replaced with a ‘new model’ or system?

Slowing down the juggernaut requires new systems, in this case a system that surpasses the car by providing flexibilized, comfortable and secure personal mobility that is not based on the high energy system of the existing car system. It is necessary to develop a system that is ‘after the car’, but which does not totally displace certain of the car’s undoubted virtues. If it did, the alternative would not take over.

Reducing carbon use within transport is crucial, since it accounts for 14 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions. It is the second fastest growing source of such emissions and this figure is expected to double by 2050.²³ There have been huge increases in the speed of travel and in the distances that are covered. In 1800, people in the US travelled 50 metres a day – they now travel 50 kilometres a day. Today, world citizens move 23 billion kilometres; by 2050 that figure could quadruple to 106 billion if ‘business’ continues as usual.²⁴

Central to such transport-generated emissions are those generated by car travel. In 2004, the UK transport sector was responsible for around 27 per cent of total carbon dioxide emissions, most of this coming from road traffic. This figure had risen by about 10 per cent compared with the previous decade. Further, a UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) forecast stated that CO₂ emissions from traffic in the UK will increase by 15 per cent from 2000 levels by 2015. It seems more and more unlikely that the UK Government will be able to meet its target to reduce domestic CO₂ emissions by 20 per cent by 2010.²⁵

The US Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 60 per cent of all US carbon dioxide emissions are emitted by motor vehicles.²⁶ The US, with 5 per cent of the world’s population, has 30 per cent of the world’s cars and produces an extraordinary 45 per cent of the world’s car-derived CO₂ emissions.²⁷ 95 per cent of transport is powered by oil and half of all oil is used in transportation, including maritime shipping and cargo vessels. The fate of the oil industry and its consequences for climate change and continued high levels of movement are absolutely crucial. As Rob Routs, Executive Director at Shell said in 2006: ‘since the marriage of fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine some hundred years ago, the fortunes of our industries have been tied together’.²⁸ Indeed, many of the world’s leading corporations in the twentieth century are either manufacturers of cars or suppliers of oil.

This book focuses upon this car system that is over whelmingly significant for contemporary life, so significant in fact that it is often not really noticed lurking in the background. We will endeavour to see whether and to what degree one of the major systems powering the climate change juggernaut to the cliff’s edge might just get replaced by an alternative low carbon system. So this is one sense of the title ‘after the car’ of this book. Such a new system will necessarily involve integrating personal movement with digital information flows. Each vehicle will need to be ‘tracked and traced’ and its movement and carbon footprint monitored on various databases. One issue we thus will have to deal with is how to design and develop a low carbon post-car system that does not become like George Orwell’s 1984 with ‘Big Brother’ forms of surveillance.²⁹ Given the tendency towards new kinds of surveillance activated by most states in response to the crises of September 11^th and the so-called ‘war on terror’, this is a major challenge for design. How to design for sustainability without simultaneously enhancing the many extensive forms of personal surveillance in the contemporary world?

But there is another way of moving to ‘after the car’ over the next few decades. If the reverse gear cannot be found, then global heating and the end of cheap, plentiful oil could erode the very bases of the current car system (and all similar high carbon systems). Flooding, droughts, extreme weather events, water and oil wars could result in the break-up of long-distance oil and gas supplies and more generally of communications. The systems that made possible the current car system will disappear and the end of the car will occur through a dystopic nightmare. There are visions of this in recent reports as to the future from the European Union, in the movie The Day After Tomorrow and in Sarah Hall’s recent novel The Carhullan Army, where long-distance movement more or less disappears in a bleak post-oil future.³⁰

So the car will end at some stage during the current century. This might occur through the emergence of a new system that is ‘after the car’. This is what transport researchers Robin Hickman and David Banister term: ‘a real step change in travel behaviour and emissions’ that might generate a whole new wave of development.³¹ This could be something like the way mobile phones appeared from ‘nowhere’ and replaced landline phones through an entirely new system. Or we might move to ‘after the car’ through a climate change collapse reinforced by declining oil supplies.

We will also show that most of the problems we are now confronted with derive from the twentieth century. In that century, an enormous number of powerful high carbon systems were set in place, locked in through various economic and social institutions.³² And as the century unfolded, those lock-ins meant that the world was left a high carbon legacy whose consequences are only now being acknowledged. The steel-and-petroleum car is one of those locked-in legacies that need to be got rid of, but we will also show that its passing will not enable the world to leap into some utopian nirvana. Getting rid of the car system and other high carbon systems is utterly necessary but it involves costly processes. The twentieth century is reaping its revenge upon the twenty-first century and limiting the choices and opportunities that are available.

