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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.
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?
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.
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.........
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.