By Reginald Dale and Eve Copeland
"Greening the dream that drives America: The U.S. should put the same creativity that produced the car into tackling the energy crisis it has caused' September 18, The Times of London
This short essay, part observation from a motel window, part finger-wagging at America, and part book review, maintains that there is bad news and good news about the alleged U.S. contribution to a global energy and environmental crisis. The bad news, writes columnist Ben Macintyre, is that Americans' love affairs with their cars is heavily responsible for "a global ecological nightmare;" the good news that American expertise, ingenuity and cash can find solutions that make economic and business sense.
The first clue, however, that the author is not very familiar with America comes when he expresses surprise that "a diminutive, middle-aged woman" should be driving a bright-red pick-up truck, with a "Support our troops" bumper sticker, in military-friendly North Carolina. (Although columnist Macintyre describes the truck as a "monster," it is actually classified as a compact, family-friendly vehicle.) So it is perhaps inevitable that the column conforms to typical European stereotypes of Americans as car-crazy, gas-guzzling polluters, who are also somehow responsible for the disgraceful boom in car sales in China, India, Russia and elsewhere.
Switching abruptly to the "good news," Macintyre approvingly quotes the message of "Hot, Flat and Crowded," a new book by Thomas L. Friedman, to the effect that the "raw power of American patriotism" can be harnessed to solve a problem that their cars have largely caused. But Macintyre seems unaware both of the huge amount of research already under way into energy-efficient cars in the United States and of the latest political developments. In claiming that environmental issues "have hardly touched the U.S. election," he is apparently unaware that the bitter, highly publicized clashes been Democrats and Republicans over offshore oil drilling stem from differing views on protecting the environment.
It would have been more interesting and original (from the European point of view) to examine the mass flight of Americans from gas-guzzling Sports Utility Vehicles since oil prices went through the roof, the prospects for alternative fuel types and other forms of transport, and the reasons why Americans still need cars to traverse big distances in a way that inhabitants of a congested Europe do not.
