Walter Russell Mead: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Electric Car Industry Isn’t Going to Save Us
[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.]
We all have our off days; Tom Friedman (a man I admire) had one last Sunday in a New York Times column calling for higher gas taxes and a crash program to build electric cars. As usual, he’s worried about the right things and is even ahead of the curve. The piece raises some serious questions about the future of the American middle class, our dependency on gasoline creates both environmental and security problems, and China in particular is making some long term investments in infrastructure that are likely to exacerbate some of the competitive issues we currently face. But electric cars won’t save the American middle class. They won’t even save China....
Unless you are a laissez-faire purist Friedman scores some telling points. The United States has neglected its infrastructure investments in recent decades. President Eisenhower’s interstate highway system was a good thing; introduced in the 1950s even as Eisenhower worked to control federal spending in the shadow of our enormous war debts from World War Two and the Korean War, the interstate highway system was an important contribution to our postwar prosperity. Infrastructure investments create jobs in the short term and in the long term they reduce costs, create new opportunities and support economic growth (bridges to nowhere excepted). The development of high speed rail is a good thing and I’d like to see the US do some more of this; government participation in the original US rail network was not without scandal (Credit Mobilier anyone?) but it was still a good thing to have train service to California. America, less densely populated with larger distances to cover, has always had a little less use for trains than Europe; on the whole, however, government support for this sector seems to have paid off over time. From the Erie Canal to the present day, federal and state promotion of infrastructure development has had a lot of waste and fraud associated with it — but it has also done a lot of good....
Counter-intuitive as it may seem, it is frequently a smart strategy to let other people pay the massive development costs for new technology while you sit back, wait, and then reverse engineer whatever they do to come up with some way around their patents. I’m told that McDonald’s used to spend a lot of time and money researching the best possible place for a new hamburger stand. Burger King had a cheaper strategy; it waited for McDonald’s to hire consultants, carry out extensive traffic surveys, compare several potential locations and finally build — and then Burger King simply built across the street. Burger King might not have gotten the absolute best spot, but they would come close — and for a lot less money.
The Burger King plan works pretty well in the real world; I have less confidence about the environmental benefits of electric cars. What if the heavy new demand for electricity means a politically irresistible demand for more coal-fired electricity plants? Greens want us to shift from coal, the cheapest and most secure fuel for electricity generation, toward more expensive sources like wind. If a significant chunk of the transportation system moves to electricity, I don’t think this will happen. If the electric car lobby wins out, coal (and nuclear) power could loom very large in our future. Electric car drivers will want cheap electricity just as much as gasoline-powered drivers want cheap gas — and when and if electric car ownership becomes widespread, the ‘cheap electricity’ lobby will be as powerful as the anti-gasoline tax lobby is today....
Read entire article at American Interest
We all have our off days; Tom Friedman (a man I admire) had one last Sunday in a New York Times column calling for higher gas taxes and a crash program to build electric cars. As usual, he’s worried about the right things and is even ahead of the curve. The piece raises some serious questions about the future of the American middle class, our dependency on gasoline creates both environmental and security problems, and China in particular is making some long term investments in infrastructure that are likely to exacerbate some of the competitive issues we currently face. But electric cars won’t save the American middle class. They won’t even save China....
Unless you are a laissez-faire purist Friedman scores some telling points. The United States has neglected its infrastructure investments in recent decades. President Eisenhower’s interstate highway system was a good thing; introduced in the 1950s even as Eisenhower worked to control federal spending in the shadow of our enormous war debts from World War Two and the Korean War, the interstate highway system was an important contribution to our postwar prosperity. Infrastructure investments create jobs in the short term and in the long term they reduce costs, create new opportunities and support economic growth (bridges to nowhere excepted). The development of high speed rail is a good thing and I’d like to see the US do some more of this; government participation in the original US rail network was not without scandal (Credit Mobilier anyone?) but it was still a good thing to have train service to California. America, less densely populated with larger distances to cover, has always had a little less use for trains than Europe; on the whole, however, government support for this sector seems to have paid off over time. From the Erie Canal to the present day, federal and state promotion of infrastructure development has had a lot of waste and fraud associated with it — but it has also done a lot of good....
Counter-intuitive as it may seem, it is frequently a smart strategy to let other people pay the massive development costs for new technology while you sit back, wait, and then reverse engineer whatever they do to come up with some way around their patents. I’m told that McDonald’s used to spend a lot of time and money researching the best possible place for a new hamburger stand. Burger King had a cheaper strategy; it waited for McDonald’s to hire consultants, carry out extensive traffic surveys, compare several potential locations and finally build — and then Burger King simply built across the street. Burger King might not have gotten the absolute best spot, but they would come close — and for a lot less money.
The Burger King plan works pretty well in the real world; I have less confidence about the environmental benefits of electric cars. What if the heavy new demand for electricity means a politically irresistible demand for more coal-fired electricity plants? Greens want us to shift from coal, the cheapest and most secure fuel for electricity generation, toward more expensive sources like wind. If a significant chunk of the transportation system moves to electricity, I don’t think this will happen. If the electric car lobby wins out, coal (and nuclear) power could loom very large in our future. Electric car drivers will want cheap electricity just as much as gasoline-powered drivers want cheap gas — and when and if electric car ownership becomes widespread, the ‘cheap electricity’ lobby will be as powerful as the anti-gasoline tax lobby is today....