Tax Cars, Subsidize Bikes

Some "foodie" named Mark Bittman wrote an article in the New York Times calling for the government (because we all know they don't have enough to do lately!) to levy sin taxes on pop and processed foods, the building blocks of the Standard American Diet. The way we eat makes him SAD. He proposes using this tax money to found a program to make healthy food more widely available and teach people how to cook it. Which is nice in theory, except that these things never work out as intended and that revenue will go where it always does, a tax cut for the top 10% of Americans.

The comparison to anti-tobacco programs is a shaky one at best. The link between smoking and cancer is direct; the link between obesity and diet, not so much. (Otherwise, I'd weigh four hundred pounds! Seriously, my diet sucks and I should probably do something about it eventually.) The link between obesity and ill health, again, there's a link but it's not a direct one in the way that smoking and cancer are directly linked. And fast food is still food, which is something you need to keep living. It's definitely not the best food, but nothing pisses me off quite as much as food fascists who smugly declare that Taco Bell isn't food.

But you know what's a better analogy? Driving. Just like eating, transportation is a necessity. And just like the government has subsidized corn and soybean manufacturers for more and for longer than we ever should have, it has also subsidized and bailed out oil companies and car makers. We've bent our infrastructure around the almighty car, just as much as we've bent our diet around what's cheapest and easiest. Just like some people in the inner city live in food deserts, people in Houston or South Podunk live in transportation deserts, wherein car-less transportation is only theoretically possible, forcing people to chain themselves to expensive, dangerous steel cages whether they want to or not. Even exercising can be impossible in those kind of places if you don't have access to a car. I grew up in a suburb/small town where there weren't even any sidewalks to walk or jog on, and where if you wanted to do some hardcore exercising, you had to join a gym, which required the cage! That's some vicious circle, dude, and it's no wonder that lots of people just stay home. They've spent too much time in the cage that day already.

And that's not even getting into the health effects of driving! Did you know that sitting will kill you? How about commuting? It seems to me that the car is at least as bad for you as fast food, and possibly worse. So why single out food?

In Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization (which is awesome, by the way), Jeff Rubin talks extensively about the gross, egregious subsidies that our government uses to keep the price of oil lower than it has any right to be. He also talks about the sky-high subsidies that developing nations like India and China are giving their drivers as a way to usher them into modernity, even as the modern world is realizing that car culture is not long-term sustainable.

I picture a world in which Americans (and Canadians and Australians and Indians and the Chinese) are forced to pay the real cost for their oil, a cost which includes carbon offsets because that's an integral part of oil use. A world where "fitness" is not something you do after work or on your lunch break, because everything you do requires physical effort, whether you're walking to the store or biking to work. And although I'm not any kind of expert, I sorta think that emphasizing physical activity and making our communities a good place to walk and bike would do a hell of a lot more good for our collective physical and mental health than slapping French fries out of someone's hand, saying "no!," and telling them what they should be eating instead. (Fun fact: Poor people already know this. They are not dumb.)

And guess what? A society where people don't drive as much, and don't import as much food as they used to due to carbon taxes being taken seriously, is by necessity a locavore society except for the upper 10% of income earners who can afford to buy fancy imported Big Macs and Kobe beef. My dream of high carbon/oil taxes isn't too dissimilar from Bittman's dream of taxing "bad" foods, except that I'm cutting to the source of the problem, not the effect.

So, don't look down on me for eating poorly, and attempt to change my behavior, not unless you're prepared to turn the camera right back on yourself and admit that you, too, benefit from Standard American Transportation (SAT... this is also an apt acronym!). Fast food, and the people who enjoy it or who see it as a necessary evil due to living in food deserts, is an easy target. But make no mistake: what got us to this point is globalization and the deceptively cheap oil that makes it possible. Sin taxing fast food is a surface-level "fix" that allows foodies to sneer at fatties without doing anything to solve structural problems. Let he who is without sin cast the first, uh, tax.

The Car That Farts Rainbows

An editorial in last week's Baltimore Sun got me to thinking. The story, for those not clicking: When aggressive government subsidies allowed Swedes to easily purchase electric hybrid cars, use of the cheap-to-run cars, and concurrent pollution, went up. The hypothesis is that if cars are cheaper to run, people (being morons) will take that as a green light to use them more. In fact, considering how normally environmentally conscious Swedes are, we could expect an even greater overuse in electric cars in America. If we overuse cars now when it's expensive, just you wait, rest of the world! We'll drive from here to the next block, just because we CAN. (Oh, shit, we already do that? Nevermind.)

