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Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Have Become Top Carbon Polluters (technologyreview.com)
Transportation is likely to surpass the electricity sector in 2016 as the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, according to a new analysis of government data, MIT Technology reports. From the article: In 2008, the global financial crisis caused widespread declines in energy use. In the U.S., that coincided with the early stages of a large-scale shift away from coal toward cleaner-burning natural gas as a way to generate electricity. As a result, carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector have continued to decline from their 2007 peak, even as the economy has resumed growing. The trend line for the transportation sector is less encouraging. Transportation emissions have begun rising as the economy rebounds. John DeCicco at the University of Michigan Energy Institute, who wrote the study, attributes the rebound we've seen during the past four years to straightforward causes: economic recovery and more affordable fuel prices. Vehicle sales numbers have been rising for several years, in particular for trucks and SUVs, and people are traveling more miles.
As processes improve large scale projects such as factories and power generation tend to get more efficient as predicted but it's hard to get the same economies of scale on smaller systems like cars. It's death by millions and millions of cuts instead of by one massive blow. I'm sort of contributing by owning a Volt and have managed to go gas free for most of spring, all of summer and fall until winter when it switches over to inefficient gas engine because it needs the waste heat. To be honest thou, I never entirely went with the Volt to save gas even thou it does as a bonus. EV's are just incredibly smooth cars to drive and lack of engine noise is really nice. Hopefully more folks realize the Volt is a good option and EV's become more popular.
Actually, this trend makes pretty good sense.
Electricity - while the oldest form of generating electricity involved burning coal or oil, there had evolved several alternatives to it, thanks to electricity generation being stationary. Like hydro, nuclear, wind and solar. So it was not difficult to minimize one's dependence on carbon based fuels, aside from the political brinksmanship - the environmental protests that the dams will drown the fish, nuclear will be another Fukushima, windmills will slaughter birds that fly into it, leaving only solar, which is good in tropical and equatorial regions, but limited elsewhere.
Transportation is a different story, however, since one can't have hydroelectric damns on a train, nuclear power in a ship (aside from Russian icebreakers) or wind power driving a car. There, one is forced to use fossil fuels. However, if one can eliminate their use in electricity generation, that reduces their consumption, and ergo, whatever pollution they create. Hopefully, one day, solar powered cars would be completely viable.
Looks like the trend is right as far as reducing pollution due to electricity goes.
Cut down on automobile pollution: Save our planet. Work from home. Tell your boss he hates panda bears if he won't let you. No one wants to be known as a Panda bear hater.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Air travel should be one of those novelty things that the lucky few can justify, same with having something air freighted, sure its nice to get stuff 2 days, but reality is waiting a week or two isnt a problem.
The rest of us should be traveling via high speed rail or hyperloop.
Thank you for deciding how fast I need to travel, or how quickly I need something. And thanks for killing many people as auto travel is much more dangerous then air travel. Sure appreciate it! And can you direct me to a hyperloop, please? I can't seem to find mine.
If you RTFA (yeah yeah...) you'd notice that this is not an indictment of transportation, but a sign that efforts to reduce emissions from power generation are succeeding. In other words, it's not that transportation emissions are unusually high, it's that other sources of emissions are on the decline.... so you can now unbunch your panties.
The article then laments that efforts to curb transportation emissions haven't gained much traction yet, and notes that higher fuel prices are the best chance to drive efficiency gains and adoption of alternatives. Boo hoo!
=Smidge=
I live not too far from major highway. Noise and pollution from automobiles worry me. The electric revolution cannot come soon enough. Also, I don't know if it is old age or something else, but those extremely loud motorcycles annoy me to no end. I wish I could stop them and beat the shit out of them. Anybody else feel that way? And why the hell do these riders intentionally make their bikes so loud?
I take this article to be good news. Renewable energy is finally contributing to the grid well enough to where emissions will drop below the carbon emitted from transportation. This is excellent progress and excellent news.
Now, here's how you fix the transportation part. A wonderful article you can only find on the Wayback Machine, from 2004. UNH Biodiesel Group, Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae, Michael Briggs, University of New Hampshire, Physics Department.
It's my favorite paper on the topic and I'll take any opportunity to post it.
TL;DR - if we really wanted to, we (meaning the USA) could utilize biodiesel entirely for our current transportation needs. It would be 100% renewable, carbon neutral, and all the money spent would stay inside our own borders. And any other country could easily do the same. There is absolutely NO need to haul oil out of the ground anymore.
Check the math in the paper. We really could do this.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Air travel should be something that you do when you're crossing an ocean, because trains over water (and subduction zones) are physically impractical, and ships are too slow to be practical.
That said, we badly need a high speed rail network in the U.S.; Amtrak is kind of fun to ride, but it takes three days each way to get across the country. As such, it is a luxury that few can afford on a regular basis.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The author concludes that our best hope to fix this trend is a return of high gasoline prices.
IMO, that's ONE way it might change, but pretty much the WORST option.
Personally, I'd rather see more people opt for electric cars or public transit because improvements were made in those areas, making them more desirable!