And in the new century various societies are playing carbon catch-up. The most spectacular is China, about to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and as a developing country not yet under Kyoto and needing to reduce its carbon emissions. This is undermining global initiatives at emission reduction, since increases in China’s greenhouse gases annul any cuts made by the rich north. Short-term reductions in China’s emissions seem unlikely, since it is the world’s largest coal producer and a new burst in building coal-fuelled power stations is underway, partly in response to power cuts experienced in 2004. Significantly, though, Beijing has announced plans to generate 10 per cent of its power from renewable sources by 2010 and it does have plans to build various eco-cities, which we examine below.³³

Paradoxically, the delivery of fresh water also depends on fossil fuels and already severe water shortages face one-third of the world’s population.³⁴ As a further convergence of oil impacts upon the environment, whatever oil does to the water and land, it also does to the earth’s atmosphere. Every gallon of petrol discharges twenty-four pounds of heat-trapping emissions, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.³⁵

And one crucial reason for potential global disaster is how systems interact with each other. There are dynamic shocks stemming from climate change and the shortages of oil and gas. Homer-Dixon notes: ‘I think the kind of crisis we might see would be a result of systems that are kind of stressed to the max already . . . societies face crisis when they’re hit by multiple shocks simultaneously or they’re affected by multiple stresses simultaneously’.³⁶ Human and physical systems exist in states of dynamic tension and are especially vulnerable to dynamic instabilities. We examine in this book how various systems reverberate against each other and their impact on larger systemic changes. It is the simultaneity of converging shifts that creates significant changes. Thus, resource depletion (peak oil) and climate change may come to overload a fragile global system, creating the possibility of catastrophic failure unless those high carbon systems from the twentieth century have begun to be displaced.³⁷

Human civilizations have in the past disappeared, and it may be that the current patterns of civilization could also be on earth only for a finite period of time. And the disaster of climate change is increasingly intersecting with a global energy crisis, since it seems that oil (and gas) supplies around the world are about to start running down. We now turn directly to this issue.

PEAK OIL

Today’s global economy is deeply dependent upon, and embedded in, abundant cheap oil. Most industrial, agricultural, commercial, domestic and consumer systems are built around the plentiful supply of ‘black gold’, as oil is often called. The peaking of oil and production decline will strongly affect global markets, as well as the many financial institutions that rely on stable market conditions.

The peak oil hypothesis states that the extracting of oil reserves has a beginning, a middle and an end. And at some point it reaches maximum output, with the peak occurring when approximately half the potential oil has been extracted. After this, oil becomes more difficult and expensive to extract as each field ages past the mid-point of its life.³⁸ Oil production typically follows a bell-shaped curve when charted on a graph, following the Hubbert’s peak model.³⁹ This does not mean oil suddenly runs out, but the supply of cheap oil drops and prices rise, possibly dramatically. After peak oil, the oil extraction process becomes less profitable. This ratio is referred to as the Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI).

Some predictions suggest that global peak oil occurred as early as the late 1990s. Others estimate that global production of conventional oil peaked either in the spring of 2004,⁴⁰ or on December 16^th 2005.⁴¹ More optimistic predictions locate the peak of oil around the 2020s or 2030s, with assumptions that major investments in fuel alternatives will help to avoid a peak oil crisis.⁴² Jeremy Leggett, though, notes how the largest oilfields were discovered over half a century ago, with the peak of oil discovery being 1965. There have been no major new discoveries since the 1970s. New fields are not being found at the same rate as they were in the now quite distant past. It thus seems a fair estimate that oil production worldwide will have peaked by around 2010.⁴³

Energy will be increasingly expensive and there will be frequent shortages, especially as the world’s population continues to soar. Both the US Department of Energy and the International Energy Agency suggest that global demand for oil has been increasing by 2 million barrels a day over the last few years. This oil demand could possibly rise from the present level of 86 million barrels a day to 125 within the next two decades, this having to be principally met from Middle Eastern oilfields. However, few Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had more production capacity in 2006 compared with 1990. And with Saudi Arabia holding an estimated 22 per cent of global oil reserves, many are sceptical as to whether it is capable of significantly increasing production for this rising demand.

The oil surplus period of the late 1980s and early 1990s led to oil trading at $10 per barrel (in 1998). However, by mid 2008, the price per barrel of oil rose to more than $135. Airlines were beginning to collapse, US car manufacturers were noting reduced sales especially of larger models, and around the world slower driving speeds were recorded.

Geopolitical instabilities in many oil producing countries are thus producing increased fluctuations and destabilizations in oil supply, prices and future energy security. Such fluctuations result in oil price changes that impact almost immediately upon oil-dependent industries. June 2008 saw tens of thousands of Spanish truckers block roads in Spain as well as on the French border. Fuel protests were also seen in the UK, Portugal and France, bringing together varied sectors of the transport industry including truckers and fishermen. Further action across Europe is expected over the changing price of petrol and diesel.⁴⁴

It already is likely that the Arctic Ocean’s seabed, which may hold billions of gallons of oil and natural gas (perhaps as much as up to 25 per cent of the world’s undiscovered reserves, according to the US Geological Survey), will become the next highly contested energy region. Already in August 2007, Russia planted their flag 2.5 miles (4 km) beneath the North Pole on the ocean bed in an attempt to lay claim to an undersea formation called the Lomonosov Ridge which Russia claims is part of Siberia’s shelf.⁴⁵ A recent EU Report warns that climate change and the peaking of oil will engender major new conflicts especially in the thawing Arctic.⁴⁶

Similarly, the UK is claiming sovereign rights over a vast area of the remote seabed off Antarctica with an application to the UN covering more than 1 million km² (386,000 square miles) of the Antarctic bed.⁴⁷ Although the UK claim is in defiance of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty (of which the UK is a signatory), which states that no new claims shall be declared on the continent, it shows how dwindling energy reserves are transforming existing policies and generating newly dangerous conflicts.

