From several weeks ago: you know, one of the dangers of all the talk about global warming is that it can lead to environmental extremism. Take for example this Earth Day posting on the popular liberal/Democrat site DailyKos. In it, the author claims: "...the worst decision this nation ever made wasn't the boneheaded blunder into Iraq, it was the way we built our nation around the car after World War II." He goes on to argue that we have too many highways, that we're "mainlining asphalt", that we should abolish the Federal Highway Administration, stop building for the most part new highways, and devote most of our resources to mass transit. Wow!
It's hard to know where to start with something like this. But let's look at it historically, with the contention that we made a mistake building our nation "around the car"after the war. Well. So what choice did we have? The automobile existed; it was there. The genie wasn't going to be put back in the bottle. The auto industry provided this country with millions of jobs. The car gets people where they want to go, where they need to go, fast. And this country needed that, indeed demanded it, given our growing population, and our growing cities. With our population skyrocketing, everyone couldn't live in cities any longer; there wasn't enough room. Hence the development of suburbs. Suburbs meant that adults couldn't always live right near to where they worked. So how would people get to work if they didn't have a car? An environmentalist such as our DailyKos writer seems to think they should all take the bus or the train. But there's no mass transit system in the world that can handle a nation of first 200 million people and now 300 million people.
The automobile is part of our modern, industrialized society. Talking about taking the car out of that society would have to be part of a call for a massive, radical re-ordering of society that...well...just ain't gonna happen. Whatever is causing global warming, we must deal with in a realistic fashion and think about it that same way. Our society must continue to function. Some extremists seem to ignore that fact.
