Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment

Front Cover
Yale University Press, Jan 1, 2007 - Technology & Engineering - 347 pages

The twentieth-century American experience with the automobile has much to tell us about the relationship between consumer capitalism and the environment, Tom McCarthy contends. In Auto Mania he presents the first environmental history of the automobile that shows how consumer desire (and manufacturer decisions) created impacts across the product lifecycle--from raw material extraction to manufacturing to consumer use to disposal.

From the provocative public antics of young millionaires who owned the first cars early in the twentieth century to the SUV craze of the 1990s, Auto Mania explores developments that touched the environment. Along the way McCarthy examines how Henry Ford’s fetish for waste reduction tempered the environmental impacts of Model T mass production; how Elvis Presley’s widely shared postwar desire for Cadillacs made matters worse; how the 1970s energy crisis hurt small cars; and why baby boomers ignored worries about global warming.

McCarthy shows that problems were recognized early. The difficulty was addressing them, a matter less of doing scientific research and educating the public than implementing solutions through America’s market economy and democratic government. Consumer and producer interests have rarely aligned in helpful ways, and automakers and consumers have made powerful opponents of regulation. The result has been a mixed record of environmental reform with troubling prospects for the future.

From inside the book

Contents

One The Arrogance of Wealth
1
Two Foresight and Emotion
16
Three A Monstrously Big Thing
30
Four An Industrial Epic
55
Five The Death and Afterlife of Automobiles
77
Six Cadillacs and Community
99
Seven Disenchanted with Detroit
130
Eight If We Can Put a Man on the Moon
148
Nine The One Who Got It
176
Ten Out of My Dead Hands
193
Eleven Small Was Beautiful
207
Twelve The Riddle of the Sport Utility Vehicle
231
Epilogue
253
Notes
267
Index
333
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2007)

Tom McCarthy is associate professor, History Department, United States Naval Academy.

Bibliographic information