"The American really loves nothing but his automobile," William Faulkner lamented in 1948. And today the words could never be truer.
A recent poll by Ohio's Progressive Insurance found that 45 per cent of married Americans ranked their cars as the thing they considered most important to them, while 6 per cent chose their children, and 10 per cent chose their spouse. Seventeen per cent of men planned to buy their vehicle a Valentine's Day present.
With one car for nearly every two Americans, each one driven an average of 12,000 miles a year, there are now more than 200 million cars in the US and some families spend more on their monthly car payments than on their housing. And that despite the fact they pay less than $1.50 a gallon for petrol.
Woe betide any politician who gets between an American and the true love that kills 42,000 people a year on the roads.
We suffer, too. US cars and light trucks are responsible for a quarter of all the greenhouse gases this country produces. The US itself produces a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases. As just one source of pollution, they are surpassed as CO 2 polluters only by the total emissions of three states, China, Russia and Japan.
And, for the second time in two years, fuel efficiency in the US has declined to levels below 1980. The reason is simple - SUVs (sports utility vehicles), mini-vans and light trucks, many of them barely able to manage more than 13 miles a gallon, now make up nearly half new vehicle sales. And they are far more likely to be dropping the kids to baseball practice than engaging in off-road adventures.
Switch from an average car to a 13 m.p.g. SUV for a year and you waste more energy than by leaving a colour TV on for 28 years. And SUVs pump out 43 per cent more global-warming pollution than traditional cars.
The US consumes some 18 million barrels of oil a day, and yet raising minimum mileage standards on SUVs and trucks to just that of cars (27.5 m.p.g.) would save a million barrels a day. That is entirely possible: scientists working with the Sierra Club estimate that using available technologies, a 19.3 m.p.g. Ford Explorer could reach 34.1 m.p.g., emitting 43 per cent less greenhouse gases, and costing only $935 more, a cost that would be recovered many times over in petrol savings during the life of the car.
Yet the car industry insists that raising minimum fuel efficiency standards by the simple expedient of defining a SUV as a car instead of a truck would bankrupt it. And politicians insist that increasing the price of petrol would cause a revolution . . .
But there are a few signs that the obsession with the car may become self-limiting.
Since 1982, the time Americans spend in traffic has jumped 236 per cent. The result? The average driver now spends the equivalent of nearly a full working week each year stuck in traffic. Collectively, that is 8 billion hours a year, at a cost of $78 billion a year to the economy in wasted fuel and lost time - up 39 per cent since 1990.
And they are running out of space. Take San Diego, expected to grow by 1 million people by 2020. If current patterns continue, that would mean an additional 685,000 cars. Today, there are five parking spaces available for every car in San Diego and parking is still a problem. To find sufficient parking spaces for another 685,000 cars, the city would need an additional 37 square miles of parking lots.
The result has been a small but significant shift. Use of the nation's public transportation systems has grown by 21 per cent since 1995 (compared with an 11 per cent increase in driving) and is now at the highest levels in more than 40 years.
In the Chicago area, for example, a home located between 500 feet and half a mile of a suburban railway station now commands an average premium of $36,000 over houses that aren't within walking distance.
Tomorrow: Denis Staunton from Brussels on how the issue of climate change has caused a major rift between the US and its western European allies