What are some of the biggest challenges around climate change today? Well Ryan Allard, PHD, Senior Fellow for Transportation and Buildings Project Drawdown says, “I think it’s really about seeing ourselves as connected people. We can take action a certain way, if we are interested but we don’t see how our actions affect other people and vice versa.
Mobility clearly is essential to economic growth, but in our carbon-based world moving people from place to place exacts a steep price.
Consider just the United States. In 2017, the transportation sector accounted for 29% of the nation’s total emissions of 6.4 bilion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2e (the CO2 equivalent of an individual greenhouse gas).
Driven largely by the transportation sector’s emissions of fossil fuels, concentrations of CO2 have risen steadily since the early 1980s, except for the period beginning with the start of the last recession in late 2007.
Annual CO2 emissions from transportation had reached mor than two billion metric tons in 2007 – the highest level since the EIA began keeping record in 1973. By 2012 about four years into the recession, emissions had fallen to about 1.8 billion metric tons. But with the economic recovery, emissions began to rise again. By 2018 transportation emissions totaled 1.9 billion metric tons for the year – just under the 2012 peak.
Despite the rise of electric car manufacturers, new public transit projects in cities across the nation, more fuel efficient aircraft engines, and other innovations in mobility, it’s clear that economics is the main driver of carbon emissions from transportation. When the economy is growing they go up’ when it’s contracting they go down.
People love to drive and love their cars –or at least the notion of car ownership. How can we collectively reconcile a need to reduce carbon pollution with peoples’ widespread fondness for driving often with just a driver, no passengers even in congested urban areas? Driving less can make a big dent in carbon emissions, but the rise in electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles has the potential to make an impact.
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