From the publisher: "See the USA in your Chevrolet" sang Dinah Shore. What's good for General Motors is good for the country is a maxim of American common sense. Yet one of our most reputedly advanced industries has hookwinked the American people and Congress for half a century. The Big Three (soon to be the Big Six) endanger public health, risk energy instability, and alter the global climate with poisonous and inefficient vehicles they are perfectly capable of improving. Wedded to an outdated, century-old cash cow called the internal combustion engine, the US auto industry has created an environmental disaster that it seems determined to protect.
Taken for a Ride chronicles the decades-long lobbying, technological slight-of-hand, and outright deceptions used by the Big Three. They delayed meeting the public health goals established by the Clean Air Act, rolled back the fuel economy standards, and, now, lead the charge against the US ratification of the global warming treaty. Catalytic converters, alternative fuels, and emissions standards all came long after they could have. Detroit has so successfully delayed the implementation of the original goals of the 1970 Clean Air Act that GM boasted, "1993 was the first year we built a [car] to 1975 standards."
The American Lung Association estimates that annual health costs from car pollution are as high as 93 million dollars. More than 100 million Americans live where the air fails to meet minimal air quality standards. America's 65 million SUVs, pickups, and vans already match the greenhouse contribution of the nation's 125 million cars, and more are on the road every day. The EPA projects these vehicles will be the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. Doyle has caught automakers redhanded, citing internal documents that details their knowledge of, and hostility toward, cleaner technology. Since scientists have found that air pollution's damage to lung function resembles the damage done by cigarette smoking, it is only a matter of time before the public cries foul and brings tobacco-styled lawsuits.
Taken for a Ride is an environmental, business, and legislative history of the sordid combination of delay and chicanery that keeps us dependent on foreign oil and gas and makes us vulnerable to political shifts in oil rich countries across the globe. If the air we breathe is not essential enough, then being over a political barrel ought to be.
Jack Doyle has spent twenty years working on national energy and enviromental issues. He was a consultant to the President's Council on Environmental Quality and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Author of three previous books — including Altered Harvest (Viking) — his articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. He is founder, director, and principal investigator of Corporate Sources.