House of Cars
House of Cars Bobkeenan Photography/shutterstock.com

According to an article posted last week on Bloomberg, 24 percent of homes built in 2015 had a garage that could accommodate three or more vehicles. More depressing still: Since 1992, when the Census Bureau began tracking the construction of large garages, "homebuilders have built more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments." A recent survey by a real estate consulting company revealed that one in three Americans shopping for a home want a three-car garage, therefore it is rational to build these monstrous things because it accords with the noble neoclassical economic laws of supply and demand. Only 10 percent of survey respondents felt that a one-car garage was adequate for their needs. (The post says nothing about those who did not need a garage at all.) Though the construction of large car garages has sharply declined over the years ("331,000 in 2005, to 154,000 last year"), the demand is still high enough to dissolve all illusions of current or coming cultural shifts in American transportation. We will definitely arrive at the next, warmer world with our cars.


This brings to mind a gloomy (or catastrophist) branch of the controversial social theory of accelerationism. What proponents of this line of thinking argue is that the radical transformation of our economy will only occur when its ruling mode of production and wealth-distribution, capitalism, has been entirely exhausted, utterly emptied. When there is nothing left to burn, it will finally cease to be and capital (the wealth of a society, according to the leading economist of our times, Thomas Piketty) will need new and very different plugs and circuits.

Electing Donald Trump, for example, would accelerate capitalism and it would reach not a barrier (which can be overcome) but a true limit (which cannot be overcome) sooner rather than later. That is what you get with Trump in the age of climate change—the horror of a car speeding toward a wall at the blink of an eye. With Clinton, sadly, this wall and the crash do not go away—both still happen but with the pedal off the metal and with far less hate in our guts. Even with Bernie Sanders, the wall and crash remains, but the passengers in this car are baked by the best political bud out there. Bernie, it must not be forgotten, would mostly likely have been good for economic growth, not bad. And economic growth as it is structured today is exactly the problem.

The hard fact of the matter is this: If you are not mobilizing the public for the challenges of climate change in the way the US mobilized the public for World War II (severe demand management, victory gardens, and the like), then you have not grasped the seriousness and scale of this crisis. The American economist James K. Galbraith made this point in one and the most important page of his book The Predator State.