http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22333
Volume 56, Number 3 · February 26, 2009
Can We Transform the Auto-Industrial Society?
By Emma Rothschild
The cataclysm of the American automobile industry has been an odd
combination, so far, of immediate and historical anxieties. The
government loan of $13.4 billion to General Motors and Chrysler in
December 2008 was presented by the outgoing administration as an
unsolicited gift, lest a "disorderly liquidation of American auto
companies" should "leave the next President to confront the demise of a
major American industry in his first days of office." It was restricted
explicitly to the very short term: "The firms must use these funds to
become financially viable.... In the event that firms have not attained
viability by March 31, 2009, the loan will be called."[1]
But there are also intimations of the deep past and the distant future.
The present and impending disorder of the automobile companies is a
reminder, even more than the decline of the housing and banking
industries, of the desolation of the Great Depression. It is a reminder,
too, of economic history, or of the rise and decline of industrial
destinies. When the listing of the "Fortune 500" began in 1955, General
Motors was the largest American corporation, and it was one of the three
largest, measured in revenues, every year until 2007.[2] GM was the
"largest industrial corporation in the world," in its own description of
1989, and it was engaged, at the time, in "the most massive
reindustrialization program ever attempted."[3] It was an incarnation of
American economic change, as a GM vice-president suggested during the
earlier automotive crisis of 1973: "To say that a company that has
successfully grown over a period of 65 years—a period marked by two
world wars and a major economic depression—will suddenly be unable to
adapt to the changing challenge...flies in the face of common sense"; it
"denies history."[4]
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The distant future, in these frightening times, includes the prospect of
a low-carbon economy. According to the energy plan outlined by the
Obama-Biden campaign, overall US emissions of carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases will by 2050 have been reduced by 80 percent, from more
than twenty tons per person per year in 1990 to some 2.6 tons per
person.[5] Cars and light trucks now account for about 20 percent of US
greenhouse gas emissions, or more than four tons per person per year,
and more than 40 percent of US oil consumption.[6] "The UAW shares the
growing national concern about climate change," the president of the
United Auto Workers union told a congressional committee in 2007; even
the president of GM said that "GM is willing to engage in discussions on
carbon constraints on the US economy."[7]
The initial challenge for the new administration, like the earliest work
of the New Deal, in Edmund Wilson's description, is likely to consist in
"the stocktaking of the country's resources, the inquiry into the
condition of the people and the development of some equitable plan for
enabling the people at large to get the benefit of these resources."[8]
In a stocktaking of recent economic history, and of the thirty-year
experiment in market ideology that began with the Thatcher and Reagan
revolutions of the 1970s, the evolution of the automobile industry, of
energy use in transportation, and of American land use has led to a
peculiarly bitter destiny.
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