High fuel prices punish the people who are already struggling, on tight budgets. If they need to drive a vehicle for any kind of delivery or taxi job (Uber, Lyft, etc.) - it means their costs go up, because they can't just "drive less". Often, it's the same story for someone who relies on a car to commute to/from work. All those people telling you to carpool to work or take a bus aren't being that realistic. In many cases, you need the ability to haul things around in a trunk or back seat of a car that you don't get when using a bus or other mass transit, and you can't always find a workable carpool. It makes everyone pay more for package delivery too, harming your ability to get your asking price when you sell used goods on the Internet via sites like eBay. (It actually hurts the whole economy since pretty much every business relies on shipping in some manner. But it hurts individuals the most, IMO. The big companies do enough volume so they can negotiate pretty nice discounts with shippers like UPS or FedEx. They may pay more than they used to to ship goods, but it'll still be far less than you or I pay.)
I know personally, I live around 50 miles from my workplace. I used to take the commuter train, but the combination of increased prices for it and reliability issues forced me to go back to driving. There are just too many times the train is really late due to freight train traffic that gets priority on the rails they use, or mechanical breakdowns. When I was waiting on the last train of the evening and it was one hour, then 1 1/2 hours, then 2, 3 and finally 3 1/2 hours late -- I had enough. (To add insult to injury, it was cold and raining outside, and the station platform is outdoors with no good shielding from the wind or rain.)
What I *have* done is to express my plight to my bosses at work, who finally agreed to let me start working from home more often. That winds up letting me claw back all of that commuting time I lost before - as well as saving on travel expenses. So it's a win all around. But yeah -- I really tried to stick with the public transit option. They just don't have their act together enough to make it attractive.
Very true... but outside of the article title, the article makes no distinction or breakdown between mass transit and personal transit, while alluding in the text to cars and other small/personal transport options - the Mike Orcutt article mentions vehicle sales, trucks, SUVs and cars, thus giving the impression that the increase is down to the American vehicle owner. Maybe the paper it references, written by John DeCicco, has a bit more of an objective viewpoint, but this particular paper is not yet linked from Prof. DeCicco's page on the MIT Faculty so it is impossible to say for sure.
Having said that, much of the language of his other linked papers specifically references "cars" and seems to point to an assumption that private transport is a greater contributory problem than mass transport so I would not hold my breath waiting for a balanced view on the relative impacts of mass- versus private-transport solutions.
> Air travel and air freight are the worst offenders for carbon output for work done.
So? If the goal is to reduce carbon, you start at the top. And that's car's.
We get equal carbon reduction by increasing car efficiency by 10% or increasing jet efficiency by 100%
Which do you think we should start on first?
> There, one is forced to use fossil fuels
But we can reduce it significantly. Especially in cars, where plug-in-hybrids can easily double (or more) average milage with basically zero effect on the way the car is used. Pure electric doesn't really help much on top of that.
> solar powered cars would be completely viable
Not possible. Literally.
A Tesla, which is actually pretty average, goes about 5 km on a kWh. At highway speeds, that's three minutes of driving. The S has a roof about 2 square meters. There are 1000 W per meter of sunlight under perfect conditions. That means in those 3 minutes you will collect about 2000 * 0.05 = 100 Wh of electricity, or about 0.5 km. So basically you're discharging 10 times as fast as you could possibly charge.
If you consider realistic conversion on the order of 10% (15% power conversion, 30% geometry losses), its more like 100 times. Even if you drive and then park, there simply aren't enough hours in the day to cover even the shortest transports. A garage roof covered in panels *might* do for people who do shopping and such.
The best next thing to tackle is reducing air travel and freight. Air travel should be one of those novelty things that the lucky few can justify, same with having something air freighted, sure its nice to get stuff 2 days, but reality is waiting a week or two isnt a problem. Unless I realllllllly need something fast I choose the slower cheaper shipping, and so what that it took 2 weeks to get something shipped from Florida to Seattle for a home project that can wait.
This is basically wrong, as Amazon has proven.
Of course, if you're buying for a specialty vendor that only has one shipping location that's across the country from you, it's going to take a few days to be shipped over by truck or train.
However, when you buy from a very large retailer like Amazon, they have multiple warehouses. Amazon has one in nearly every state now, last I heard. So when you order from them, depending on what you get, you may very well get it from a warehouse that's not very far from you, so you don't need air freight to get your item quickly. And those warehouses can, of course, be stocked by trucks or trains that take a week to get stuff around.
We really could be using more trains in the US for shipping stuff; it's a lot more efficient than truck, and it's compatible with trucks too, thanks to containerization (meaning you can ship a container from a rail terminal the last few dozen miles to its final destination, instead of driving it across the country with a truck). We've done a really bad job there, considering we used to have a lot more rail shipping.
