ii) Criticisms of the New Oomanistic Critiques of the Car.

I: A Pleasure-Pain Critique of the Car.

Given that cost-benefit analyses are an ineffective critique of the car, perhaps a radical utilitarian (benthamite) pleasure-pain calculus might be more appropriate. The car produces considerable pleasures, and not a few thrills, but it also causes considerable pain and suffering. Perhaps if these were weighed up it would create a case against the car. Unfortunately, the attempt to determine a pleasure-pain calculus for the car immediately runs into some fundamental difficulties:-

Firstly, perhaps the most ineradicable problem - it is not possible to measure pleasure or pain;

Secondly, some of the biggest pleasures generated by the car are illegal e.g. speeding or hotting;

Thirdly, motorists obtain pleasures not merely by putting their own lives at risk but other people’s. The cowardly, selfish, and immoral, nature of this risk-taking does not seem to detract from the pleasures which motorists obtain from speeding.

Fourthly, with the exception of asthmatics, many of the people poisoned by car life-line pollution do not feel any pain in the early stages of their disease. It is only when they become ill that they discover they have been poisoned.

Finally, many of those killed by cars often die outright without little sensation of pain. A pleasure-pain calculus of an assassin slipping a knife into his victim would register only the assassin’s pleasure at disposing of an enemy since the victim would feel very little.

Given that in the last two categories above the amount of pain experienced by car victims would be small, it would not be surprising if it was concluded that a pleasure-pain calculus for the car indicated that the pleasures outweighed the pains.

Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter an iota if it could be shown that the car generates a huge net surplus of pleasure because, ultimately, cars are devastating the Planet. No matter how much the pleasures of the car outweigh the pains, the car is still killing the Earth. It can be hypothesized that the point at which the greatest number of motorists enjoy the greatest amounts of pleasure from their cars is the point at which the Earth’s life support system collapses. What seems much less speculative is that the pleasures of the car seem to be masking the destabilization of the Earth’s life support system. The pleasures generated by cars are not a celebration of human vitality but an ecological liability. They are akin to the assassin's knife slowly being inserted into the Earth's life sustaining processes.

II: The Sheer Extravagance of the Car.

Not even the increasingly profligate use of the car seems to disturb the widespread support for the car. It might have been thought that taxpayers[1] would tolerate the car's costs where it was indispensable to society and economic growth but not where it was being used for trite purposes. And yet, the fact is that car use has become so pervasive it is being used for the most trite purposes. Today, more mileage is expended on leisure travel than commuting; the ferrying of children to school has been estimated to cost £26 billion; a huge proportion of all car trips are short journeys which could easily be made by walking, cycling or catching public transport; and, motorists are spending huge amounts of time locked into traffic jams which have been subsidized by government handouts to company car directors.[2] Despite this waste the supporters of 'value for money', 'good housekeeping' and 'efficiency' continue to support the car - primarily because they are the beneficiaries of such extravagance.

III: The Car as a Class Issue.

Given the prevalance of class politics it is quite staggering that the car has rarely been regarded as a class issue and even more surprising that the less well off (whether working or unemployed) have never objected to the car. Not even the most class conscious groups such as ‘class war’ see the car as a class issue. Such is the seductive power of the car. And yet the car represents some clear manifestations of class conflict. It has already been noted above that:-

* vat on domestic fuel was introduced to pay for the government’s massive road construction programme which in effect means that the poor and carless are paying for the roads used by the rich;

* in autocracies motorists promote their own interests at the expense of the carless;

* the car tends to destroy inner city communities inhabited by the poor;

* huge areas of land in city centres and inner city areas are designated as car parks for the rich rather than homes for the carless. Car parks are houses for cars or, more accurately, second homes for motorists.

A: The Poor Get Less Financial Benefits than Company Cars.

