When I heard that the World Economic Forum proposed to ban car ownership, I dismissed it as left-wing nonsense that would never get far with elected officials. But earlier this week the Scottish government announced it planned to ban car ownership as a part of its campaign to reduce per-capita driving by 20 percent by 2030.
The Scottish government plans to reduce car kilometres and discourage car use. They tell us the era of private car use is well and truly over…listen and hear the words for yourself…#Together #Scotland #SNP pic.twitter.com/PiA7eOLmhy
— Gillian McKeith (@GillianMcKeith) January 15, 2023
Of course, they say such actions are needed to reduce climate change, but the truth is that a lot of people have hated automobiles for decades and are just using climate change as an excuse to carry out their vendetta against personal mobility. They also claim to care about income inequality, but the automobile did more to reduce income inequality in the 20th century than just about anything else.
Back when people were speculating about the effects of self-driving cars, many people said that would mean the end of auto ownership. But I always believed that at least half the people would continue to own cars as it would be economically efficient for them to do so, either because they traveled enough that it would cost less to own than to share or because they lived in rural areas where car sharing wouldn’t work.
That’s all a guess, though. No one was proposing to forbid car ownership. Now they are.
Meanwhile, China’s greenhouse gas emissions are several times those of the U.S., and though it promises to zero them out by 2060, no one believes it. Anyone who is serious about reducing emissions should figure out ways to reduce them in China rather than fretting about auto emissions, which tend to be declining anyway as cars get more fuel-efficient.
I’ve been told that horses were once a primary source of transportation and that they were quite “polluting”. Over time they were replaced by cars that were and are less polluting and better at the job of transportation.
Now, on the horizon we see electric cars that may be even less polluting and with at-home charging more convenient.
Maybe someone should tell The World Economic Forum when they jet in for their next meeting.
There are two dimensions to this. The first is a desire to consolidate control over the masses which the elite view as being inferior. When you look at the type of Malthusian/social Darwinist thinking that pervaded in elite intellectual circles in the late 19th century that really just reflected a disdain for average people and a desire for elite control. It really does appear as if that way of thinking is becoming pervasive in elite circles again. Granted the right and the left articulate it differently but most of their rhetoric seems to point in this direction. Second, much of the mass support for things like this is irrational and somewhat religious in nature. There is no effort to do skeptical or systematic analysis. Once climate change or whatever other vague deity-like concept is invoked the mass swell to support what ever action is taken regardless of how irrational or extreme it might be.
No need for cars in the Ideal Communist City, Comrade.
Who can blame the Scots for being lefties? Wikipedia:
Scotland is about the same size as South Carolina. If its politicians want to ban private automobiles based on the rantings of a pigtailed Swedish woman-child high school dropout, more power to them. It will be entertaining to watch. My guess is that clown on the YouTube video will be out of a job soon after.
rovingbroker, interesting you bring up horses. Fun factoid I ran across is that 4,000 people a year died in horse accidents a year back when they were in common use. That’s just deaths and just Boston.
That’s when 20% of the population lived in cites, not 85%. Not sure how that plays out across the US as a whole in 1880. But we could easily be talking 100K+ deaths alone from horse accidents in a country of 50 million.
The US today is ~6 times larger population yet we’re talking what? 40K total car accident deaths?
Source:
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War
By: Robert J. Gordon
There is no doubt that Scotland’s huge fleet of one billion cars with no catalytic converters is the world’s number one cause of pollution. Besides Scotland is such a tiny country and everyone can walk everywhere in 15 minutes so they don’t need cars. America, however, will avoid this ban because Americans need a way to haul around all their guns. Thus, Americans realize that banning cars is a form of gun control.