Tooches Tsekaert (Arse Backward)

Gawd, those poor hard-done-by automobile manufacturers, it's just heart-wrenching to see their plight. First of all, the North-American-based automobile manufacturers have continued, year after year, to bring out new profiles, newer models, refining the aesthetic appearance of cars and trucks, taking great care to design cup-holders handy to the driver, while overlooking the gas consumption of those monstrosities that too many people have become wedded to, those hybrids, the SUVs, the ubiquitous vans that clog highways and gleefully burn fuel, fouling our atmosphere.

Yes, when the oil-supply crisis erupted decades ago, consumers were hit hard and began to look for feasible alternatives to those big-bodied, large-engined road hogs that ate up all their disposable income just to keep them in operation - and at a time when oil shortages seemed a fixture in the economy. Out came the new designs and everyone loved the scaled-down compacts and sub-compacts. Once supply settled down nicely and seemed secure, though, the automobile manufacturers went right back to the design board, Xing out all those nice little alternative vehicles and introducing those monster road hogs again.

And didn't the buying public love them? Drive anywhere in the U.S. and all you see is SUVs lumbering around, with the odd humble little passenger vehicle trying to keep out of the way of the big boys. In Canada, there's plenty of SUVs around, but the humble van is the choice of most families; zuftig and gas-guzzling to a fault. But hey, they're inexpensive, 'good value' for the money. Cheaply constructed, almost throw-aways, see what they're worth in the used-car market.

So who is really responsible for the energy-shambles we find ourselves in today world-wide, with the spectre of global warming and climate change looming large and hard, very hard to ignore? Well, plenty of causes, and many scientists claim on the evidence at hand that we're to blame, and maybe just incidentally the normal course of nature as well. Still, we don't know exactly what's around the corner into the future; we do know that things are not what they were, nor what they should be.

In the Alberta oilsands, a senior Canadian petroleum executive pronounced that the Government of Canada shouldn't 'punish' his industry with excessive regulations to reduce the pollution that causes global warming. Suncor vice-president for sustainable development Gordon Lambert (don't laugh!) claims his company has already made investments in greening its operations, improving efficiency without any devastating consequences. Nice to hear. No job losses predicted. Sounds suspiciously like business as usual.

Yet, look here: car manufacturers claim they can go only so far in improving the fuel efficiency of new vehicles rolling off the assembly line - until Canada kicks its singular 'addiction to gasoline'. No kidding! They like the idea of alternative fuels; biofuels, for example; not me. They're talking food now, comestibles, what people eat - forget it, biofuels are not meant to nourish metal beasts roaming our highways. Is that practical?

The manufacturers like to claim they've been doing their part to improve fuel efficiency, but that alone, they say, won't achieve the kind of deep cuts government is looking for. Back to the drawing board, fellas. "Right now we are suffering from a lack of diversity of solutions for people in the marketplace because we are beholden to gasoline as the dominant source of mobility" (huh?) claims David Paterson, vice president of corporate and environmental affairs for General Motors. Like that title? It's so...pious.

So it's not the industry's fault that vehicles run on gasoline. It's...government's fault, it's...the fault of the consumer who blithely purchases the vehicles designed by, who else? car manufacturers. Who are innocent in all of this; they're just providing what the public is clamouring for. More and bigger. And, said John Mann, director of engineering and regulatory affairs (there we go again with the doublespeak titles) for DaimlerChrysler, the problem manufacturers face is that carmakers don't want to 'waste time and huge sums of money creating new models that rely on a fuel that may never be readily avaiable'.

Oh. How naive; here I always thought that manufacturers of widgets and everything else plow part of their profit regularly back into research and development. Ah - all the R & D car manufacturers indulge in is classy new chassis; engineering and alternative energy source potentials be damned, evidently. The manufacturers want a reliable new energy source on which to design their goods that the public will flock to purchase. But they want some other agency: government, university, industry, private laboratories, to invest and to single out viably reliable energy sources.

Then they'll jump into action. Design appropriate vehicles which will run on these new energy sources; reliable, clean-burning, efficient, plentiful.