Letter from the Road

by

David A. Harris

Executive Director, American Jewish Committee

January 30, 2002

            The road I’m talking about is Roaring Brook Road.  It’s normally a quiet country thoroughfare in northern Westchester County, except on school mornings, when it becomes a frustratingly long line of cars, minivans, and SUVs snaking down a steep hill and headed eastward for the local high school on the other side of the Saw Mill Parkway.

            By the time the vehicles make it across the parkway on the quick green light, they are joined by others that have exited the highway from both the north and south on their way to the same destination.  They inch up the hill, with the sprawling, verdant campus of Reader’s Digest on the left, while another caravan of vehicles approaches the school from the west, both lines alternating to make the turn into the school and the eventual drop-off of students or, in the case of young licensed drivers, the search for a parking space. 

            I’ve never made a proper count of the ratio of cars to light trucks (SUVs, etc.), but with each passing year it seems to be getting closer to parity.

            The scene repeats itself day in and day out: literally hundreds of cars headed for a school with barely one thousand students.

            Anyone who wants to understand America’s energy challenge should watch this morning ritual.

            The bright yellow school buses arrive practically empty.  The few students who ride them are ninth-graders.  No older student would be caught dead in the “loser cruiser,” as local kids call the school bus.  So, as many as 750-800 students who avoid the buses at all costs must arrange for other transportation.  In some cases, it’s parents who drive; in others, especially for juniors and seniors, it’s quite likely to be kids in their own cars.  That’s another feature of life here – the expectation that shortly after passing the driver’s test, there’ll be an additional car in the garage. 

            Doubtless, the same story repeats itself in suburban and rural communities across the country.  With only limited public transportation, scarce sidewalks, few bike lanes, and “uncool” school buses, it’s all about cars.

            When one concerned parent approached a local school official and suggested a student-led energy conservation initiative as a response to the events of September 11, the official essentially responded that he wouldn’t touch the idea with a ten-foot pole.  Not only would it go nowhere, he said, but it could easily provoke a backlash.  Cars, you see, are a sacrosanct subject in places like this.  Perhaps, said the persistent parent, but shouldn’t the students be challenged to do something tangible to help our nation while our servicemen and servicewomen are defending us abroad?  The official wouldn’t budge.

            The problem extends far beyond the high school.  For example, parents sometimes wait for the school buses carrying their elementary school children in cars with engines running to ensure enough warmth in winter, cool air in summer, or uninterrupted news or entertainment on the radio.  And then there are the sports travel teams, a subject on which I can claim some expertise.  With two of our sons having participated for years in competitive hockey programs that took us all over the tri-state area on weekends, the idea of a team bus or even carpooling was never taken seriously.  Instead, as a rule, each of the 15 or 20 players would travel separately with a parent as much as a couple of hundred miles every week for games, most often in a large vehicle, the preferred mode of transportation for hockey parents, at least in this part of the world.

            Meanwhile, our recent year-long experience in Europe revealed some significant differences. 

Cars are most assuredly an important feature of the Continental landscape – just try navigating the streets of Rome at rush hour or the French highways heading to the Riviera at the beginning of August – but there are at least two major distinctions. 

First, Europe has invested very heavily in energy-efficient railroads, and, with few exceptions, the networks are comprehensive, efficient, and fast.  Moreover, they are integrated into the larger transportation system, so that a passenger arriving at, say, Geneva or Frankfurt airport can board a train and either go into the city center or head directly for his final destination, for example, Lausanne or Bonn.  In stark contrast, passengers arriving at JFK or La Guardia have no train options whatsoever, and even when the long-in-coming train connection is finally completed at JFK, it will be a far cry from the European model.  Add to this the impressive urban and suburban transportation systems in many European metropolitan areas and you have a highly competitive rival for the car.

Second, SUVs are still a relative rarity on European streets.  What discourages many prospective buyers from purchasing large vehicles, apart from any possible environmental considerations, is the simple fact that gasoline is heavily taxed and thus two to three times as expensive as in the United States.