This article made me wonder about whether I'd be so anti-car if fully electric cars became mainstream, and really did cost some ridiculously small amount of money per day to run, and didn't kill the environment. Say that they actually, in some science fiction twist, helped the environment. How much of my hatred of cars is due to the environment, and how much is due to the fact that I hate and suck at driving? The answer: it's almost all because I hate and suck at driving. If there were an electric car that was somehow better for the environment than my bicycle, thereby making me the awful polluter, I would continue to rail against cars and sprawl. My reasons for being an anti-car/pro-walking/biking advocate are not altruistic, but selfish. Ayn Rand did teach me something, after all!

Oh, there's other reasons to hate cars besides the damage they do to the environment. Truth be told, even before having this epiphany last night, the environment wasn't even in the top five list of why I hate cars. (Want the top five? Driving's boring, They're expensive, They're dangerous, Sprawl Sprawl Sprawl, Biking/walking helps me think in ways driving doesn't.) Maybe we'll render the Earth uninhabitable by 2100 through our own actions, but I'm not going to live that long! But meanwhile, I DO have to live in a world where you can't (in most places) get a job without a car, where walking or biking to the nearest grocery store can be a minefield, where your choice of transportation (and once I do get a license, not driving WILL be a choice for me) informs your life decisions instead of merely being the way you get from Point A to Point B.

The fact is, the way we live now--especially in the suburbs--is not healthy and it's not because of smog or obesity. It's because when you remove the place you work from the place you live and the place you play, it creates a fractured kind of existence. Hell, we even have a separate place to get exercise, instead of getting it just from our daily interactions with society. I'm not a spiritual person, but I'll be damned if this fracturing isn't at the root of a lot of what's wrong with the world and with our selves. And that's my high-horse bicycle advocacy moment for the day.

Time Travel for Poor People

Today marks the first day of Daylight Savings Time, the happiest half of the year. As I didn't know very much about Daylight Savings Time other than that I think it's awesome, I took it upon myself to fall into the Wikipedia trap and learn a little something.

First of all, the real name of it is Daylight Saving Time. Because the inventors were not hicks who add a superfluous "s" to everything. Anyways, moving on.

George Vernon Hudson

DST's original proponent was an amateur entomologist named George Vernon Hudson, who hailed from New Zealand, one of the upside-down lands. Hudson realized that shifting the clock one hour forward would give him more time to collect bugs, and also to maintain the complex series of straps and pulleys that all denizens of the upside-down lands must use in order to keep them tied to the Earth's surface. The idea was then stolen by Englishman William Willett, who allowed it to take over his entire life. Like an old man incensed by a proposed skate park, he wrote letters to the paper promoting "British Summer-Tyme," published proto-zines on the topic, and wore a large clock around his neck set an hour early, always proclaiming "yeaaaahhh, chaaap!" He did not live to see his dream become reality, dying of influenza because he pawned his coat to buy a thousand "Spring Forward!" promotional 1" pins for members of Parliament.

Many people think that DST is an energy saver, which is one of the reasons it's practiced so widely. But in fact, there is almost no real energy savings, and some energy losses, since people tend to drive more when the sun is out. Seasonal depression is lessened, but skin cancer rates rise. Retailers like DST because people spend more, but it is hated by bars and farmers, the former because people don't like sitting in dank bars spending money when the sun is out, the latter because corn knows that it's really an hour later and stubbornly slows its growth in protest. DST has been shown to reduce crime. Even murderers would rather enjoy the sun's rays than sit in some dark basement going all Dexter on someone. Basically, the statistics are mixed and can be skewed either way depending on your objective, like all statistics.

As a fan of daylight who can't easily get up before nine a.m. without assistance, I love DST. Yeah, I'm pretty jet-lagged for a week after it goes into effect (though it's worse in the fall), but it's a small price to pay for being able to romp outside for an extra hour longer for the next six (and now eight, thanks, Obama!) months. If it were up to me, we would have year-round DST, at least until the funding comes through to build a giant replica of the sun to shine 24/7/365, angering farmers everywhere.