Personal Transport and the Greenhouse Effect

Peter Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134052455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

The issue of 'sustainability' in the developed world is nowhere more critical than in the field of personal travel, which in many countries has become the fastest-growing contributor to global warming. Unless the use of cars can be brought under control, there is little chance of meeting government targets for reducing greenhouse emissions.

Personal Transport and the Greenhouse Effect sets out the steps that could be taken to lessen the conflict between personal mobility and long-term environmental security. It provides a detailed analysis of the policy options available for limiting carbon dioxide emissions, and highlights the limitations of technological measures in solving the problem. Instead, the book's 12-point plan for sustainability shows how a significant reduction in emissions requires the use of all the policy measures available. This valuable contribution to a crucial area of debate covering energy, transport policy and the environment will be essential reading for policy makers, planners and students alike. Peter Huges is deputy editor of Local Transport Today, and has contributed to a wide range of publications including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, New Scientist and Energy Policy. Originally published in 1993

1

Introduction

Since the affairs of men rest still uncertain, Let’s reason with the worst that may befall.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

In the late 1980s, global warming grew in significance from a little-known scientific theory to an issue of deep concern for politicians, industrialists and the public alike. The realization that human activities could be shifting the world’s climate into a new, warmer epoch by enhancing the atmosphere’s natural ‘greenhouse effect’ is an issue that has grave implications for the entire world community.

Global warming is an alarming prospect, not only because of the likely impact that it will have on the Earth and the life that inhabits its surface, but also because of the overwhelming difficulties that are likely to be faced by world leaders in the search for solutions. Since the Industrial Revolution, the developed world has been increasingly locked into a lifestyle that demands unsustainable levels of energy and resource consumption. To make matters worse, developing countries are increasingly seeking the affluent, resource-intensive lifestyles to which the developed world has become accustomed, and in doing so are threatening to tip the ecological balance irreversibly towards catastro-phe. The issue of’sustainable development’ is nowhere more critical than in the field of personal travel, which in many countries has become the fastest-growing contributor to ‘greenhouse’ emissions.

The environmental damage associated with personal mobility is not, of course, restricted to climate change alone. Air pollution in many European and North American cities has begun to reach chronic levels, with incidents of very poor air quality becoming steadily more common. Unlike the famous smogs of the 1950s, today’s toxic fumes are produced not by coal-burning in houses and factories but by the use of automobiles. In addition to urban air pollution, the manufacture of vehicles, principally private cars, imposes a heavy toll on the natural environment. Meanwhile the use of cars, particularly in urban areas, has created landscapes of concrete and tarmac that create a sense of alienation for the people who live there.

The inter-urban road network has provided fertile ground for property developers, as lax planning regulations have allowed them to create massive retail and leisure parks on greenfield sites flanking motorways and major roads. By creating facilities which can be reached only by car, developers have not only inflicted commercial hardship on traditional town and city centres, but contributed to society’s increasing dependence on the automobile.¹

Mobility is not something that we can give up easily. But in view of the ever-increasing demand for cars, roadspace and fossil fuel, we have no choice but to examine what exactly it is that mobility provides. Almost without exception it is the access — to people, goods and services – which we value so highly, rather than the travel itself. As Dr Phil Goodwin and his colleagues at Oxford University have written, in Transport: The New Realism (1991):

[Transport] is unlike many other fundamental human activities in that in most cases movement is a means to an end, not an end in itself. There are exceptions, such as a pleasure cruise, or walking the dog, but for most day to day trips we do not really want to travel at all – we want to participate in some activity in a different place and transport is simply something we have to do to enable this.

Obvious though this observation may seem, it holds the key to resolving the conflict between personal travel and its environmental impacts. By focusing attention on the actual benefits that our mobility-intensive lifestyles deliver, we can begin to look for alternative, less damaging ways of fulfilling society’s basic need for access and communication. While traditional transport policies have concentrated on the movement of vehicles, planners are now turning towards the movement of people as their key aim. For example, cars have historically tended to be given greater priority than bicycles in transport planning, because of their greater size and speed. However, one may question why a person driving to an out-of-town supermarket should be given any greater priority than a person cycling 2 kilometres to the local shops: both individuals are gaining the same benefit from their trips, even though the economic and environmental costs of the two journeys are so widely different. Similarly, there is a strong case for giving priority to buses, which generally carry many times more people than private cars.