When Americans visit Europe, they are often struck by the small size of many cars, not to mention the surprisingly large number of motorcycles and motor scooters.  When we first took our children to Italy in the early 1980s, they fell in love with the adorable Cinquecento, the legendary Fiat 500, and wanted to take one home, as a play toy, that is.  But together with the Morris Mini and the Volkswagen Beetle, the Fiat 500, now in its remodeled form, has been a popular family car on the streets and highways of Europe.  Today there’s the Smart car as well, a two-seater that can more or less fit in a standard closet and appears to be selling well, its principal features being high fuel mileage and easy parking.

            Vehicle use is not the only way that Europe differs from the U.S.  When it comes to electricity, per capita use in Europe is surely lower than in the United States. 

Each time I travel to Germany, I am struck by the limited use of lighting in offices, even for senior government officials.  The same was true for the modern apartment building in Geneva in which our family lived for a year.  The lobby and corridor lighting was a fraction of what it would have been in an equivalent New York building.  Anyone who has visited an apartment building in Paris will surely remember dark public spaces that are illuminated by pushing a time-controlled button that barely allows you to get between the entrance and an apartment.  And when it comes to heating British homes in winter, I don’t remember removing my sweater very much during three-and-a-half years living in London and Oxford.  (Britain’s per capita energy consumption is 46 percent of the U.S. figure.)

            I fully recognize that energy conservation is not an especially popular subject in the United States.  As Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times on May 20, 2001:

We want big. We want fast.  We want far.  We want now.  We want 345 horsepower in a V-8 engine and 15 miles per gallon on the highway.  We drive behemoths.  We drive them alone.  This country was not built on H.O.V. lanes.  We don’t have limits.  We have liberties….We don’t care for cardigans.  Give us our 69 degrees, winter and summer.  Let there be light – no timers, no freaky-shaped long-life bulbs.

                        The mention of cardigans presumably was a reference to an American president who took seriously the issue of energy conservation – Jimmy Carter – and the ridicule he endured when he announced that he was turning down the wintertime thermostat at the White House and wearing a sweater to compensate.  Rather than follow his laudable example, many pooh-poohed the gesture, suggesting that this was hardly a sure-fire formula to enhance a politician’s popularity.

            But President Carter was reacting to the traumatic events of the 1970s – first, the Arab oil embargo of 1973, followed by the jacking up of oil prices by the OPEC cartel.  He understood that America’s Achilles’ heel was our dependence on foreign, especially Middle East, oil, and we needed to wean ourselves off this dangerous addiction, or risk the possibility of further political and economic blackmail.

            He wasn’t alone in understanding the danger.  One month before Carter took office, the American Jewish Committee adopted a far-reaching Statement on Energy:

The American Jewish Committee believes that the development of a comprehensive U.S. energy program is essential to the economic and social well-being of our country, to our national security, and to the continuance of our broad role in world affairs…the American public seems to have forgotten the 1973 crisis and the quadrupling of oil prices that followed.  Indeed, our dependence on foreign oil, particularly Arab oil, has increased over the past three years.  In 1973, we imported only 28 percent of the oil we consumed; today [in 1976] we import close to 43 percent, and the trend is upward.

            AJC offered a targeted six-point plan to achieve a substantial reduction in U.S. dependence on imported energy supplies that included “reducing wasteful energy consumption, increasing domestic supplies, and developing alternative sources of energy and the means to cope with supply cutoffs.”

            The statement served us well as we responded to specific energy policy issues in the ensuing years. In fact, during the 1970s and 1980s, there was real progress.  New fuel economy standards (Corporate Average Fuel Standards, or CAFE) were adopted that averaged 27.5 miles per gallon for cars and 20.1 m.p.g. for trucks.  A Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created to help the nation in case oil supplies were again disrupted or prices manipulated.  Research into alternative sources of energy, including geothermal, solar, wind, and shale, was undertaken.  And more stringent energy standards for appliances and construction materials were introduced.

But all this encouraging momentum came to a screeching halt about a decade ago.  Fuel economy standards were allowed by Congress and the Administration to loosen. The fleet fuel economy standards have now dropped to the lowest in the last 15 years. More generally, energy consciousness pretty much disappeared, except among a very few. 

