Commentary: “Toward green mobility: the evolution of transport”,

Commentary: “Toward green mobility: the evolution of transport”, Jesse H. Ausubel, Cesare Marchetti and Perrin Meyer. European Review in May 1998, published by Cambridge University Press (UK) for the Academia Europaea.

I have just completed reading an excessively idiotic article on the future of transportation written by three highly intelligent, certainly well-meaning and otherwise well-informed authors, to which I would like to recommend your attention. The title of the piece is "Toward green mobility: the evolution of transport" and the identifying info on the authors and their references will be found at http://phe.rockefeller.edu/green_mobility/. I regret to put my point so harshly, but to my mind this once again provides evidence that high intelligence is no guarantee against idiocy.

Amid a certain number of pretty cogent observations taken from the transportation literature of the time (that is mainly the 80s and first half of the 90s) the authors do a good job in setting the stage for their long-term analysis, but then seem to lose their way in a most appalling manner. There they are, it's the mid-90s and they have set out to peer into a very long term future for sector. Technology and technological solutions? No problem, abundantly manifest. You will find in their pages all the usual drivel on fuel cells and Maglev and hypersonic transport that is the stuff of many technology heads wildest dreams. But what is missing from this groaning table of plenty? Here's a clue or two for you: CO2 -- no mentions. GHD -- none. Greenhouse gases -- none. Climate -- none. Warming -- none. Planet -- none. Ecology -- none.

Now why do I draw this sad misinformed disingenuous mess—and happily out dated -- to your attention this morning? First of all as a friendly challenge to any of you who find that my observations might be ungenerous or misinformed. (I'm always pleased to learn through my own mistakes.) But this kind of analysis, which given today's screamingly immediate problems (and hey! They were also evident a decade ago, so no excuses), takes a most unfortunate step away from the crush of reality when it takes out after a fifty year time horizon without any feel at all for the full state of play. It’s as if they take off for a long hike in the woods, but forget their shoes.

What is tragic in this --under the circumstances this and a lot of other things out there on the radar screen that are looking so complacently over the long term and assuring us that technology will save the day, is that it lulls us to sleep. Okay, one can (kind of) understand it when the miscreants are part of the groups that will profit each day from our diminished sense of urgency. But folks like IIASA and the Rockefeller Foundation. . . isn’t that a bit of a problem?

To conclude, I think it is really a useful drill to take the few minutes that are needed to read their dozen pages of text and three pages of references, if nothing else as a reminder of how far off many of us have been thinking about these issues in the past. As Hannah Arendt put it, the banality of . . . well if not quite evil, but what about a certain kind of hubris?

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Eric Britton