A crucial factor impacting upon oil reserves is increasing energy consumption from the developing industrial economies of especially China and India. From 1999 to 2004 China’s oil imports doubled. Peak oil researcher James Kunstler estimates that at the current rate of growth in demand China will within 10 years consume 100 per cent of currently available world exports of oil. And this assumes no growth in demand elsewhere in the world and no fall-off in global production.⁴⁸ It may be that in a world of globally contested, and diminishing, oil and energy reserves, a ‘rush and a push’ for remaining resources will ensue. The main industrial states and corporations will try to get their hands on available supplies and secure distribution channels (which is trickier, since many pipelines run through unstable geopolitical regions).

In short, not having sufficient oil to sustain rising levels of global economic growth and consumption will generate significant economic downturns, resource wars and lower population levels. Also, the world’s fuel resources are under threat of petro-political blackmail from oil producing states. Heinberg sees peak oil as hitting global energy markets within two decades or less, leading to much potential political and civil unrest. Kunstler considers the systems effects to be dire:

At peak and just beyond, there is massive potential for system failures of all kinds, social, economic, and political. Peak is quite literally a tipping point. Beyond peak, things unravel and the center does not hold. Beyond peak, all bets are off about civilization’s future.⁴⁹

In particular, the worldwide transport sector has a dependency on oil of 98 per cent and this represents approximately 50 per cent of all global oil consumption, about 20 per cent of all energy consumption. This follows an annual average growth rate of more than 2 per cent.⁵⁰ The inefficient internal combustion engine is principally fuelled by the primary energy sources of oil, natural gas and coal, producing a combination of petrol/gasoline, diesel and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). There are many other types of vehicles that rely on fuel: delivery fleets, couriers, taxis, military and so on. The largest fleet of vehicles worldwide is the US Federal Government’s with around 600,000 vehicles, and as yet they do not lobby for alternative fuels. More generally, the infrastructures of developed and developing nations are predicated upon the plentiful supply of ‘cheap’ oil to lubricate many areas of industrial, military and commercial life.

Central, then, to understanding development around the world is to appreciate the significance of black gold and especially the power of its vested interests. Jeremy Leggett describes the ‘Empire of Oil’ as being ‘without doubt the most powerful interest group on the planet’, much more powerful than most nation states. Hence, ‘The Great Addiction’ (to oil) remained with oil becoming vital to virtually everything that is done on the planet.⁵¹ And the oil industry did not consider that they had to think to the future. As one industry leader wrote in 1897: ‘As to future generations, we can safely trust them to settle their own difficulties and satisfy their own wants’.⁵²

And these oil interests have consistently exaggerated the size of their reserves, upon whose estimates official global figures depend. Recently, they suggested that the peaking of global oil is further away than it is (and have in some cases been leading funders of climate change denial publicity and extensive lobbying).

More generally, American and European foreign policies are driven by global oil interests. In the US, the desire to increase access to oil sources from outside the US since its decline in oil production in the 1970s is the context for its attempted subjugation of Middle Eastern oil interests in the name of ‘freedom’ (we might add that the freedom here is principally of US citizens to drive).

There is some limited critique of this power of oil, with the European Commission Chief José Manuel Barroso announcing in 2007 that it was time for a ‘post-industrial revolution’. In this, the EU would cut greenhouse gases by 20 per cent by 2020⁵³ but it was simultaneously motivated by Europe’s vulnerability as a major oil importer. As a move to secure European self-sufficiency Barroso stated that the EU should look towards supplying 20 per cent of its energy needs from renewable power by 2020, with 10 per cent of vehicle fuel coming from home-produced biofuels. We return in chapter 4 to the significance of transport policies that simultaneously address climate change and energy security.

VIRTUAL WORLDS

We turn now to a third major change in the climate affecting travel and transport. Since around 1990 there has been a remarkable change in the nature of human life itself. There were until then two distinct kinds of things that provided the background to people’s everyday lives. First, there was the ‘natural world’ of rivers, hills, lakes, soil, storms, crops, snow, earth and so on. This physical world provided the taken-for-granted background for almost all of human history. Second, there was the background made up of the ‘artificial’ objects of the industrial revolution, such as trains, pipes, steam, screws, watches, lights, paper, radio, cars and so on. This background gradually spread around the world, especially during the twentieth century.