Instead, complacency settled in.  Sure, there were those who continued to alert us to the danger of dependence on Middle East oil, but their warnings went largely unheeded.  America was seemingly awash in cheap and plentiful oil, and we thought we could confidently ignore the prophets of doom and promising new energy-saving technologies.

(According to a 2001 National Academy of Sciences study [The Economist, December 15, 2001], “[W]ith technologies that are readily available, reductions in fuel use of up to 20 percent for cars and light trucks could be achieved comfortably.”)

            As a consequence, we’ve actually experienced backsliding.  Since SUVs are classified as light trucks, not cars, they are governed by the lower mileage standards. In 1975, light trucks accounted for only 19 percent of all automotive sales, while today that figure is 50 percent.

            A recent article in the Toronto Star (January 4, 2002) revealed some rather startling facts:

[I]f SUVs were required to have the same average fuel economy as cars, the gasoline saved in the U.S. would represent more oil than could be pumped from the Alaskan wildlife refuge over the 30 years it would take to deplete its oil stocks….To look at the wastefulness of SUVs in another way, consider this: the amount of extra gas they use on average in one year, compared with cars, equals the amount of energy you’d waste if you left your refrigerator door open for six years.

            With American constituting less than five percent of the world’s population, “today one out of every seven barrels of oil produced in the world is consumed on American highways” (The New York Times, January 2, 2002).  As domestic sources of oil dry up, we today import 52 percent of our crude oil, of which, according to the Department of Energy, 29 percent comes from the Persian Gulf, principally Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq (yes, Iraq). 

The one piece of good news is that we have managed to diversify our sources of imported oil to include other, more stable suppliers as well.  Europe and Japan, on the other hand, remain far more dependent on Middle East oil. The advanced European nations, for example, import 57 percent of their oil needs from North Africa and the Persian Gulf; in the case of Japan, the figure is over 75 percent.

            After the horrific events of September 11, we have another window of opportunity to talk about energy questions.  There is far greater understanding today that the principal Middle East suppliers of oil are not necessarily our friends.  They most certainly do not share our basic values of democracy, the rule of law, emancipation of women, and religious tolerance.  In some cases, they’ve been playing a double game – alleging friendship with the West while financially propping up anti-Western regimes in the region and inculcating anti-Western hatred in their own youth.  And for years they’ve been turning a blind eye to groups within their borders that often masqueraded as “charitable organizations,” while funneling oil money to terrorist networks that target Americans and other Westerners.

            As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently wrote:

I don’t want to be dependent on Mideast oil anymore.  Countries in that region haven’t had a good century in 700 years – and they’re not going to soon.  Oil is their curse, as well as ours.  It’s corrupted their rulers, enabled them to keep their women backward and out of the work force, and prevented them from developing innovative economies that make things instead of just taking things from the ground.  They have a lot of homework to do before they will be stable allies.

            If these regimes are inherently unstable, then their oil supplies can be disrupted, making it all the more important for America not to be caught off guard.

            No one should be under any illusion about the complexity of developing a national energy policy.  There are no simple, neat formulas, no silver bullets.  Virtually all major energy decisions entail difficult trade-offs involving political, economic, diplomatic, environmental, and consumer considerations.  Elected officials, foreign governments, energy companies, power companies, car and truck manufacturers, environmental groups, and others all have a profound stake in the outcome of any debate on energy questions, and will fight tooth and nail to defend their respective interests.

            AJC today is once again deepening its involvement in these issues, just as it did in the 1970s. Presciently, AJC reestablished an Energy Task Force last spring to build on the foundations of the old policy with the addition of some new issues and emphases. Its work has only become more important since September 11.  It has drafted a proposed statement that will be debated by the Board of Governors at its February meeting in Dana Point, California.

            At the end of the day, perhaps, the true test of success will be measured mornings on Roaring Brook Road and its environs.  While I’d be reluctant to predict any positive short-term change in driving habits to and from school, car purchasing patterns, or, for that matter, energy consumption at home, I had one pleasant surprise this morning. 

At our suburban train station, I discovered that there are now ten choice parking spots for electric cars, each fitted with a recharging unit.  Now that’s an interesting and unexpected development.