As for travel, what we need to do is build SkyTran for shorter-distance travel to replace most cars, at least in the suburbs, and for inter-city transport. With pods that can travel at 100-150mph on suspended maglev rails, you'd be able to get around to cities within your region pretty quickly, much faster than by ground car, and probably faster than plane too since there's no TSA. For longer-distance travel, Hyperloop sounds interesting though it hasn't been proven (one problem with it seems to me that the passenger cabin doesn't hold nearly enough people to exploit economies of scale, but if it works out to have lots of pods, like SkyTran, then this might not be a problem). HSR seems to not be that great an idea; the speeds aren't much higher than SkyTran, it costs an absolute fortune to build (as it sits on the ground and has to be site-built rather than factory-built), it isn't suspended like SkyTran, and it isn't anywhere near as fast as Hyperloop.
Did you know that electric trains don't need to carry their own power source? True story!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Planes fly better with both a left and right wing
I don't disagree with your math, but an article on NewAtlas TODAY extols a claim from a German company that they are going to build a car with 7.5 m^2 of 22% efficient polycrystalline solar cells covering its flattish surfaces, with a 14.5 kW-H internal battery, that will get at least 30 km/day from normal ambient (unobstructed, sure) sun. Their so-far rendered image of a car looks like a smallish four seater commuter car. They also CLAIM that they will sell this for $14 to $16K USD.
I'm skeptical -- but if the DO manage this, it would make a hell of a car for my in-town driving. Basically buy it and then use it without fuel for the rest of its useful life, because I don't drive 30 km/day on average, even including runs to stores as well as work. I'm not sure it would be a good "only car", but it would sure take the pressure off of my 4Runner (needed to pull a boat and for trips but overkill for daily commuting).
The point being that there may be "specialty cars" that can actually function as solar cars for limited length commutes. The ELF (made in Durham NOW, as opposed to dreaming-ware like the car in the new atlas article) could almost do it, if you could hook it up to a few square meters of panel this efficient, but it isn't really a "car", it is more of an electric enhanced tricycle with a tarp-like cover and a bit of storage. But for $6000, one could add the solar panels and a system to accumulate enough charge at home in a day to keep it charged for standard commutes, if it were really road safe (IMO it's not, quite).
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
As far as CO2-equivalent global warming effect, generating electricity with natural gas is almost as bad as burning coal.
The reason is subtle.
When UNBURNED natural gas leaks out of the distribution pipe network and leaks at extraction from the ground, that is methane that is being emitted into the atmosphere.
100-year global warming potential of methane (CH4)
25 x – I.e. Releasing 1 kg of CH4 into the atmosphere is about equivalent to releasing 25 kg of CO2
20-year global warming potential of methane (CH4)
72 x – I.e. Releasing 1 kg of CH4 into the atmosphere is about equivalent to releasing 72 kg of CO2, in terms of warming effects over the 20 years following emission.
If the total leakage in the production and distribution of natural gas is about 3%, natural gas energy's global warming potential is about the same as coal's.
The actual leakage percentage is a much debated unknown.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Yep, that steak you're eating is one of the largest carbon footprint problems in the world.
But, it is SOOO tasty!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This is an area where I think autonomous vehicle actually may have the biggest impact. My fly vs drive cutoff is usually about 5 hours of driving. Below that driving wins the time vs convenience battle. If I have a car that can drive me, I''l significantly increase that time, probably to 8 hours, or even more. I could have the car drive overnight while I sleep, then no need to take a flight then rent a car, work around flight schedules, etc.
In short, fully autonomous vehicles could cut into business travel flight as well as personal flights, but it could put more cars on the road at any given time and increase road congestion. It also may breed a new type of vehicle... the sleeper car, where you have a full bed or two (or more). That might actually result in some bigger vehicles on the road.
You have to "decarbonize" limestone (CaCO3) to Calcium Oxide (CaO) to make cement. You _cannot_ make cement without producing a lot of carbon dioxide, even if your energy source is carbon-free.
Actually, the bizarre thing is many firms manufacture more efficient and less polluting planes, trains, and vehicles, including trucks.
End the tax exemptions for business use of fossil fuels: as fuel, in depreciation for vehicles, in deductions for business miles travelled in fossil fuel vehicles of any type.
The Invisible Hand of Capitalism will then crush fossil fuels, which are massively subsidized, and eat up large segment of national and state and county and municipal budgets.
This includes any lanes for fossil fuel vehicle usage, by passenger mile traveled.
Capitalism cares nothing about fossil fuels. It will crush these buggy whip manufacturers and kerosene users like it did before, if you give it the proper signals.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We seem to have electrified railways going between cities in Europe, and they seem to be cost effective. We even have an electric train that crosses the English channel.
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> but trucking was then deregulated, so it became cheaper to ship a lot of stuff by truck.
It has nothing to do with deregulation, and everything to do with time. You need to go watch them switch a railcar onto an industrial spur some time, it takes HOURS. The last one to go into Dominion Color, a single tanker car, took most of a day.
If your product has any time-dimension value, and they all do, then there is a price differential that means trucks are cheaper end-to-end. That line moves with the *relative* price of trains vs. trucks. Trains are cheaper than trucks, about 35% IIRC, but that's not enough to justify it unless you ship a LOT of stuff that can move from one siding to another. Like steel, or coal.
I seem to recall a study that said when diesel hits $4.00 a gallon an ungodly amount of freight suddenly moves to trains. I guess that's why the train companies are spending so much effort on truck-to-train systems, for that day when it might come.