It’s become a staple of office banter in America and internationally: “Holy moley, I had to deplete my retirement fund for a tank of gas!” Stickers on American gas pumps showing a pointing Joe Biden and the caption “I Did That!” have become so ubiquitous, we no longer see them, even though gas prices remain up worldwide. Politically diverse groups join together in the shared commitment that high gasoline (petrol) prices suck.
Some solutions are arising, though not everyone will like them. While several auto manufacturers have pledged to discontinue gas-burning cars by the year 2035, they only make such pledges in “leading markets.” Meanwhile, an increasing number of large-market cities are banning new gas station construction, citing declining demand and long-term environmental costs. Clearly the days of cars burning gasoline- and diesel-burning cars are rapidly coming to an end.
Sounds great, right? But I have my doubts.
This commitment to discontinuing petroleum sounds wonderful in theory. But our economy remains committed to a vehicle-dependent structure. American cities, with their single-use land development practices, are so huge and difficult to navigate, you need military-grade satellite technology to visit most neighborhoods. This while we continue underfunding public transit. If you lack car access in most American suburbs, you’re truly trapped.
It’s even worse in America’s rural areas. Most farmers rely on diesel-burning tractors and combine harvesters to work increasingly vast patches of land, then require diesel-burning trucks to haul their crops to market. Their daily lives are no better. Despite the diverse crops on Old MacDonald’s storied farm (E-I-E-I-O), most American farmers practice monocropping, and therefore don’t grow their own food. They’re frequently twenty miles from the nearest decent grocery store.
This rural-urban divide matters. Many commentators have recently observed that the Democratic Party has essentially cut rural America loose, leaving the rural electorate that once powered FDR’s New Deal coalition to Republican domination. Anti-environmentalism has been a staple of Republican policy since Newt Gingrich made it a shibboleth of his 1994 “Republican Revolution.” For many rural Republicans, disdain for the environment has become part of their personalities.
While many cities (reluctantly) build electric car infrastructure, designed to preserve the car-centric model we’ve built since World War II, rural areas just aren’t. Where I live, some private homes might have electric car plug-ins, but for working-class people and renters, the only car charging station is outside a grocery store at the edge of town. If gas cars are discontinued in 2035, rural poor will continue driving increasingly aged, inefficient beaters, because they have to.
Oil prices today: $115.83 a barrel
— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) June 15, 2022
Gas prices today: $5.01 a gallon
Oil prices in April of 2008: $116.50
Gas prices in April of 2008: $3.51 a gallon
Gas prices are $1.50 a gallon higher than they should be because of the greed of big oil. It's time for a windfall profits tax.
That’s to say nothing of global industry. We proletarians might stop driving gas-hogs, someday, but we continue depending on shipping and distribution networks that consume vast quantities of petroleum. Most of the electronics that make American middle-class life possible are manufactured in China, and transported in massive diesel-burning container ships. Most of the globe’s medical PPE comes from a small number of factories, as we learned with grief in 2020.
Transferring to electric-powered cars will only serve to defend, even expand, class-based divisions. Those who can afford the rapid transition, not only to a new car, but the electric plug-in necessary to power it, will do so promptly. Urban poor, and rural-dwellers on the periphery of the distribution network, will wait indefinitely. And large corporations, which don’t use the pumps us groundlings use, will keep burning Texas Tea.
Because fundamentally, the problem isn’t cars, or even petroleum. The problem is that modern, technological society is founded on presumptions that no longer hold, if they ever did. American economic expansion has been grounded on cheap land (once we chase the Indigenous population off), cheap energy, and cheap labor. All of these are running out in real time, and when depleted, won’t come back soon.
Switching to electric cars only tinkers around the edges of a fundamentally decrepit system. Another Prius or Tesla might make individual buyers feel personally virtuous, but the problem isn’t personal, it’s structural. The problem is resource-hoarding billionaires who devalue land and labor, in order to keep their stock returns high. They don’t care what costs the rest of us must shoulder, because they don’t have to care.
Cars, and their related technology, have contributed to fat guts, heating climates, and cities that are massively unpleasant to live in. But they’re a symptom, not a cause. Our entire economy is premised on the idea that our world and its resources are, in some way, infinite. We’re living through the proof that this just isn’t so.
Edit: in the hours after I wrote this essay, President Biden floated the idea of a summer-long hiatus of all federal gas and fuel taxes. This is, of course, a bandage, not a solution. The poorly planned cities, sweltering-hot highways, and unsustainable globalized industry will still be there when the temporary reprieve ends.
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