Technological advances are making it increasingly possible to replace journeys with digital communications. ‘Telecommuting’ or ‘telework-ing’, explored later in the book, is becoming a viable option for many office-bound workers, offering them the possibility of avoiding travel altogether on certain days of the week. But teleworking will only ever be a partial solution, not least because it is leisure travel, rather than journeys to and from work, that is currently growing most rapidly.

One might be forgiven for thinking that technology holds all the answers to the travel-versus-environment conflict, and that society can simply employ more scientists and engineers to develop environment-friendly ways of maintaining the mobility that it has come to enjoy. But evidence to date strongly indicates that technological advances can only be part of the solution, and significant lifestyle changes will be an essential part of any strategy for sustainable transport. For example, even if it were possible to replace the entire car fleet of Europe and North America with ‘zero-emissions vehicles’ (an unlikely proposition), society would still be faced with the massive environmental damage that arises from the manufacture and disposal of cars, and from the construction of roads and carparks on which to operate them.

National governments in Europe and North America have been keen to play down the environmental impacts of car use. Anxious to support their national car industries, yet aware of a growing level of environmental concern among their electorate, governments have been happy to support the myth of the environment-friendly car. Unleaded petrol, catalytic converters, airbags and vehicle component recycling have all contributed to the illusion of green and friendly motoring. But none of these measures can do more than scratch the surface of the problem. The real issue at stake is society’s deep-seated dependence upon the car, and the associated issues of oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions arising from it.

In 1989 the German car manufacturer Volkswagen-Audi ran a full-page newspaper advertisement in Britain’s daily press outlining the measures that the company has taken to reduce toxic exhaust emissions from its cars, through the use of catalytic converters. The advert explained how poisonous gases produced by the engine enter the catalytic converter and undergo chemical reactions, which turn them into ‘harmless carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water.’ If carbon dioxide -the most prolific greenhouse gas produced by human activities – really is harmless, as Volkswagen apparently believes, then there is little point in reading any further. But a consensus of opinion among the scientific community would suggest otherwise.²

It is, of course, easy to blame car manufacturers for the environmental damage wreaked by mass mobility. After all, one new car is brought into the world every second. But in reality it is society that is responsible for the problem, and which must therefore work to find solutions. Every minute, more and more people in the developed world acquire cars. Every day, we consume products that are brought to us via an energy-intensive network of freight distribution.³ And every year, many of us are more than happy to take foreign holidays by air, often consuming as much petroleum in eight hours as we would do in a year travelling by car.

This book proposes a realistic strategy by which personal travel can be reconciled with the need to stabilize the atmosphere and halt the buildup of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas. It is based not on arbitrary targets for reducing emissions, but on the scientific community’s best estimate of the reduction in emissions that will be necessary in order to stabilize the atmosphere. It takes a realistic view of the kind of measures that society is likely to accept as part of a strategy for reducing greenhouse emissions. It would, after all, be easy, but entirely unproductive, to recommend that the use of cars be banned overnight, and to suggest that the use of public transport be made compulsory. The environmental benefits of such a policy would, of course, be enormous — but the democratic process would not tolerate such a draconian response. Policies to protect the environment can only work if they have the support of the electorate. Well-meaning environmental organizations have been known to sink without trace by alienating the public on whose support they depend.

In 1987, the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by British scientists prompted a global response on an unprecedented scale. The shock of the discovery, compounded by the grave human and ecological consequences of ozone depletion, produced an effective and immediate response from the global community. The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987 and last revised in 1992, represents a commitment by governments world wide to cooperation in the elimination of ozone-destroying gases. Subsequent measurements of stratospheric ozone levels have vindicated the sense of urgency with which this agreement was signed.

Many have pointed to the Montreal Protocol as an analogy of the kind of global consensus that will need to be secured in order to avert a greenhouse catastrophe. At the time of writing, most governments have acknowledged the likelihood of climatic change through emissions of greenhouse gases, but have made no more than a minor response. The purpose of this book is to propose ways in which governments and their electorates can contribute to a coordinated, international programme for averting global warming.

It first describes the current state of knowledge in the field of climatology and the likely impact of’anthropogenic’ – human generated – greenhouse gas emissions. Much of this review is based on the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientific group, a body set up by the United Nations to establish best estimates of the nature of the greenhouse problem. The book then examines how, and to what extent, personal travel contributes to the greenhouse effect, with an examination of each of the different forms of transport in turn.

