The cars on this Washington State ferry seem so peaceful, heading to some paradise in the future. But in reality, we they are heading to a nightmare of traffic jams and climate change.
The cars on this Washington State ferry seem so peaceful and heading to some paradise in the future. But in reality, we are heading to the nightmare of climate change. Checubus/shutterstock.com

Despite all of the press and scientific reports about the bad state of the environment, about how climate change is undoubtedly related to the burning of fossil fuels, car sales in the United States are really booming. Part of this has to do with the costly credit being easily offered to those who are too poor to afford expensive shit like cars. The growing trend is almost identical to the one that caused the crash of the financial markets in 2008, and the consequent Great Recession, and the painful austerity programs that essentially punished poor people for bad deals made by big banks.

Another reason for this boom in car sales is the market is flooded with cheap oil. This in part is due to a petrol industry that has deviously decided that it's better to dump its climate-changing products on a world that's politically and economically structured to buy it, rather than wait to see what happens in a future that is unknown, that may be radically different from the one we have now. All of this cheap oil is also one of the reasons why sales in electric cars are flat.

Added to all of this unhappy news is the fuel of excellent job reports, which means a little more money for Americans to spend on the cheap energy that has transformed our world's atmosphere into a sewer. This is exactly what you get when left and right positions on job growth share the same lack of content or context.

As predicted in the 1965 documentary, Frankenstein and the American Family Automobile, that attempted but failed to make a case for public transportation, cars have become our Frankensteinian monster:


As I wrote in my review of the documentary Bikes vs. Cars, which opens today, nothing at this juncture has the political power to stop this monster. We are very much stuck here.

Along with soaring car sales is a sharp rise in gun purchases. It is reported that on Black Friday (November 27), gun dealers made 185,345 requests on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. That is just in one day. And that day happened before the recent mass shooting. Most of these guns will certainly make their contribution to the longstanding fact that gun owners rarely shoot bad guys but, accidentally or deliberately, either themselves or those close to them. There has only been one week this year that was not rocked by a mass gun-related event.