We look at the new book by David Obst, author of Saving Ourselves from Big Car, see more about the book here .
Saving Ourselves from Big Car, reviewed
This book is compelling, shocking, and yet, in many ways also quite unsurprising. Much like climate change denial narratives and lobbyists funded by the petro-carbon industries, why would come as any surprise that the opposition to costly car related safety legislation would be heavily funded by the car industry themselves. The consequences of undermining accurate science and growing awareness of dangers of using lead in our car fuels? Many millions of unnecessary deaths. Obst quietly, but strongly and effectively details the suppression of inconvenient truths, over decades and decades, with the huge loss of life as a consequence.
Obst names the contradiction that he does drive a car, but, at the same time effectively explaining that there were many possible paths that the movement of humans could have followed over the last century. Time and time again, money and vested interests won out, including insurance companies working in lockstep with the automobile industry, to ensure billions of profits went to a very small minority of people. Time and time again it was profits before people.
Thankfully the book is not unrelenting gloom, rather an informed and accurate dissection of how we have been lied to, repeatedly, and with no concern of humanity’s best interest versus maximising profits. The final sections detail some better, and more hopeful scenarios. As always the goal is mobility surely, rather than driving the most possible profits to private companies. There are positive case studies and reasons for hope, it is just a shame that, along the way over the last century so much damage has been done to the planet, and all the lives cut short due to fight back against seatbelts, rollbars and numerous other features that would have kept drivers and pedestrians alive otherwise.
An important and timely book. Well worth reading.
How Big Car Took Over The World
More about Big Car
Cars are killing people and making the planet uninhabitable. Crashes take the lives of more than a million people around the world each year. Air pollution linked to motor vehicles contributes to even more untimely deaths. Highways and unsafe streets have devastated cities, yet traffic congestion still swallows up countless hours. And carbon emissions from transportation are a key driver of climate change, which now threatens to make the world unlivable. Why do we still worship at the altar of the car? How can we find alternatives that are healthier for the planet and ourselves?
This book exposes how “Big Car”—the complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench car dependence—has pursued profit at the expense of the common good. David Obst explores how Big Car gained almost immeasurable influence over our lives, weighing the benefits and the costs of reliance on private automobiles. He details how industry covered up the harms of lead additives, fought against seatbelts, and continues to fund climate-change denialism. Obst considers the future of mobility, surveying how cities—from Taipei to Tempe, Copenhagen to Chicago—are experimenting with forms of transportation that offer alternatives to the dominance of cars. Provocative and comprehensive, Saving Ourselves from Big Car is a powerful wake-up call for us to change how we use cars before it’s too late.
About the Author
David Obst is a former journalist, publisher, screenwriter, and film producer. He worked as a literary agent for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, among others. Obst is the author of Too Good to Be Forgotten: Changing America in the ’60s and ’70s (1998).
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