The Usefulness of Cranks

Whether this sort of waste can be stopped by a change of administration remains to be seen. Gibson thinks that the Republican right’s anti-environmental coalition began to come apart in 2006, and that the re-enchanters re-asserted themselves. They will have to confront the disabling impact of economic recession on environmental regulation--almost always seen as an enemy of "jobs"--as well as the old canard that they are hopeless romantics standing athwart the thrust of progress. That is where books such as Edward Humes’s Eco Barons can be helpful. Written in the breezy style of celebrity journalism, the book is nevertheless well grounded in the local history of environmental controversy. And it gives environmental activists a makeover without trivializing their struggles.

Echoing the title of The Robber Barons, Matthew Josephson’s classic account of Napoleonic financiers in the first Gilded Age, Eco Barons translates environmental activism into the idiom of business heroism. No longer knobby-kneed nerds in Birkenstocks, Humes’s heroes are resourceful, shrewd, hip entrepreneurs. They include such countercultural capitalists as Douglas Tompkins, the founder of Esprit fashions, who has purchased and preserved huge tracts of temperate rain forest in southern Chile; and Roxanne Quimby, the queen of the Burt’s Bees unguent empire, who has used her negotiating skills to build an odd coalition of vegetarians and hunters against development in the Maine woods.

The book’s most provocative story centers around Andy Frank, an engineering professor at UC Davis who invented and patented the plug-in hybrid car. Humes accompanies his profile of Frank with a quick but revealing history of electric cars in America. The overall pattern boils down to this: the problems with electric cars have always been more political than technological. At various key moments in the electric car’s history, the automobile and oil industries have intervened to block its development. The most recent occasion was in the late 1990s, when Toyota, Ford, and GM, faced with the California Air Resources Board’s demand for a "zero-emission vehicle," produced workable battery-operated vehicles and even set up electric car divisions to market them. "One of the most curious episodes in automotive history unfolded next," writes Humes, "as car companies sought to undermine their own products."

They refused to sell the new cars. Instead they leased the vehicles "after a lengthy, intrusive application process." They spent next to nothing on advertising them. Despite mounting consumer demand, the companies produced only a few thousand electric cars, then began publicly criticizing their performance and shifting their focus to hydrogen fuel cell research--despite the objections of Frank and other scientists, who testified that the batteries were far more reliable and promising than hydrogen would likely ever be. Frank urged that the state substitute "very low emission vehicles" for "zero emissions vehicles," and that the industry turn to research in plug-in hybrids. GM hired him briefly to turn its battery-pack car into a hybrid, but then decided to kill the whole electric program, fired Frank, and turned to building Hummers. Other carmakers got on the SUV express, and electric cars piled up in junkyards.

Like Gibson, Humes thinks the political shift of 2006 represented a return to green thinking. Frank’s designs have been rediscovered by local governments; Washington state wants a fleet of plug-in hybrids based on his model. Frank’s company, Efficient Drivetrains, Inc., is much in demand, especially in Asia--but not in Detroit. The Detroit carmakers have developed plug-in hybrids, with specifications that fall short of Frank’s. He questions the depth of their commitment, and presses on.

The history of electric cars is a green parable for our time. It raises subversive questions about roads not taken. It shows that, without adequate public backing, green entrepreneurs--no matter how shrewd--cannot successfully buck the corporate consensus. And above all it challenges the fundamental dogma of development, technological determinism. For decades if not centuries, critics of development have been told that the capitalist (and for a while, the socialist) version of progress is simply unstoppable--a neutral, inevitable, and beneficent process that is beyond politics and policy debate. For a moment, in the forgotten 1970s, this dogma came under scrutiny. But the cyber-revolution of the last thirty years revived it. Techno-determinists from Thomas Friedman to Bill Gates have repeatedly told us that we must choose to do what we have to do anyway-- re-organize our lives in accordance with the dictates of technology. The rhetoric of inevitability conceals the business interests it serves, and negates the possibility of challenging them.

But the tale of the electric car decisively undercuts this determinist mythology. Humes’s account reveals that technological progress is not the product of some irresistible demiurge called "modernity"; and that human beings have the capacity to direct technology rather than merely genuflect to its force; and that in fact the very definitions of progress can be challenged and changed by cranks who resist conventional wisdom. But only--it should be clear--if the cranks have a shot at some money and some power.

Jackson Lears is editor of Raritan and author, most recently, of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (HarperCollins).