Running on empty: Oil spills will continue as long as we drive

Sometimes, we need to shelve the microscope and look at whatever falls into our scrutinizing eyes in large view.
Sometimes, a column needs to be a thought experiment.
So, what’s a thought I want to experiment with?
A world without cars.
Cars make us fat.
Car crashes kill more people before their time than anything else.
Cars are fueled by a resource that is not inexhaustible.
Cars pollute.
Looked at like this, it’s a wonder why tobacco and fast food companies get picked on the most as a threat to our health.
Last week’s oil spill on the Kalamazoo River (800,000 gallons!) has me thinking about all of this. Just as we finally plugged the last oil spill, another one pops its cork right here in Michigan.
The usual chatter in the media has followed. It will continue for months. It’s a narrative we’re all intensely familiar with after having gone through months of the Gulf oil spill.
The company’s at fault. The government didn’t regulate them enough, so it’s their fault. There will be a lot of devastating pictures of wildlife covered in oil. There will be pictorial diagrams of the pipe system my non-engineering mind won’t understand. There will be inscrutable acronyms. A line from a media report might sound something like: “Authorities of the GAA said the pipe wasn’t inspected by HDAD officials in over twelve months even though YWE codes call for them every eight months in odd calendar years. The HDAD is now casting blame on the GAA for negligent oversight of the YWE.”
Blah. Blah Blah.
The faux acronyms (and sarcasm) are all mine.
This is fine. The sad situation should be put under a microscope and examined in-depth so it can hopefully be prevented from happening again. Big businesses who run pipes underneath us have responsibilities to the public. So does the government, who we elect to protect the common good from “accidents” like this.
But in a broad view, how about we look at it this way: The oil spill is the fault of each and every one of us who plops our large rumps in a car each day. Myself (and my prodigious rump) included.
You can’t eat oil. You can’t build anything with it. It’s main purpose is to keep our cars running.
And America burns through some gas.
Think about the last ten times you hopped in the car. Where did you go? What did you do? Was it a necessary trip?
Probably not. If you’re like me, you hop in the car to run over to the Wesco to get an ice tea, even though it’s only a few blocks from our newspaper office.
Sometimes, we’re just riding around in our automobiles with no particular place to go.
We make needless trips because we can, because it’s our God given American right to be wasteful. That’s what liberty’s all about, right? If by pursuing our happiness we destroy the world, then so be it. Maybe man was meant to ruin the earth.
Don’t get me wrong, the internal combustion engine is a miraculous feat. Without it, our lives would be limited. There would be no Motor City, cross country road trips or the car chase in Bullitt.
These would all be bad things. Without the automobile industry, my grandparents wouldn’t have had jobs to support having children, thus no me (a negligible bit of the argument in the large view, but of vast importance to me). All we would know of the world is where our feet could take us, which slows down economic productivity and opportunity. And who doesn’t love the romance of Steve McQueen zipping around the streets of San Francisco in a muscle car.
So, alas, I know this is not a feasible, real world argument, but nor is it some liberal, hippie doomsday prophesy.
It was just a thought experiment.
But we can also experiment in real life.
This week I’m going to try a strange new thing I just discovered that doesn’t need oil, doesn’t make us fat, doesn’t kill you if you collide with another and does not pollute.
Walking.