Most autos and all the energy required to move them are imported and will incur an ever upward spiraling cost to Nepali society, particularly as the world´s petroleum reserves are declining as predicted more than half a century ago by M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist with Shell Oil Company. All societies that have committed themselves to automobile transport will be increasingly drained of their resources and leveraged of wealth of every kind. Hubbert predicted that with the beginning of the global decline, which he projected for c. 2010, a petroleum-based transport will invariably become nonviable by mid-century.
If you want to see Nepal’s future, look no further than the US, the petroleum-based culture par excellence. From being the world’s creditor, the US has put itself $16,190,905,174,000 into debt, most of that within the last decade (which increased another $2 billion by the time I finished writing this). This represents more than $51,000 debt for every US citizen. Even China, despite all its exports, has begun to experience negative balance of trade due to petroleum imports.
As another example of cost, on the same morning Khanal´s article appeared, a heart specialist interviewed on National Public Radio in the US said that the US spends billions of dollars on treatment of heart disease, the primary cause of which is Americans´ shift to the automobile. Similarly, a study of Pacific Islanders found direct correlation between the introduction of the automobile and rising rates of obesity and diabetes, life-style diseases now epidemic worldwide, but particularly among Asian populations. In Nepal, INGO’s are pushing for increased health resources to go to the “non-communicable diseases” (heart problems, diabetes, etc.), rather than focusing on the preventable lifestyle changes (auto culture, pre-processed unhealthy foods, soft drinks, etc.) that are bringing about this changing disease profile.
Pitfalls of auto transport
The growing middle class in Nepal, which perhaps more truthfully should be called “new petroleum consumers,” sees diabetes almost as a natural consequence of maturation. They applaud the construction of heart and cancer hospitals. The cardiac doctor on Public Radio said a simpler, healthier, less costly, and I´ll add, even time-saving solution is for people to get onto their feet and bicycles.
My wife, Jamuna Shrestha, who came out of Nepal’s middle class, used to tell me that she could not afford to ride a car. She even took a second job so she could afford her first car, which she insisted was necessary to get to this second job. I pointed out that for an average American worker, operation of a car requires two or more days of labor a week. What kind of saving is it when 25 percent of your time is consumed by the car? In addition, diabetes shortens a human life span by 15 years, which means the auto significantly reduces potentially productive and creative output over a lifetime.
With growing traffic congestion and time spent looking for parking, bicycling becomes faster than riding a car. As Khanal pointed out, and has been proven many times over in the US, road expansion only increases congestion. It is like a never ending process of hooking large pipes into small hoses, which then themselves back up and must be enlarged. Until you bulldoze and pave over much of your country in the manner that the US has done to 51,000,000 acres of farmland—enough roads to circle the earth 157 times.
Over the course of the life of a car, just the time earning the money to pay the direct costs along with the transportation time approximately equals the time it would take to go the same distance by bike. And if the bike rider can avoid getting hit by a motorist (bike deaths are still only 10 percent of auto ones), she will receive 15 to 20 years extra lifespan—which is healthier and more vital to boot.
In Nepal most people with cars are not laborers, which means that villagers and urban workers must be the ones producing the goods exported for foreign exchange to buy the cars. Car drivers thus are necessarily transferring much of the direct cost of car ownership to non-car owners, adding greater social burden for the people who don’t drive.
It is thus ironic that Nepal’s prime minister, whose party claims it is not only fighting inequality, but also constantly sloganeers against feudalism, is promoting automobile transport. The primary burden of feudal society was the requirement of the serf to give up two or more days of labor to the lord. Today we have a similar petroleum serfdom of the car. Furthermore, Dr. Bhattarai always talks about his theories and practices as being scientific, and yet what kind of science ignores the laws of thermodynamics, the most basic precepts of the universe and life and culture on this planet?
My wife, after watching her relatives being knocked down one after the other by diabetes, has taken to daily walking 10 km to work or else riding 25 miles on the bicycle, and often she rides 80 to over 160 km in one day. She has gone down one dress size, and at sixty-four looks younger and enjoys more energy than car-encumbered teenagers in the Nepali expat community in Madison, Wisconsin. Nor does she have to waste money and time at the gym, the latest symbol of middle-class social status popping up in Nepal and another example of the strange avatars taken by the real social costs of widespread adoption of the automobile.
One last word on energy inefficiency, which is especially relevant in a world of declining petroleum reserves. Walking consumes three times less energy than a car, while the bicycle, which was described by the visionary astronomer Karl Sagan as the most efficient form of transport ever invented by humankind, will go over 450 kilometers on the same amount of energy that a car requires to move a passenger less than seven kilometers, most of which is lost to heat. And if that energy is fed by local organic peasant cultivation rather than American-style petroleum-based agriculture (also being promoted by Nepal’s government), then none of that transportation energy is imported and all is renewable.
Finally, the smoothest riding, most elegant, and most expensive bicycle frames in the US are made out of bamboo by California-based Calfee Designs, with the addition of little more than human labor—there are ample supplies of both in Nepal. What can be a more beautiful status symbol for a socially and environmentally conscious person of Nepal’s middle class than whisking along on a domestically manufactured bamboo bike, that most of us bicyclists in the US can only dream about? Under a joint project undertaken by Cornell University and Calfee Designs, street children in Africa are being trained to build excellent bamboo bikes for villager and working-class use, providing an example for Nepal to become manufacturers of the world´s most efficient and beautiful transportation rather than producer of migrant laborers in the Gulf and beyond. Such an initiative is already appearing in Cambodia. In place of flyways to rush the sedentary middle class to heart and diabetes treatment centers, envision bicycle lanes for Nepal–produced, domestically fueled, health-giving transportation. Now that would be a real step along the road to independence and the application of “scientific socialism.”
The writer is an anthropologist who studies Nepali economy and politics. He can be reached at stephen@mikesell.info
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