Sociology. Anthony Giddens
to school or visiting nearby friends and relatives. But large-scale car-ownership and use generates large amounts of pollution and waste and is a major contributor to greenhouse gases. Why has it proved so difficult to reduce our use of the car?
Most drivers are extremely reluctant to give up the family car, 4 × 4, SUV or small hatchback on purely environmental grounds, despite a growing body of evidence demonstrating the negative aspects of private car-ownership. Thousands of deaths are due to low-level vehicle pollution in urban areas, and residential streets are blighted by mass vehicle ownership, yet the private car remains deeply enmeshed in our daily lives (Mattioli 2014). A partial explanation of this is that the car is extremely functional for the conduct of modern life. Many cities have been built around vehicle movements rather than cycling or walking, and, as Shove and her colleagues argue, cars are ‘[a] consequence of the extent to which driving has become integral to the conduct of an increasing range of social practices including shopping, commuting and getting to school’ (Shove et al.: 2015: 275).
One survey of attitudes to car-ownership found a range of consumer types among visitors to National Trust properties in the north-west of England (Anable 2005). The largest group consisted of Malcontented Motorists. They are unhappy with many aspects of their car use but feel that public transport has too many constraints to be a genuine alternative, so they do not switch. Second are Complacent Car Addicts, who accept that there are alternatives to using the car but do not feel any pressing moral imperative to change. Third are Aspiring Environmentalists. This group has already reduced their usage but feel the car has advantages that force them not to give it up altogether. Fourth are Die-hard Drivers, who feel they have a right to drive, enjoy driving and have negative feelings towards other modes of transportation, such as buses and trains. Fifth, Car-less Crusaders have given up their cars for environmental reasons and see alternative modes of travel in a positive light. Last are the Reluctant Riders, who use public transport but would prefer to use a car; however, for a variety of reasons, such as health problems, they cannot do this, but will accept lifts from others. This study shows that blanket appeals to an emerging environmental awareness to promote public transport use and a shift to electric cars are likely to fail. Instead, ‘the segmentation approach illustrates that policy interventions need to be responsive to the different motivations and constraints of the sub-groups’ (ibid.: 77).
Some sociologists argue that, seen in the long term, the ‘century of the car’ may be coming to an end anyway, as oil supplies have peaked, the mitigation of global warming is leading to a push for new, ‘low-carbon’ technologies, and rising population levels make mass individual car-ownership unsustainable (Dennis and Urry 2009). The current shift towards electric vehicles, particularly cars, vans and buses, may offer a way of radically cutting CO2 emissions while maintaining the freedom of movement that many people have grown used to.
USING YOUR SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
5.3 The car is dead – long live the car?
In the UK, transport emissions accounted for around 28 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2016, while cars, vans and HGVs made up some 87 per cent of these (Committee on Climate Change 2018: 150). Encouraging and facilitating the move away from petrol and diesel to electric cars would therefore make a major contribution to hitting the UK’s target of net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. And though electric car sales are increasing, by 2020 the take-up was not rapid.
In Norway, by contrast, electric car-ownership has increased rapidly since 2010. In March 2019, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) made up 58.9 per cent of the country’s new car sales. In the UK, the figure was just 0.9 per cent (Browning 2019). Indeed, Norway is a leader in switching from fossil-fuelled to electric cars. Transport analysts point to the many benefits and government incentives which encourage Norwegian consumers to make the move. For example, electric car owners do not pay the 25 per cent VAT on the purchase, and they can use bus lanes, park for free in many car parks and parking areas, charge for free at the kerbside, and pay no or reduced road tolls (Lindeman 2018).
Norway’s electric car revolution is much lauded, but it has been built on a raft of government incentives, such as free city-centre car parks for electric cars. Will other governments be prepared to commit to this approach?
Yet Norway’s economic success is far from an environmentalist’s dream, as its wealth since the 1980s has actually been built on fossil fuels. Around half of Norway’s export earnings are from oil and gas, and in 2017 the country became the second largest gas exporter behind Russia (Perrone 2019). The generous electric car incentives are also gradually being reined in. At the time of writing, there are plans to remove the VAT exemption in 2020, to end free battery charging, and to impose road tolls on BEVs. However, petrol and diesel vehicles will still face higher taxes and charges than BEVs, keeping the latter as a competitive option. Whether other countries are prepared or even able to follow Norway’s lead remains, for now, an open question.
THINKING CRITICALLY
The shift to electric vehicles seems to be a sensible solution to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from transport and urban pollution. Why might it not be the panacea for global warming that some perceive it to be? How else could transport emissions be radically reduced, and what changes would be needed to bring it about?
Yet we should remember that electric cars are still cars – they have to be manufactured, powered and disposed of at the end of their life, they need parking spaces and roads, and they bring about traffic congestion. Therefore they continue to generate similar social and environmental problems to other types of car. In addition, electric vehicles are environmentally beneficial only if the electricity they use is produced from low- or zero-carbon sources such as Norway’s hydro-electric system or renewables such as solar or wind. And even here the mass take-up of electric cars will require a major expansion of electricity generation capacity. Where coal, oil and gas remain key planks of a country’s energy mix, the environmental benefits of electric cars may not be so clear.
Dennis and Urry argue that the twentieth-century ‘car system’ of mass individual ownership of petrol-fuelled vehicles driving around extensive road networks may not survive in its present form, and they are likely to be correct. But the ‘electric car system’ of the future, despite playing a key role in reducing CO2 emissions, currently looks a lot like the old oil-based one. At least in the short to medium term, the private car looks set to retain its symbolic value as part of the transition to independent living and adulthood as well as embodying the modern ideals of freedom and liberation.
Consumerism: a romantic ethic?
A further aspect of modern consumerism is its pleasurable aspect. But why is it pleasurable? Some have argued that the pleasure of consumerism lies not in the use of products but in the anticipation of purchasing them. Colin Campbell (1992) argues that this is the most pleasurable part of the process – the wanting, the longing after, the seeking out and desiring of products, not the use of them. It is a ‘romantic ethic’ of consumption based on desire and longing. Marketing of products and services draws on this anticipatory consumerism in seductive ways to create and intensify people’s desires. That is why we keep going back for more and are never truly satisfied.
From an environmental perspective, the ‘romantic ethic’ of consumerism is disastrous. We constantly demand new products and more of them. That means more production, so the cycle of mass production and mass consumption continues to churn out pollution and wastes natural resources. At the input side of production, natural resources are used up in enormous quantities, and, at the output end in consumption, people throw away