Natural Capitalism on Cars

Orange Hub Caps
Originally uploaded by compujeramey

From Natural Capitalism (part of a series of ongoing posts)

Imagine a conversation taking place at the end of the nineteenth century. A group of powerful and farseeing businessmen announce that they want to create a giant new industry in the United States, one that will employ millions of people, sell a copy of its product every two seconds, and provide undreamed-of levels of personal mobility for those who use its products. However, this innovation will also have other consequences so that at the end of one hundred years, it will have done or be doing the following:

* paved an area equal to all the arable land in the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, requiring maintenance costing more than $200 million per day;
* reshaped American communities and lives so as to restrict the mobility of most citizens who do not choose or are not able to own and operate the new product;
* maimed or injured 250 million people, and killed more Americans than have died in all wars in the country's history;
* be combusting 8 million barrels of oil every day (450 gallons per person annually);
* made the United States increasingly dependent on foreign oil at a cost of $60 billion a year;
* relied for an increasing percentage of that oil on an unstable and largely hostile region armed partly by American oil payments, requiring the United States to make large military expenditures there and maintain continual war-readiness;
* be killing a million wild animals per week, from deer and elk to birds, frogs, and opossums, plus tens of thousands of domestic pets;
* be creating a din of noise and a cloud of pollution in all metropolitan areas, affecting sleep, concentration, and intelligence, making the air in some cities so unbreathable that children and the elderly cannot venture outside on certain days;
* caused spectacular increases in asthma, emphysema, heart disease, and bronchial infections;
* be emitting one-fourth of U.S. greenhouse gases so as to threaten global climatic stability and agriculture;
* and be creating 7 billion pounds of unrecycled scrap and waste every year.

Now imagine they succeeded.

This is the automobile industry - a sector of commerce so massive that in 1998, five of the seven largest U.S. industrial firms produced either cars or their fuel. If this industry can fundamentally change, every industry can. And change it will. This chapter describes how the world's dominant business is transforming itself to become profoundly less harmful to the biosphere.

Read more of this chapter online.