Transport and the City — The Energy Glut

I. Roberts and P. Edwards on motorization as an energy story: per-capita food-energy intake fell 20% over the period cars took over movement, and scientists systematically miss gradual societal transitions because they look for causes of the kind they already believe in.

Part of the New City reading list — indexed on The New City.

Notes

• By: I. Roberts and P. Edwards
• “The best available data, corroborated from different sources, showed that average per capita food energy intake fell by 20 per cent over this period. This point deserves repeating. The prevalence of obesity was rising whilst average food energy intake was falling. The notion that fatness is all to do with greedy gluttons egged on by an insatiably profit-hungry food industry simply does not stand up to scrutiny. Prentice found that the evidence implicating sloth to be far more compelling. Two major trends were highly correlated with increase in BMI: increasing car ownership and television viewing. In 1961, three out of ten households in Britain owned a car. By the mid-1990s seven out of ten households had at least one car, and nearly a third had two or more. IN the 1960s, the average Briton watched thirteen hours of television per week; by the 1990s this had risen to over twenty-six hours per week. Prentice concluded that the most likely explanation for increasing population fatness, despite a declining average energy intake, was that energy output was falling even faster than energy intake. We eat too much for our level of physical activity but our physical activity level is lower than ever before (Roberts & Edwards 27)”
• “Scientists tend to have a blind spot when it comes to gradual societal transitions and that they tend to limit their consideration of causes to those things that they believe are amenable to change. As we will see later, the notion that the de-motorization of society is either possible or desirable has effectively been barred from consciousness by a sustained bombardment of industry and government propaganda” (Roberts & Edwards 31).