We’re told* that in 2015 a record number of (new) automobiles were purchased in the US, and with gas so cheap this surely must mean that everything is hunky dory, that automobility is here to stay.
But what if the way we spend our money isn’t a good proxy for where things are headed, for our capacity to withstand shocks to the system, for the limits to growth? What if our public (political, biophysical) prospects can’t be deduced from our private (economic) priorities? People may have all kinds of conscious and unconscious reasons for buying a new car that fail utterly to take into account the future prospects of automobility or climate instability or gasoline price spikes. What if these purchases, collectively, resist easy extraction of a historical meaning?
Or what if, more or less consciously, we all know what’s coming, that the age of fossil fuels is very nearly over, but we’re afraid and unwilling to acknowledge this because we are terrified of the uncertainty, of what it might mean, of what will replace it? What if by buying a big shiny car instead of thinking about these unknowns we can convince ourselves that, in fact, the collapse isn’t looming? Like George W Bush exhorting us all to go out and buy stuff after 9/11. Because in our economic system when lots of stuff is bought we have learned to infer from this that everything’s hunky dory, because if things weren’t hunky dory we wouldn’t exhibit so much Consumer Confidence….
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