That means that if millions of new drivers are about to get on the road in China, then somehow millions of other drivers will have to get off somewhere else. Last year, that’s exactly what happened in America for the first time since World War II. And unless Boone Pickens is miraculously able to convert the American vehicle stock to natural gas–powered engines, some 40 million other vehicles in the US will similarly be taking the exit lane over the next decade. But more on that later.

That’s not news to the auto companies. General Motors is busily expanding its production capacity in China, thanks to bailouts from American and Canadian taxpayers. Nor is it news to Canadian tar patch producers, who are quickly recognizing that China, with one tenth the per-capita oil consumption of the US, will be the real market for the billions of barrels of oil they hope to extract. And belatedly, even the International Energy Agency (IEA), long fixated on shrinking oil demand in its own member OECD countries, has finally recognized what carbon emissions have been saying for the last three years: that China is the world’s largest consumer of energy.

And that energy, for the most part, is carbon-based. China may lead the world in energy from renewable sources such as solar and wind, but it’s good ol’ fashioned King Coal that’s powering that country’s industrial revolution, just as it powered the Industrial Revolutions centuries ago in the west. China may still only consume half the oil America does, but it’s long since passed the US when it comes to coal consumption, which provides China with 80 per cent of its power. Unless abated by cuts elsewhere, the planned expansion of coal-fired generating plants in China and India will almost double world coal consumption over the next two decades.

As with oil, the more coal China burns, the less coal North America can use. If world carbon emissions are to be capped, or even if global emissions growth is to be slowed, there must be an offsetting decarbonization of economies elsewhere. And that means coal plants must be shut down in places like North America if new plants are built in China.

Not only is China the world’s largest consumer of energy, but the more carbon-based fuel it burns to power its economic growth, the more our economies will have to make do with burning less.

While the recent initiative signals a much more activist stance for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) than their virtually comatose profile during the Bush administration, raising corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards for vehicle manufacturers is nothing new.

Anyone who lived through the OPEC shocks of the 1970s can’t help but get a strong sense of déjà vu. We went down that route back then, when CAFE standards rose by over 30 per cent despite the auto industry’s contention that they couldn’t meet the new environmental standards without going bankrupt. To absolutely no one’s surprise, the auto industry was able to meet those levels and survive at the same time. But to virtually everyone’s surprise, we discovered that those impressive efficiency gains neither cut our fuel bills nor lessened our carbon trails.

Your engine may be a lot more efficient that your dad’s old gas-guzzler from the 1970s, but chances are you burn just as much gasoline on the road over the course of a year as he did. You, like your fellow North American drivers, eat up all the energy efficiency gains made in engine and materials technology over the last thirty years by driving ever-larger, ever-faster vehicles loaded with more and more energy-consuming features. And to top it all off, you drive your vehicle about a third more than your parents did, in large measure because you commute so much further every day than they did.

Raising CAFE standards won’t force us to burn less oil or emit less carbon. But the pump prices that will come with the triple-digit oil prices that are just around the corner will make us do both. And, for good measure, those same pump prices should easily enable the auto industry to reach the new bar set for corporate average fuel economy.

That’s because the biggest factor affecting a vehicle manufacturer’s ability to meet the higher North American fuel economy standard is the company’s vehicle mix. When it costs you over $100 every time you fill up your tank, chances are there will be a lot more scooters than SUVs flying off the assembly line.

In 1899, an electric car was clocked going over 60 miles an hour. And a little over a decade later, a Detroit Electric managed to travel 211 miles on a single charge. (By comparison, the Volt will go just 40 miles on a single charge before its back-up gasoline engine kicks in.)

In an ironic twist of fate, it was the invention of the electric starter that all but killed the electric car, since you no longer needed the physique of a weightlifter to crank-start your internal combustion engine.

Back then, of course, you didn’t have today’s lithium-ion battery technology. But like most other oil-saving technologies, this one ain’t cheap. The lithium-ion car battery costs about $7,500, and even a sub-compact like the Volt is going to set you back $40,000.

Sure, the cost of operating one of these cars will be cheaper than running the gas-powered one you’re replacing, but will the lithium-ion battery stand up to years of driving?

The one in my laptop couldn’t even handle my daily email before frying my hard drive.

Whether car batteries prove to be an economically viable way of storing energy remains to be seen (gasoline carries about 20 times more energy per pound) but storing power and generating it are two very different things. Batteries, lithium-ion or otherwise, need to be charged by an external power source.

And just where is the energy charging all those batteries going to come from?

The American vehicle fleet—some 250 million cars—burns 13 million barrels of oil per day on the road. That’s what it takes to power two million American homes for an entire year. (I discuss this in depth in chapter four of my book, Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller.)

Just which part of the continent’s power grid has that type of spare capacity?

Certainly not the part where I live. Only a few summers ago, one too many air conditioners running during a summer heat wave sent me walking down the eighteen flights of stairs in my former office building, as the grid collapsed between Ohio, upstate New York and Ontario.

Try charging 250 million lithium-ion car batteries and see what happens.

Of course, we could always try to meet that energy challenge by emulating our climate-change partners, China and India, and build hundreds of new coal-fired generating plants.

I wonder why no one proposed that at the recent Copenhagen global environmental summit.

So by all means, leapfrog the constraints of our rapidly depleting world oil supply, and trade your gas-guzzler in for an electric model. Just remember to turn out the lights.

Politicians, local car dealers, parts suppliers and the auto workers’ unions told them it was to protect strategically vital jobs in their economies. But far from being essential to our economic future, those jobs are rapidly becoming obsolete—at least in this part of the world, where they are being funded by taxpayers’ money.

With GM car sales in China up over 60 per cent this year and North American sales still down from last year, I know what I’d be doing if I were running the company.

I’d take the bailout money given by the taxpayers of countries with shrinking auto markets, like the US and Canada, and use it to build new car plants in China and other countries where car sales are booming. (GM already sells almost as many cars in China as it does in the US.)

But I’m sure the company promised not to do that.

Even so, the bailout is a losing proposition for North American taxpayers, who have become the de facto owners of the company. US car sales are a shadow of what they once were, and in a world of triple-digit oil prices, they will become even fainter.

There were four million fewer cars on American roads last year than there were the year before. As oil prices climb ever higher, some 50 million more vehicles will be heading for the exit lane over the next decade.

Is that the kind of market outlook the taxpayer should be investing in?

But invest they have. American taxpayers ponied up some $40 billion last year. The federal government in Canada, along with the provincial government of Ontario, anted up $14.5 billion in direct taxpayers’ assistance to GM and Chrysler—a bailout equal to half those jurisdictions’ entire annual corporate tax collection.

Just think of the public outrage that would follow if the government gave the money directly to the oil industry instead. Yet the auto and oil industries are two sides of the same coin—over half of all the oil used in North America is burned in our cars.

During World War II, Detroit went from manufacturing cars to making tanks and bombers literally overnight. Today, couldn’t all those unemployed auto workers be re-employed to make what their economy really needs—more public transit vehicles—so that when those fifty million Americans get off the road, there’s a bus or mass rapid transit vehicle for them to get on?

That way, if we’re going to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, we’ll be investing in our future, not in our past.