Review by Allen Best
Transportation – February 2009 – Colorado Central Magazine
Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future
by Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran
Published in 2007 by Hachette Book Group
ISBN: 978-0446698665
AMORY LOVINS appears within the first few pages of this report about our joined-at-the-hip oil and car industries. Lovins is described as a “farsighted energy thinker who lives atop a mountain in the Rockies.” Few could quibble with the front-end of that description. Lovins, a physicist by training at Harvard and Cambridge, was drawn early to energy analysis and has been proven almost entirely correct since his ground-breaking 1976 essay in the journal Foreign Affairs. All of our big issues of today — from climate change to terrorist threats to dependence on oil from unstable foreign sources — were in that essay, along with a host of solutions that are now dribbling out.
As for this business of “living atop a mountain,” I just assumed it was a bit of poetic license — if not the sort of off-the-leash writing you’d expect from the authors, who are seasoned correspondents for The Economist, the widely admired magazine from the United Kingdom. But later in the book, there it is again — Lovins living in a home atop a mountain at Old Snowmass, Colorado, “which at 13,000 feet houses the world’s highest banana farm.”
I hate to bring up these gaffes, for I subscribe to The Economist, have met one of the authors, and found great value in this book about cars and oil –“jalopies and juice,” they sometimes say in the typical dry humor of Brits — and a host of accompanying issues, including climate change, geopolitics, and resource depletion. Still, it does shake your confidence in the reporting and analysis when you see such an outlandish claim. Lovins’s house is not at 13,000 feet on a mountain. It’s in a valley, at the confluence of Snowmass and Capitol Creeks, at an elevation of 7,100 feet.
Near as I can tell, aside from this error, they got Lovins right. That’s good, because Lovins, although only making a few appearances, provides the fundamental argument. The authors, Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, maintain that American addiction to oil must be overcome, to be replaced by fuels that are less problematic. Like Lovins, they profess an abiding faith in technology and entrepreneurial innovation. But what the tinkerers and visionaries must have, they say, is a fair market — something that currently is lacking, given the hidden and not-so-hidden subsidies for fossil fuels.
Oil has any number of extraneous costs not paid at the pump. A chief cost, they maintain, is the emission of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas. The authors accept that the evidence already accumulated provides compelling support for the theory of global warming. Even if oil remains for decades, they argue, the shift to alternative fuels must begin within the decade. Transportation fuels account for 27 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, while buildings were responsible for nearly 50 percent.
But aside from greenhouse gas emissions, oil is still a problematical fuel for the United States because of our lack of domestic resources. Contrary to the chants of the Republicans, the United States cannot possibly drill its way out of dependence on foreign imports, no matter how many wilderness preserves are invaded or how many off-shore rigs are sunk.
What must be done, they argue, is to level the playing field and itemize the true cost of what economists call the externalities of our current oil dependency. Those externalities include the greenhouse gas emissions, which are hard to quantify.
Better numbers, if still somewhat squishy, can be assigned to oil-related U.S. defense costs. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, estimated that the direct cost of guarding the shipping lanes used by tankers from the Persian Gulf during the 1990s was $30 billion to $60 billion a year. During that same time, U.S. oil imports from the Middle East were only $10 billion annually.
“Oil is the problem, not cars,” write Carson and Vaitheeswaran. “That is why we must reinvent the automobile. As engines of change, the clean cars of the future can help speed the world toward a more sensible approach to transportation. The snag is getting from here to there. Big Oil clearly has no interest in seeing its main product fall by the wayside, and the Detroit car industry has shown few signs of real innovation or long-term vision.”
What is needed, they insist, is revised public policy, most importantly a gas tax. But they admit that determining the actual cost of these externalities is a problem, and they refuse to specify how much the gas tax should be.
Along the way, the authors analyze the failure of the big three Detroit automakers, a useful study in understanding the headlines of today. The book came out in October 2007, well before the bailout talk. They also visited a conference of those who believe that world oil supplies are now at or will soon be peaking, unable to keep up with increased demand. They dismiss the peak as unlikely to be reached soon, because of the ability of improved technology to better ferret out underground oil supplies. However, just because supply is available doesn’t mean that we should continue using it, they say.
This book breaks no new ground, lacks easy narratives, and is annoying for its lack of footnoting. Still, if you can ignore Amory Lovins’s house being above timberline, it’s a useful compendium of conversations about issues that really matter.
