Paradise paved

Reviewing a new book by Henry Grabar, Bill McKibben writes:

By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the US than there is housing for each person. This devotion to the storage of automobiles comes with many costs… in Grabar’s words,

in the rent, in the check at the restaurant…. It was hidden on your receipt from Foot Locker and buried in your local tax bill. You paid for parking with every breath of dirty air, in the flood damage from the rain that ran off the fields of asphalt, in the higher electricity bills from running an air conditioner through the urban heat-island effect.

All this amounts to a subsidy to drivers in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Read more here.