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February 23, 2009
An interesting article on the auto-industry by Emma Rothschild in the New York Review of Books Is the bailout an indication of the decline of this industry in the context of the shift to a low-carbon economy? Rothschild says, in relation to the US, that
the auto-industrial society, with its distinctive organization of American space, cities, highways, social entitlement, and energy use, has continued to flourish. Some 90 percent of Americans drove to work in 2007, 76 percent of them alone. Less than 5 percent went to work by public transportation. The people who used public transportation were much more likely than other Americans to be black or poor; they were more likely to be women than men; most of them lived in New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The states in which population has increased most rapidly—Utah, Arizona, Texas, Nevada —have low population densities, and low rates of public transportation use.
WA, Queensland and Northern Territory come to mind in Australia. Rothschild adds that
an enduring bailout, or a new deal for Detroit, would be different. It would be an investment in ending the auto-industrial society of the late twentieth century. This would involve innovation in public transportation, and in the infrastructure that would enable people to work at home or close to home. It would engage the information industries in making public transport more convenient, more enticing, and more secure.
What we have in Australia are subsidies for a green car ie.,to Toyota to assemble hybrid Camry's) and little attempt to address the viability of the local industry, let alone the dysfunctionality of the mode of life of the auto-industrial society.
What we don't have is a deal in which the bailout of the automobile industry was one component of a program of investment in the transformation of the auto-industrial society would connect economic, environmental, and energy policies. It would involve innovation in public transportation, and in the infrastructure that would enable people to work at home or close to home.
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So the Rudd Government has a massive public investment($6.2 billion) in a declining industry that has been reduced to corporate begging? The fiction in Australia is that everything will be hunky dory, even though the car industry was in deep trouble before the financial crisis. In trouble because its production and product was geared to another era.