The managers and directors of multi-national corporations benefit more from car perks than the unemployed receive in income support. Cowie interleasing .. "reckons that an employee with a Cavalier 1.8 GL would need a pay rise of £90.80 a week to cover the cost of keeping the same car on the road privately. The extra income tax and national insurance you would have to pay on that bumps up the amount needed before stoppages to more than £115 a week - around £6,000 a year."[3]

B: The Carless Subsidizing Motorists.

The government's pro-car bigotry is so extreme that the low paid who, in general, do not own cars, find themselves contributing to the motoring costs of those rich enough to own one or more cars. The poll tax increased this injustice because many carless people, such as the low paid, had to contribute to local authorities' expenditure on the construction and repair of roads. Even the unemployed, who are least likely to own a car, had to contribute to the improvement of transport facilities for the rich. Similar examples of social injustice occur around the world, "Milwaukee spends more than $80 million of its property taxes annually on roads. In essence we are robbing our schools to feed our internal combustion engine."[4]

C: The Poor as the Victim in Car Accidents.

Many car accident victims are the poor who do not own cars .. "the more vulnerable victims of motor danger, who happen to make up half of those killed on the road ..."[5]

D: Why the Car is not Seen as a Class Issue.

The car is not regarded as a class issue because a large number of poor people are motorists. The political representatives of the poor would thus face a considerable degree of opposition to anti-car campaigns from the people they are supposed to represent. More importantly, these political representatives are reluctant to oppose cars because most of them are car owners. There are class war warriors who drive around in cars helping to inflict suffering on the poor without cars; ban the bomb activists who drive to ban the bomb meetings in cars to protest about the dangers of armageddon even though they themselves are participants in carmageddon; green activists who drive to meetings to protest about environmental destructon, sometimes even the environmental destruction of the Amazon rainforest which is caused by the mining of iron ore and aluminium for cars. If left wing radicals won't condemn of the car then it is not surprising that the rest of the country does not even regard the car as a political issue.

IV: The Global Political Costs of the Car.

One rarely mentioned critique of the car is the role of cars in the over-industrializing nations’ exploitation of industrializing/disintegrating countries. The exploitation of industrializing/disintegrating countries for the sake of cars is one of the major forms of global exploitation. It is far more serious than the expoitation entailed by cash crops such as coffee, tea, sugar, etc.. In many ways, cars are the archetypal symbol of third world exploitation.

Firstly, although the vast majority of people who own cars live in the over-industrialized nations[6] many of the resources used by the road/car/oil industries, which are the single biggest consumers of the world's resources, come from industrializing/disintegrating countries.

Secondly, multinational car corporations have relocated some of their most toxic manufacturing processes to third world countries to avoid the paltry environmental regulations imposed on them by governments in the over-industrialized nations.

Thirdly, third world countries are used as dumping grounds for some of the car industry's toxic waste.

Fourthly, vast areas of land in the industrializing/disintegrating countries have been poisoned or ruined by the mining of the raw materials used in the manufacture of cars. Large areas of land have been expropriated for the growing of crops whch are used in the manufacture of cars - e.g. the rubber and the cotton used in tyres, the wood used in cars, etc.

And, finally, car exhaust emissions are boosting the greenhouse effect which is causing climatic damage in the industrializing/disintegrating countries.[7]

In conclusion, the car creates acute social injustices within the over-industrialized world, but the injustices it creates between the ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds are even greater.

The failure of left wing, car-owning, radicals in the over-industrialized nations to develop a critique of the car as one of the main commodities in the exploitation of third world countries is a blatant indication of their moral bankruptcy and political degeneracy. Even worse are the third world developers who drive to meetings supposedly to help stop the exploitation of third world people even though it is the car which is causing the one of the worst forms of exploitation in the third world. It is transparent that both groups are so blinded by the huge pleasures and benefits of cars they are unwilling to acknowledge that these pleasures are being paid for by the exploitation of third world countries.

