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The Coming Wonder?: Foresight and Early Concerns about the Automobile

In the second half of the twentieth century, the automobile came to be seen as a cause of several of America's more vexing environmental problems. The two Arab oil embargoes in the 1970S forcibly reminded American consumers and policymakers of their reliance on a nonrenewable fossil fuel whose primary sources of stupply were no longer controlled by the United States. This dependence spurred efforts to explore alternative fuels and improve the fuel economy of gasoline-powered vehicles. Automobile emissions proved not merely a matter of smelly fumes but the cause of photochemical smog, a persistent problem not just in the peculiar climatic and geographic conditions of southern California but in many other regions of the country as well. At the dawn of a new century many environimentalists wonder what the twentieth-century American experience with the automobile augurs for the rest of the world. Perhaps the most significant chapter in the automobile's environmental history is yet to be written. This historical trajectory invites questions, not only about whether the automobile's problems were foreseen at the outset but also about the connection between foresight and the environmental ramifications of technological change. The small but estimable historical literature on the adoption of the automobile in America has had little or nothing to say about the origins in this period of the automobile's environmental problems.' Contrary to prevailing belief, the environmental liabilities of the automobile were recognized at the outset, at least in nascent form, and attempts were made to address them. These efforts were frustrated by an imposing array of social, economic, and political factors, but most especially by the fact that Americans simply had a different and more important agenda of aspirations and concerns for the automobile. With rapid consumer adoption of the automobile well underway by 1910, the prospects for addressing these problems, which initially seemed promising to many between 1905 and 1910, diminished considerably.