Umbrage

A scathing rebuttal! I had to result to insults to finally get a comment on the Monologues. I alluded to an invisible 100 foot tether between my sister's ankle and her car and that sent her over the edge!

I actually like that visual, that's some clever shit. Just like some car alarms used to say "Please step away from the vehicle," I see one whose owner leaves its 100 foot perimeter and a shock collar keeps him in line. Zaap. "Where are you going, Dave?"

I decry my suburbia and assume that with a better, more human scaled environment, I should be able to caper about with fewer vehicles. So I look to my sister who does live in such a place and who's as socially responsible as they come and wa-la! One vehicle per human!

Here's the deal. First off, you have to accept my bias, my personal contempt for the way we've laid out transportation. Then you have to accept my hypocrisy, someone who continues to own more than one vehicle per human. If you can accept this, then realize that the US has over 800 cars per 1,000 people...far in excess of every other industrialized country. It's not much of a stretch to equate this with an invisible tether...you gotta wash them, finance them, maintain them, lock and alarm them, insure them, register them, smog them, gas them, oil them, make payments on them, and hope they don't get stolen or you don't wreck them. About 20% of a vehicle's total energy drawdown comes from its manufacturing and disposal. Driving it less doesn't affect these energy inputs. Owning two cars that are driven less than one makes no energy sense, outside of financial sense.

It is exceedingly difficult to find one job that's close to work, or close by way of public transportation. Then, to suppose that a two income household can find two jobs close to the same residence, well, that's nigh impossible, now isn't it...but somehow, elsewhere, in every other nation on earth, they manage with fewer vehicles. What enables them? If you take the argument that your job mandates some vehicular provenance, won't everyone do the same?

But they are doing the same! Consider the staggering impact of moving China from 35 cars per 1,000 to 800! Modeled after us. They have as many cars per person, now, as we did in 1916.

One has to pay a mint, has to have two incomes, to live in a human scaled world because we don't build them anymore, while scads of people clamor for them. But somewhere I must have gone wholly wrong in my assessment that these environments can reduce vehicle ownership. Apparently, physical form can only do so much. Reducing the number of vehicles, apparently, calls for a reduction in living standards, perceived or real. I don't think it has to be this way...but it is.

I concur, however, with the impact of spawn. I have always known of the population bomb, even before I seeded Tyler. There is a virtual one-to-one correlation to energy utilization and population...this is exactly why I fear the development of cars that run on water. We would see an overnight jump to 1,200 cars per 1,000, we'd fucker up ever more habitat, grow ever more, constrain every other natural resource ever more...

Perhaps she also didn't take well my implication that she's the emissary of a consumptive, bankrupt empire in steep decline. That, my dear sis, was a full-on sarcastic insult! Play on!