The book then turns to carbon dioxide (CO₂), the most abundant greenhouse gas produced by human activities, and the main focus of this work. In order to estimate how emissions of this gas might change under different possible futures, a computer model called SPACE (Scenario Projections of Aggregate Carbon Emissions), has been developed. As a first step, the SPACE model is used to predict how transport’s emissions are likely to change in a ‘do nothing’ world, based on a ‘business as usual’ scenario, which assumes a continuation of current policies and no intervention from central government.

A second scenario is then constructed to address the question of whether, and to what extent, technological solutions might be found to the transport-greenhouse problem. The importance of this question is self-evident: if ‘technical fixes’ can be used to eliminate CO₂ emissions from personal travel, then we may consider the problem solved. If, on the other hand, technology does not hold the whole answer, then it will be necessary to go beyond technical measures in order to find an environmentally sustainable solution.

A third and final scenario examines what could be done if all the available policy measures were to be called upon at once. If all the stops were pulled out, what reduction in CO₂ emissions could we expect to achieve? The answer to this question is of immense relevance to all developed countries – not to mention the developing world, where the disturbing spectre of mass car ownership is beginning to materialize.⁴

Although the three scenarios are modelled on personal travel in Great Britain, the strategy developed in this book could equally be applied to most European countries. Britain’s problems are fairly typical: on the one hand, more and more people are acquiring and using cars, and travelling further every year; while on the other there is pressure to meet a national target of stabilizing CO₂ emissions by the year 2000. Care should be taken, however, in extrapolating the results to countries such as the United States, where the nature of personal travel is considerably different from that in Europe.

Politicians in developed countries are faced with many critical issues, including domestic economics, international stability, Third World debt and environmental protection. Added to this list is the threat of irreversible climate change arising from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Although less tangible than most of the day-today concerns affecting politicians, the threat of global warming is in many ways the most serious of all. This book aims to steer a course through the technical and political obstacles, and sets out the steps that could be taken to lessen the conflict between personal mobility and long-term environmental security.

Notes

1.  A catalogue of these and other environmental impacts of transport can be found in Whitelegg (1993), whose rigorous examination of ‘sustainable’ transport challenges many of the assumptions upon which current transport policy is based.

2.  A second advertisement, published later in the year by Volkswagen-Audi, added insult to injury by describing carbon dioxide as ‘the stuff that makes fizzy drinks fizzy’.

3.  Whitelegg (1993) estimates that each person in Britain consumes the equivalent of 60 tonne-kilometres of freight per week.

4.  See, for example, Meyers, 1988.

2

Global Warming and
Climatic Change

Naturally occurring greenhouse gases keep the Earth warm enough to be habitable. By increasing their concentrations, and by adding new greenhouse gases like chlorofluorocar-bons, humankind is capable of raising the global temperature.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

In the late 1980s global warming grew in prominence from a little-known climatic theory to a major concern on the public and political agenda. The possibility that anthropogenic emissions could be altering the behaviour of the Earth’s climate system gained credibility following a series of climatic anomalies world wide, including floods, droughts and hurricanes of extraordinary ferocity. Six of the seven warmest years ever recorded fell in the 1980s, and 1990 was the warmest year since records began.

The ‘greenhouse effect’ is the popular term for the principle underlying global warming. The Earth’s surface is heated by radiation from the Sun, and most of the energy is then radiated back into space at infrared (IR) wavelengths. However, trace gases present in small quantities in the lower atmosphere reabsorb a small amount of this outgoing radiation, warming the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth. Without this natural greenhouse effect, the average temperature at the Earth’s surface would be an inhospitable -19°C, compared with the actual average of 15°C.

In fact the analogy of a greenhouse is not strictly correct. The warming effect of a garden greenhouse is produced by a thin layer of glass that retains the warm air inside. In the atmosphere, greenhouse gases are present not as a thin layer but spread throughout the atmosphere in tiny concentrations, and they warm the atmosphere by absorbing radiation rather than by restricting the escape of warmed air.

Under equilibrium conditions, the amount of energy from the Sun entering the atmosphere is exactly balanced by the energy radiated back into space. The average temperature of the atmosphere settles at a level in which this balance is established. Any additional factor that disrupts the balance by increasing the absorption of he...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Global Warming and Climatic Change
• 3 Travel, Energy Use and ‘Greenhouse’ Emissions
• 4 ‘Business as Usual’ Carbon Dioxide Emissions
• 5 Policy Tools
• 6 Prospects for ‘Technical Fixes’
• 7 Questioning the Need to Travel
• 8 A 12 Point Plan for Sustainability
• 9 Conclusions
• References
• Index