Hurricane Katrina and Hypercars

hypercar.com

Now, you may be wondering what Katrina and Hypercars have in common.

Or even, what a hypercar is. The short explanation is, it is an ultra-light car powered by hydrogen.

To me, how we're looking at the two problems of damaging Cat 4 hurricanes and peak oil bear a dismal similarity of ignored reality.

In today's radio segment, Democracy Now! interviewed environmental journalist and president of Blue Frontier Campaign David Helvarg and quoted from his piece in the LA Times:

“Those who think they can rebuild in harm's way using the same assumptions that worked in the last century or who believe they can manage nature by stockpiling generators and water bottles are living in a dangerous fantasy. Unfortunately, theirs a fantasy we are having to pay for.”

So, obviously, our approach to land management in coastal areas susceptible to hurricanes, is terribly flawed. We build a nice house on the Florida coast, mother Nature destroys it, we collect on insurance and build again. And the government encourages this foolishness. Rather than recognize the effect of global warming, forbid developers from building on hurricane pathways (never mind the view), our government ignores global warming and subsidizes such bad practices.

Global warming, is of course, caused by our frenzied burning of fossil fuels.

And that brings us to the hypercar. Sustainability guru Amory Lovins and his Rocky Mountain Institute's answer to the problem of transportation energy and global warming is to build a car which burns hydrogen with water vapor as the only effluent. No pollution, no oil, voila! Problem solved.

So, what's the problem with this approach?

Two things: one, our love affair with personal transportation is what led us into this mess in the first place. It is what gave rise to suburbia and its attendant problems. (James Howard Kunstler has much more to say on this). Shouldn't we be looking at a way of waking up people to this problem?

Idealists can say, it isn't the automobile per se, that's the problem, but rather how the automobile manufacturers conspired with oil companies to build highways, destroy public transportation and encourage suburban development. Perhaps we can start clean, have our toys and not be used by them? As I said, I believe only idealists (living in a non-corporate world) would say this.

The second thing wrong with the hypercar is that it will take a lot of energy to build it and its fuel infrastructure. Petro-energy, that is. Energy that is in short supply and should morally be used to ease our transition into an energy-poor future. To prevent possible catastrophes when an energy shortage results in other shortages like that of food with deadly implications for under-developed countries.

In the end I would say, Amory Lovins' vision is a familar one. The U.S. has for long projected an image of entitlement. It has justified its behavior as "preserving the American way of life," which was very obviously for an American to consume much much more than the average global citizen did. The hypercar is an expression of this entitled view. As Americans, we don't have to change our consumer culture to cope with the changing energy situation. Rather, we just go on consuming, just using a different product. Thus, the answer to consumerism is consumerism itself. This is the irony expressed by the vision of an avowed sustainability expert.