WHERE IS OUR STATE AND NATIONAL LEADERSHIP ON GLOBAL WARMING?

When will our State and National leaders wake up and realize the enormous environmental impacts we are dumping onto future generations of Americans by our continued inaction on global warming?

Through our land use and transportation planning processes, why are U.S. and Colorado's government leaders and key private sector decision makers NOT taking action to curb global warming?

Why are they ignoring our growing contribution to greenhouse gas emissions from our current transportation and automobile dependent land use and development patterns?

Why are State leaders so fixated on growing revenues for continued highway expansion that only drive up automobile dependent development, vehicle miles traveled and sprawl?

Through their lack of vision and desire to continue the status quo of automobile and highway dependent land use, they are dumping catastrophic global environmental conditions on their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, often in the name of “economic development”.

Is this so called “economic development” achieved by continued automobile dependent development, continued highway expansion and continued sprawl, worth the dire environmental consequences that we are passing onto future generations throughout the world?

Asilomar Declaration

on

Climate Policy

B Y

D A N I E L  S P E R L I N G

This article borrows from Chapters 1 and 15 in Driving Climate Change: Cutting Carbon From Transportation, which were co-authored with James S. Cannon and David Burwell. The Asilomar Declaration was endorsed by the TRB committees on Transportation Energy, Alternative Fuels, and Transportation and Sustainability. David Greene, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and John E. Johnston, then with ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company, prepared the text of the Asilomar Declaration.

CHANGING THE CLIMATE

While political wheels spin, greenhouse gas emissions—mostly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels—continue to increase. Official US government sources estimate that global CO2 emissions increased from 21.4 billion metric tons in 1990 to roughly 6 billion tons in 2004, and expect them to increase another fifty percent by 2025, an increase of two percent per year.

Mounting emissions are contemporaneous with mounting scientific evidence that GHG emissions are likely causing significant shifts in the Earth’s climate. The eight hottest years in more than a century of record-keeping occurred in the last decade. Analyses at the Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado concluded that 75 percent of the four million square miles of permafrost in Arctic regions could melt in the next hundred years, and a multinational assessment predicted an almost complete melting of the Arctic ice cap (during the summer) by the end of this century.

The Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, representing the consensus of 1,500 scientists, concludes that the Earth’s climate has demonstrably changed on both global and regional scales since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and that new and strong evidence indicates that most of the warming observed over the last fifty years is attributable to human activities. Scenarios based on a range of climate models point to an increase in global average surface temperature of 1.4° to 5.8°C over the period 1990 to 2100.

Despite mounting scientific evidence of global warming, changing climates, and melting polar ice, the exact scientific connections between increased GHG emissions and climate change remain murky. It is not clear how much, how fast, and where the climate will change, nor what the effect of that change will be on land use, biodiversity, agriculture, and fresh water supplies, to mention only a few areas of concern.

What is clear is that global emissions of GHGs are on a steep upward trajectory. Before industrialization and the widespread use of fossil fuels, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 275 parts per million (ppm). It is now 375 ppm. Climate scientists believe that doubling CO2 to 550 ppm threatens radical shifts in precipitation, temperature, and water currents.

To stabilize concentrations, even at 550 ppm, would require a sharp reduction in emissions across all economic sectors—by about one third of forecasted levels for 2050 and over two thirds for 2100. Stabilizing concentrations at lower levels would require even more dramatic reductions.

There is no doubt that large rapid increases in GHG emissions have the potential to alter the climate in ways that would be catastrophic for human civilization and the Earth’s ecology. And there is no doubt that the US is by far the world’s leading GHG and CO2 emitter, accounting for about 27 percent of the global total. China is projected to eclipse the US around 2020 in total emissions, but the US will remain far ahead in emissions per capita into the foreseeable future.

DRIVING EMISSIONS UP

Transportation is the fastest growing source of GHG emissions in the world.

Vehicle usage continues to increase, rapidly in some regions. Within the US, transportation accounts for one third of all emissions, growing at about 1.5 percent per year. Most transportation CO2 emissions come from cars and trucks burning petroleum fuels: sixty percent from gasoline combustion in cars, 22 percent from diesel trucks and buses, and the rest from rail, off-road vehicles, aviation, and marine transportation.

It is even worse than it seems. That is because, as conventional oil supplies become scarcer, the oil industry is turning to unconventional carbon-intensive oil sources such as tar sands and heavy oil. Manufacturing gasoline from tar sands produces about fifty percent more CO2 emissions than making gasoline from conventional oil. Even if global oil consumption were capped, using more carbon-intensive oil sources means more GHG emissions. Amazingly, we are re-carbonizing our fuel system when virtually everyone accepts that we should be doing just the opposite.

The challenge is huge.

THE ASILOMAR DECLARATION

Alarmed by simplistic public discourse and the enormity of the climate challenge, a group of individuals organized a high-level meeting focused on transportation energy policy and investments. Two hundred leaders and experts from automotive and energy industries, start-up technology companies, governments from around the world, public interest groups, academia, and national energy laboratories assembled for three days in August 2005 at the 10th Biennial Conference on Transportation and Energy Policy at California’s Asilomar Conference Center. They asked what could or should be done to reduce emissions from the transport sector. Three broad strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions were investigated:

1.  Reduce motorized travel

2.  Shift to less energy-intensive modes

3.  Change fuel and propulsion technologies

Conference discussions revolved around four key questions. What is the role of technology versus behavioral changes? Are entirely new technologies required?

What is the role of transportation? Which policy instruments might be most effective, and which most acceptable? The group never arrived at definitive answers, but several threads of agreement surfaced. These were put into writing and endorsed as the Asilomar Declaration.

DECLARATION 1:

It is the consensus of the 10th Biennial Conference on Transportation and Energy Policy that climate change is real. Transportation-related GHG emissions are a major part of this global problem, and they must be reduced.

