Are 2 billion cars a nightmare we can avoid? New book tackles the subject

Let’s look at China for a moment. The People’s Republic was founded in 1949, and it took nearly 50 years before Beijing had a million cars on its teeming streets. But in just the few years since, the capital city’s fleet has more than doubled, to 2.6 million in 2005, when 1,000 vehicles a day were being added.

Today, China uses about a third as much oil as the United States, but it won’t stay that way for long: By 2010, the country will have 36 times more cars than it had in 1990. By 2030, it could have more than the U.S., and who would be buying more oil then?

According to Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon in their provocative new book, “Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability” (Oxford University Press, $24.95), the 1.5 billion (including motorcycles and scooters) vehicles we will have by 2010 are “pumping extraordinary quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, draining the world’s conventional petroleum supplies, inciting political skirmishes over oil and overwhelming the roads of today’s cities.”

And the Third World not only wants, but also is entitled by any reasonable moral standard, to enjoy the same mobility as the west. But with global warming emissions already at a tipping point of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide (plus the specter of peak oil), how is it even possible?

Miami Herald