It has to be suggested, however, that even if such a critique was developed and became more popularized it would not be an effective argument against the car. Exactly the same point can be made about the global injustices created by the car that was made earlier about multinational car corporations’ corruption in the over-industrialized nations. If the exploitation of third world countries for the sake of the car was abolished the result would be a vast explosion in the number of cars in third world countries which would be geophysiologically unsustainable. Such an argument is not intended to condone the current system of exploitation but to oppose what could happen if exploitation is replaced by a system whereby endless numbers of cars could be manfactured and traded fairly.

V: The Ooman Costs of the Car.

A: Carnage on the Roads.

Perhaps the first, most enduring, and most widespread, criticism of the car has been the number of people killed and injured in road accidents. But even death has lost its sting. In 1985 some 250,000 people around the world died in car accidents - although even this may be an underestimate given the lackadaisical way that car fatality statistics are collected. This carnage, bordering on outright slaughter, hasn't dented the car's popularity. Road deaths hardly raise more than a fleeting moment of concern, "Although .. more people died on roads in the US in the average year than in the Vietnam war, it seems to have made little impression on individuals and the media."[8]

B: Deaths from Pollution.

Road accidents, however, are by no means the end of the death and destruction wreaked by cars. Vehicle exhaust emissions are the biggest source of atmospheric pollution. It has been calculated that in America alone, where pollution standards are the highest in the world, 30,000 die from vehicle exhaust pollution. This is little different from the number of deaths caused by road accidents. Given that pollution from the car industry is greater than that generated by vehicle exhaust emissions it is possible that the total number of deaths from car pollution could be double that from vehicle exhaust emissions. Car pollution in major urban centres outside the over-industrialized world may be even worse. Firstly the cars used in communist bloc and third world countries generate far more pollution per car than those in the over-industrialized nations and, secondly, most of the cars in the former countries are used not on motorways between cities but for commuting into urban areas. As a consequence, the millions of cars being driven into major third world cites create local pockets of pollution which are worse than those found in the cities of the over-industrialized world. The number of deaths caused by car exhaust pollution in third world cities could be huge - but most are unrecorded. Globally it is conceivable that the fatalities caused by car pollution could be greater than the number of people killed in car accidents.

If motorists won't give up their cars because of the dangers posed by road accidents they are unlikely to do so because of fatalities caused by car pollution. If dramatic media pictures of multiple pile ups don't frighten motorists out of their "padded cells" (john papworth) then statistics about the numbers killed insidiously by pollution are hardly likely to make a difference. What makes the situation even worse is that those motorists who smoke tobacco, and thus risk contracting lung cancer, aren't likely to be bothered about the health risks they are causing by driving cars, no matter how serious the pollution.

C: Fatalities Caused During the Manufacturing Process.

The car causes fatalities throughout the car life-line,

* industrial accidents amongst car industry workers;

* insurrections over multi-national road/car/oil corporations exploitation of third world resources;[9]

* the murder of indigenous peoples as a result of developments caused by the construction of new roads;

* wars defending motorists' oil supplies, etc.,

Even if the deaths which occur throughout the car life-line are added to the car's running death toll this is unlikely to change the public's devotion to cars. It seems that cars are much too exciting and too much of a status symbol to make it likely that motorists will give up their cars or that governments will curb the car. Isn't jonathon porritt right, then, to overlook his view that, "There is no such thing as a green car" and accommodate himself to the "extraordinary voracious beast"?[10] Even if a million people are killed every year by cars this could well be perceived as just an unfortunate price which people (both motorists and non motorists) are willing to pay for what is regarded as an indispensable part of the joys of modern life?

Perhaps if motorists were the only ones to suffer because of the destruction caused by cars, they might begin to doubt the risks involved. Unfortunately, the people who are most affected by cars are the inner city carless who:-

* bear the brunt of vehicle exhaust pollution;

* are forced to come homeless to make way for new roads;

* watch land allocated for housing being redesignated for car parks (i.e. homes for cars not people!);

* suffer from a high proportion of road accidents.[11]

It is at this point that reflections about motorists' morality become unavoidable; how many people have to be killed by the car life-line before motorists support a limit on car numbers; how many have to die before there is a ban on cars? No-one aware of the full extent of the terrorism perpetrated by the car can evade such reflections. Perhaps stanley millgram could arrange some experiments to discover just how far motorists will go to defend the real love of their lives.

iii) The Failure of the Oomanistic Critiques of the Car.

