Transport

Cutting Carbon Emisions Doesn't Need to Mean Not Going Anywhere

But Flying Is Problematic

Modern transport and global warming are intimately entwinned. Humans love to move around. Much of our history is concerned with voyages of discovery. ‘The journey’ is one of the core stories of our culture.

Fossil fuels have allowed us to travel further, faster and in more comfort than any other form of transport. Globally it accounts for 13.5% of GHG emissions and is rising steadily.

It is crazy to imagine that people are going to give up all journeys other than those that can be achieved through walking, cycling or sailing so the challenge is to reduce emissions from transport. Finding solutions to global warming in this sector is partcularly urgent as the transport sector is growing both here in Britain and elsewhere.

Road transport is the biggest contributor and the easiest place to start. There are substitute technologies that are available now, in the shape of electric and hydrogen powered vehicles. Electric vehicles are no longer the jokes they were just a few years ago and, even using current UK grid electricity that is generated from fossil fuel, are 30% better in terms of emissions. That figure keeps getting better as the power generation moves to Renewables. Moving to electric cars is also a neat way of using Renewable electricity from wind, which mostly blows at night and is when most cars are off the road.

If you can’t afford to change your car to electric three big ways to reduce your impact is carrying passengers, reducing total miles covered, and reducing speed.
Carrying passengers is the best route, especially when the passenger would otherwise have driven themselves. Commuting to work is an obvious place to look and if there is no-one in your workplace that lives near you, there are a number of lift-share websites to help you find someone.

Air transport, although not as big a source of GHGs is faster growing and there is a worry that, because the emissions are made up in the sky, their impact is much greater. There is still a lot of on-gong studies being made to try and work out how much worse emissions at altitude are but the biggest difficulty with air transport is that there is no substitute technology even on the drawing board, never mind development. Helium airships are gaining momentum as a possible solution to air-freight but their much lower speed will possible make them unattractive for passenger service. Using fuel derived from crops to power existing aircraft is difficult because of the lower temperatures at operational flying heights (which makes the bio-fuel get too thick to flow into the engine properly) and raises thorny issues over the area needed to grow the crops for fuel versus food. Making an impact in this area needs conscious action by individuals choosing to fly less.