Paul Hawken: Auto industry Not So Green
By John O'Dell February 7, 2008
One of the great thinkers in the green movement, Paul Hawken is author of six acclaimed books including Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
, which Bill Clinton has called one of the five most important books in the world today. He has founded a number of green companies, including several of the first natural food companies in the U.S that relied solely on sustainable agricultural methods, and Smith & Hawken, the garden and catalog retailer.
Hawken also is in demand as a keynote speaker at major conferences and this week was at the Systems, Cities & Sustainable Mobility Summit hosted by the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Here are snippets from his speech that touched on automotive issues:
Nikolas Otto, in 1876, invented the internal combustion engine... If you opened the hood of a car today and put the electronics aside, he could tell you what's going on there. Nothing [else] we have has remained static that long in industrial society. But 50 years before him, Robert Anderson invented the electric car. And so far, successfully, the only place we've really been able to place electric cars is on the moon.
-o-
Even the National Academy of Engineering has said that the United States on a good day -- on a good day -- is [only] 2 percent efficient, thermodynamically speaking. And that means that if somebody gets in a 6,000-pound SUV before Leno to get a pint of Chubby Hubby at 7-Eleven and comes back and that ice cream's been shipped across Vermont [home of Chubby Hubby maker Ben & Jerry's] during the summer in a refrigerated van, that's inefficient. Right? That's not 2 percent efficient -o-
Last night, I was in a big R & D center in Detroit, looking at cars of the future -- and they're not. They're not. Why? … there is this 'plaint there that 'the customer is making us do it' [and] 'Well, it's what the customer wants.' But Henry Ford himself said, 'If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said, "We want faster horses."' [Ford] imagined what was way ahead of what people imagined.
Scott Doggett, Contributor
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Scott, the guy makes perfect sense....mostly.
But I understand why the traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) has been so succesful and will be for sometime. The fact remains that it is still very difficult or nearly impossible to find other energy sources as well suited to vehicles as petrol and diesel. The technology might be more than 100 years old but, despite all the pollution and CO2 problems, petrol and diesel still get the job done best. That's the reality.
Of course, where I agree with him is that automakers have not put enough effort in developing cars that use more environmentally-friendly energy sources. (Had they put in that effort 50 years ago, petrol and diesel might no longer be the most appropriate energy sources fo vehicles.) They are partly right in blaming the customer, because customers do not want the sacrifices that the earlier stages of developing electric-car technology would require. This is where the government should create laws/policies to force or persuade automakers to develop these cars and consumers to make the sacrifices.....but then the same automakers lobby against such legislation because they simply don't want to spend the R&D money/resources.
As long as the government is not bold enough to make the neessary rules, what the author saw at that Detroit factory will continue (until environmental problems skyrocket out of control). Sad but true.
One thing I'd say in defence of automakers is that vehicles emit "only" 30% of CO2 emissions, but they get all the negative attention. WHy is nobody putting pressure on the causes of the other 70%?
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