I: The Failure of Oomanist Protests Against the Car.

Even before the first world war there were protests about the deaths caused by reckless drivers (even though the number of cars on the roads was miniscule in comparison to the numbers today). After the first world war other complaints began to emerge, "The first widespread complaints about car parking in city centres were made in 1916 and by 1923 the first proposals were put forward to ban them from city centres."[12] Since then there have been innumerable, but isolated, protests over particular problems which the car life-line has caused to various groups of oomans. Protestors have had some successes against the car e.g. the need for motorists to be given driving lessons prior to obtaining a car license; the introduction of speed limits; the siting of certain roads, etc., but the success rate has been minimal. There has been a remorseless growth in the damage which the car inflicts on humans year after year. Whilst in many of the over-industrialized nations there has been a reduction in the annual number of people killed or injured in car accidents since the early, ‘cowboy’ period of the car when staggeringly high levels of carnage occurred, the overall number of deaths caused by the car has not declined because far more people are now dying as a result of pollution from the car life-line.

The remorseless growth in the damage which cars have inflicted on humans is shocking for two reasons. Firstly, successive governments and by the public seem to be completely reluctanct to do anything about it. Motoring organizations have opposed virtually all the major reforms of the car since the days when motorists were allowed to roam the streets at will. Secondly, and perhaps more shockingly, there have never been protests against the car itself even though it would be easy to conclude from the damage caused by cars that it should be banned. Protestors have always protested against specific aspects of the car-life-line not against the car itself.

It is futile to believe there will ever be popular support for government measures to drastically curb, or even ban, cars because of their impact on oomans. Firstly, all governments around the world have been taken over by motorists and have become autocratic institutions promoting motorists’ interests. Secondly, the car (and car accidents) are essential to most economies, and it is central to the way of life (and death) of a huge number of consumers - in fact consumers wouldn’t be consumers without cars. Thirdly, the benefits of the car are so colossal that motorists can get away with a huge level of damage before the cars’ benefits are called into question. Even if the damage outweighed the benefits, car owners would probably still be powerful enough to fend off the complaints and protests. The car would only be seriously called into question if motorists were afflicted by serious levels of damage but even then their addiction to cars might be sufficient to ignore the issue. Finally, autocratic ideology is so dominant that, for example, it is commonly held that lung cancer has nothing to do with vehicle exhaust fumes but is caused by cigarette smoking - a point of view even promoted by the car owning medical profession. Life for many people is inconceivable without a car or the hope of obtaining a car.

It can be concluded that it is futile trying to win popular support for a curb on cars by criticizing the car on the grounds of:-

its inadequate mobility;

its failure to liberate people;

its corruption of politics and society;

its extravagant use of non-renewable resources;

its destructive impact on communal life;

its need for colossal economic subsidies;

its exploitation of industrializing/disintegrating countries; or,

its huge death toll.

Every one of these criticisms has just bounced off car bumpers as the number of cars has grown almost exponentially over the last three decades.

II: The Necessity for Combatting Global Warming.

There is only one argument which necessitates action to curb the car and this is that cars are killing the Earth. The car life-line contributes to acid rain, smog, stratospheric ozone depletion, tropospheric ozone poisoning, toxic pollution, the greenhouse effect (the release of Carbon emissions) and global warming (the destruction of the Earth’s Phytosynthetic capacity). In many ways, criticizing the car industry for being a major contributor to all the major forms of pollution afflicting the Earth, tends to obscure the most serious environmental threat posed by cars i.e. the cars’ destruction of the Earth’s Phytosynthetic capacity. The cars’ contribution to the destruction of Photosynthesis is far more important than its contribution to all other types of pollution because only global warming threatens to destabilize the climate and thus the Earth’s life support system. What is more, although each type of pollution causes a considerable amount of damage to the Planet's ecology, the most significant damage they cause is their contribution to the destruction of the Earth’s Phytosynthetic capacity. In other words, the significance of all the major forms of pollution created by the car lies not in their own right, but in their contribution to global warming. The car is one of the top three or four most important contributors to global warming.[13]

