Paved Paradise?
Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning
February 16, 2005
"Americans may feel vaguely superior by driving around in
hybrid cars and parking in spaces provided at someone else's expense,
but they are not likely to have much effect on the oil price."
The newest mind-bogglingly moronic idea courtesy Thomas Friedman,
"Free parking anywhere in America for anyone driving a hybrid
car."
We would not normally waste our time explaining why a columnist's
proposals were lame and preposterous. It seems enough to hold
them up to the light; the ridicule comes naturally, like a laugh
after a pratfall. But here we undertake a bit of surgery. We intend
to quickly take the project apart, not in an effort to save it,
for it never really had a chance of life... but merely to dissect
the thing just to see how it is put together.
Let us say that we were to take the proposal seriously and that
tomorrow Congressmen were to eat a foul breakfast... and with
a kind of grave indigestion disturbing their thoughts and gas
pains preventing laughter... we can imagine that they make it
the law of the land.
Henceforth, a fellow with a hybrid car can park free - wherever
he wants. We will have to pass over the practical innards of the
plan - how will the owners of the parking spaces be compensated,
the paperwork, enforcement and so forth - and move to its theoretical
troubles. Readers will quickly see that in order to improve the
world in this manner, millions of private arrangements must be
dis-improved. Someone must make up the lost parking revenue. Instead
of buying an extra beer or upgrading his flight to Jamaica, the
taxpayer must divert some of his spending power - one way or another
- to pay for someone else's parking space. And those who get the
free spaces then find that they have a little extra cash in their
pockets to buy things they could not previously afford. And so
the whole world is titled, and everyone stands a little at an
angle... which is an annoyance.
Central planning would have created a world a little more to Mr.
Friedman's liking, but everyone else's world would have to be
disturbed.
But maybe it is worthwhile? Who knows? Certainly not Thomas L.
Friedman. The goal of this exercise in mass inconvenience is supposed
to be to reduce America's use of oil, thus reducing oil revenues
to Iran and Saudi Arabia, which would require these oil producers
to "reform." "There's many a slip 'twixt the cup
and the lip," as Shakespeare put it. But here, the cup and
lip might as well be on different planets. Any Americans who agreed
with Friedman are free to buy hybrid cars already. Or, they could
merely drive their existing gas-guzzlers less often. His proposal
is designed to discomfort those who don't agree with him; it is
merely a way bossing other people around, under cover of a "good
purpose."
Do hybrid cars really reduce energy consumption? We do not know,
but we doubt it. Batteries must be charged up. Where does that
energy come from? It must come from somewhere. And offering free
parking might actually encourage people to drive more. Besides,
in order for the free parking bribe to have any impact, it would
have to be widely taken up. In other worlds, the world's auto
factories would have to switch over to producing millions of hybrid
cars. Whether this would actually reduce energy consumption or
not, we don't know, but the changeover would require massive new
capital investment and retooling - which, itself, would mean the
consumption of much more energy. Then, of course, the cities would
be stuffed with cars parking for free - with a whole new energy
guzzling bureaucracy to enforce and regulate the new system.
Meanwhile, whether or not an even a smear of oil is actually saved,
the price of petroleum might still rise to $100 a barrel in a
few years. The easy oil has already been pumped out. And Asia
has three trillion people who are getting richer every day...
and beginning to lick at the world's oil supplies like lost kittens
at a bowl of milk. Americans may feel vaguely superior by driving
around in hybrid cars and parking in spaces provided at someone
else's expense, but they are not likely to have much effect on
the oil price.
But so what? Why does Friedman think that a high oil price stifles
"reform," or that the reforms that might be coming are
the ones that the world improvers want? What if Iran and Saudi
Arabia have world improvers of their own... with proposals even
more absurd, and perhaps more lethal, than Friedman's?
Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning
Editor's Note: Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of The Wall Street Journal best seller Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century (John Wiley & Sons).
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