The purveyor of ecological-footprint analysis has little time for talk on bailing out the automobile sector.

In a phone interview on November 18, UBC’s cycling green keener Bill Rees said U.S. and Canadian lawmakers are only considering bailing out the faltering auto sector because “we are wedded to the status quo”.

“There is just so much employment associated with our auto sector,” Rees, a professor in the school of community and regional planning, said by phone. “Bailing that sector out after it’s made such incredibly naive, even stupid, assessments....Why is it that the North American auto industry--even though the global-climate-change writing has been on the wall for 20 years and peak oil has been emergent for the last decade--they continue to produce muscle cars for which there can be no market in five to seven years?”

Rees spoke to the Straight as debate swirled around whether U.S. lawmakers should approve a loan of around US$25 billion for the Big Three--General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford.

Leaders of both houses of Congress have told the Big Three that they have until December 2 to come up with their own recovery plan. “Until they show us the plan, we cannot show them the money,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, according to a story published on the BBC News Web site.

However, for Rees, the writing is already on the wall for an industry he referred to as the domain of the “dinosaurs”.

“We are seeing major economic restructuring occurring, but we don’t have in place the social safety nets, so that people can be eased with dignity and graciousness from one kind of job to another,” Rees said. “We should not be encouraging growth in the low-employment hydrocarbon sector, but rather encouraging job training to move those people from the extractive sectors into things like retrofitting homes and alternative energy jobs.”