But, it might be suggested, if motorists don't care about the carnage inflicted on oomans are they likely to feel any different about killing the Planet? Given that many motorists do not even understand the nature of the Earth’s life support system let alone care about it, it does not seem in the slightest bit feasible to believe that they will voluntarily give up their cars for such ‘abstract’ reasons. Motorists do not seem to be in the least bit bothered about geocide.[14]

The situation as regards governments, however, is different. Governments have a responsibility for combatting global warming and preventing the destabilization of the Earth’s life support system. They must act against cars. Global warming requires governments to dramatically curb, and, in the case of the most geophysiologically unsustainable countries, ban, cars. Ultimately, it is irrelevant what motorists think about global warming.

III: The Theoretical Inadequacies of Oomanist Critiques of the Car.

There are a number of criticisms which can be made about humanistic critiques of the car. Firstly, humanistic critiques of the car seek to remedy the damage which cars inflicts on humans but ignore the damage to the Planet. Secondly, humanistic critiques of the car are a distraction from the more urgent threat posed by the car i.e. that cars are exacerbating global warming and disrupting the Earth’s life support system. One of the most powerful critiques of the car[15] focusses attention on the dangers which motorists pose to road users rather than the dangers which the car poses to the Planet’s life-support system; it is concerned about the road environment rather than the global environment, the Earth; and it treats the road environment as a workplace issue rather than as a Planetary issue. This concern for humans needs, human interests and human welfare is a distraction from the more urgent issue which is protecting the needs, interests and welfare of the Earth.

Thirdly, highlighting the humanistic dangers of the car tends to reinforce oomans’ preoccupation with their own self interests rather than the interests of the Earth. Fourthly, humanistic critiques of the car are an irrelevance because even if cars are reformed so that there are fewer and fewer car accident/pollution fatalities, they would still pose a massive danger to the Earth.

Fifthly, the danger of humanistic critiques of the car is that the success of road safety/anti-pollution measures would reduce opposition to the car. Most of the animosity towards the car is generated by car accident fatalities and ooman-centred pollution not by the damage it is causing to the Earth. Those who criticize the car often mention that cars boost global warming only as an afterthought. Without human fatalities, there would be no clamour against cars and thus no platform from which criticisms about the car’s contribution to global warming could be voiced. It is possible that the damage which cars inflict on the Earth would be even greater if the damage which cars inflict on oomans was eradicated.

Finally, the measures taken to prevent cars from damaging human health or interests may exacerbate global warming as is the case with the introduction of catalytic converters.

In conclusion, the car is a bigger threat to the Earth's life sustaining processes than it is to oomans. To put it even more bluntly the damage which the car inflicts on oomans is unimportant in comparison to the damage which it causes to the Earth. And, finally, just to ensure that the edge is not taken off such a blunt statment, contrary to the basic premise of any form of humanism, the more damage which the car inflicts on Earth-wrecking humans the better.

iv) A Geocentric Evaluation of Human Fatalities.

It was pointed out in the introduction that although the headline number of people mutilated and murdered by cars is far smaller than the number of people killed by cigarette smoking, the geophysiological damage caused by the road/car/oil industries is insignificant in comparison to that caused by the tobacco industry. For example, if everyone on Earth smoked cigarettes then hundreds of millions of people would die every year but this would not pose any threat to the survival of the Planet's life-sustaining processes whereas if everyone drove a car they would bring about an almost instantaneous geophysiological collapse. It is possible to compare the relationship between the fatalities caused by a whole range of human activities and the level of geophysiological damage caused by those activities. This enables comparisons to be made to the fatalities and geophysiological damage caused by the car. There are a number of human activities which kill far more oomans than those killed by cars, but cause much less devastation to the Earth’s life support system than the car industry. There is no correlation between human fatalities and the destruction of the Earth’s life support system. On the contrary there may be an inverse relationship between the two.

