Booktopia - Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment, Tom McCarthy, 9780300158489

Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment

By: Tom McCarthy

Retail Price:	$34.94
Booktopia Price	$30.50

ISBN: 9780300158489

Format: Paperback
Published: October 2009

All prices in Australian Dollars

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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. InAuto Maniahe presents the first environmental history of the automobile that shows how consumer desire (and manufacturer decisions) created impacts across the product lifecyclefrom 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 Maniaexplores 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, 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.