I: Domestic Accidents.

It is alleged that in great brutland, domestic accidents cause more death and injuries than the road/car/oil industries, "More people die in the home than on the roads because of the neglect of safety rules, a survey discloses today. More than 2 million injuries a year need medical attention, most of them happening in the lounge or sitting rooms."[16] The domestic sector causes a huge amount of damage to the Planet's ecology. It may be greater than that caused by the transport sector although the differences would not be that great.

II: Poverty.

Poverty kills hundreds of millions of people every year. The number of people killed by cars is insignificant in comparison to the seas of torment, misery and death entailed by absolute poverty. There are no scientific measurements which give any indication as to whether the road/car/oil industries cause more damage to the Planet's life sustaining processes than poverty. It is held that poverty stricken, slash and burn shifting cultivators are primarily responsible for tropical deforestation. But it is the road/car/oil industries which construct the roads and open up the way for shifting cultivators who, by themselves, would not be able to hack their way into the Forests.[17] The road/car/oil industries have impoverished huge numbers of people in the industrializing/disintegrating countries. They are causing such a level of ecological devastation and pollution that they are increasing climatic based crop failures and thus boosting poverty.

III: Alcoholism.

Alcoholism kills more people than cars (although not as many as tobacco), "Alcohol abuse kills over 25,000 people every year in the UK alone."[18] However, the alcohol industry does not cause anything like the same scale of ecological damage as the road/car/oil industries. The pollution from breweries and the suffocation of the Earth’s life-sustaining processes by breweries/public houses etc., is miniscule in comparison to that caused by the road/car/oil industries.

IV: Medicinal Massacres.

The medical profession kills a huge number of people, "One estimate puts the annual number of (prescription) drug induced deaths in Britain at 10,000-15,000 - four to five times the officially reported figure of over 2,000 and about twice the number killed in road accidents. The estimate needs to be taken seriously if a recent study on just one category of drugs - the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents - is any guide. .. according to an editorial in the medical journal Gut, they may be associated with more than 4,000 deaths every year in the UK from gastrointestinal complications."[19] In addition, in great brutland, 3,000 people die on the operating table and 30,000 die within a month of an operation. “A report, produced by the Royal Medical colleges .. looked at some 1,400 of the 18,000 adult deaths within 30 days of surgery between April 1991 and March 1992 in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands.”[20] The most extreme, but by no means implausible, evaluation of the deaths caused by the medical profession comes from a commentator concerned about the huge numbers of deaths caused by mass vaccination programmes, "Vivisection-based modern medicine has maimed and killed more people than war, famine and pestilence combined."[21].Although the medical profession kills far more people than cars it does not cause anything like the same ecological damage. The pollution from hospitals and the suffocation of the Earth’s life-sustaining processes caused by hospitals is small in comparison to that caused by the road/car/oil industries.

V: Meat Eating.

In brutland, and probably many other over-industrialized countries, meat eating causes more death than cars, "The single most common fatal illnesses of middle and old age remain coronary heart disease and stroke .."[22] The global Animal exploitation industry causes more pollution and ecological devastation than the car, and car related, industries.

VI: Abortion.

The most clear cut example of the distinction between humanism and geocentrism can be seen by looking at abortion. Huge numbers of humans are killed every year through abortion with virtually no effect on the Earth’s life support system, "Worldwide, perhaps 50 million abortions are performed each year, nearly half of them illegal."[23]. The loss of life entailed by abortion is vastly greater than the number killed by the car life-line but its impact on the Planet’s geophysiology is virtually negligible.

In conclusion, then, although the car is one of the major global killers there are many more activities which cause a greater loss of life but only a few activities may cause more ecological destruction (the domestic sector and global poverty) and only one activity, the Animal exploitation industry, definitely causes more ecological damage.