DECLARATION 2:

US national policy has so far failed to adequately address the role of

transportation in climate change. This must be remedied.

DECLARATION 3:

By judiciously crafting a portfolio of solutions, it is possible to reduce

transportation-related GHG emissions while creating an efficient and effective transportation system for current and future generations.

But the challenge for the transport sector extends far beyond national fuel economy rules. A broader range of mitigation strategies is necessary, since emissions are linked to the entire range of traveler behaviors and land use decisions. And they must include adaptation strategies, since changes in climate threaten transportation infrastructure.

Thus, the climate debate must address individual responsibility and government initiatives to manage land use, moderate vehicle use, and protect the integrity of the transport infrastructure.

Inaction on climate policy is also explained by the remoteness of the effects of global warming. Fortunately, solutions to climate change overlap with more politically salient challenges such as energy security, local air pollution, and traffic congestion. Intensifying tensions over these issues are likely to motivate innovation and policy action well before global warming does. In any case, Asilomar participants agreed that actions to reduce GHG emissions and oil use must accelerate.

Opportunities abound to reduce transportation-related GHG emissions. These include improved fuel efficiency, improved fuel and vehicle technologies, a more robust mix of transportation fuels, and changes in travel behavior that improve the efficiency of the transportation system. Many actions cost little and have quick paybacks, yet little progress is being made. All trends are towards creating higher emissions.

Homes and jobs continue to disperse, causing people to travel ever longer distances; vehicles are becoming larger and more powerful; petroleum fuels continue to dominate; unconventional, carbon intense petroleum sources are replacing conventional petroleum; and transit is stuck at two percent of passenger travel in the US. Because the rate of change in the transport

sector is so slow—in terms of land use, vehicle turnover, and fuels infrastructure—even under the most ambitious scenarios, it will be a long time before the upward trajectory of GHG emissions is bent downward. New transportation fuels, new fuel technologies, new user behaviors, and new institutions are needed, and they are not happening.

Those few changes that are happening are negative or trivial. For example, ethanol made from corn is trumpeted as a clean fuel and received about $3 billion in corn and fuel subsidies in 2005, mostly from the federal government. General Motors touts ethanol in full-page color ads asserting that “yellow is green.” It is not. Corn ethanol provides no air quality benefit and little or no GHG benefit. Depending on circumstances and which assumptions and models one chooses to use, corn ethanol might increase or decrease GHGs compared to gasoline.

While lack of progress is discouraging, there are indeed many options for reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. Over the last 25 years, vehicle fuel consumption rates have remained static—but not because technology is not improving. Today’s vehicles are far more energy efficient in a technical sense than vehicles of 25 years ago.

What has happened is that the efficiency improvements—estimated

at one to two percent per year—have been offset by increases in size and power. Twenty years ago, the average car accelerated from zero to sixty miles per hour in over fourteen seconds. Today’s cars need less than ten seconds. Today’s granny car would have qualified as a performance car 25 years ago. If performance and size had been frozen at 1981 levels, current vehicles would consume thirty percent less fuel.

With the advent of hybrid vehicle technology and improved diesel engines, and a storm of innovation in materials, electronics, and combustion, this one to two percent annual rate of improvement in efficiency should continue for many decades, resulting in large reductions in oil use and GHG emissions—but only if performance and size are capped.

Even greater improvements are possible if low-carbon fuels and advanced technologies are introduced. Fuels can be made from cellulosic matter, including grasses, trees, and crop wastes such as wheat straw. These produce forty to ninety percent fewer emissions than gasoline, considering the full cycle of production, delivery, and combustion.

If vehicles are powered by electricity from the grid, emissions could drop by

up to seventy percent in many regions, especially in California where coal accounts for only about twenty percent of grid electricity (versus about sixty percent elsewhere in the US). And vehicles powered by hydrogen, even when the hydrogen is made from a fossil fuel such as natural gas (as it is in the US today), would significantly reduce emissions.

Some combination of these low-carbon and advanced options—electricity, biofuels, and hydrogen—will almost certainly replace petroleum eventually. But it will take considerable time, in part because it requires a transformation of the energy, agricultural, and automotive industries.

HUMAN FACTORS

The other large set of solutions to increasing emissions is tied to shifts in travel behavior. With land use planning, tolls and other pricing schemes, investment in alternative travel modes, and improved system integration, energy-intensive travel could be reduced, along with air pollution, oil use, and greenhouse gas emissions.

The bad news is that these changes in travel behavior have proven even more challenging to bring about than changes in fuels and vehicles. The history of modern civilization is one of increasing mobility. Almost all forecasts anticipate escalating travel, even in the US, though an increasing share of it is by air (which is even more energy intensive, but I leave that topic for others). How can the Earth sustain continuing increases in energy use? The first challenge is to create a more efficient transport system than today’s monoculture of two-ton vehicles serving all purposes in all places on all roads.

Imagine a seamless multi-layered transport system with high-speed bus and rail services fed by small neighborhood vehicles and shared cars. Imagine paratransit vehicles that detour from set routes to pick up and deliver passengers on a moment’s notice. Imagine greater use of telecommunications to make mode transfers seamless, and imagine more effective management of land to support these innovative services.

Is this any more preposterous than transforming our energy, agricultural, and automotive industries?

Efforts to reduce, or at least restrain, travel are desirable for many reasons. Contrary to widely held beliefs in the transport community, it is not true that more vehicle travel is socially beneficial. Accessibility, yes; mobility, no.

There are ways to increase accessibility without increasing mobility, as suggested above. Less vehicle travel not only reduces the threat of climate change and oil scarcity, but also reduces the total cost of transportation and can lead to more desirable and aesthetically pleasing communities.

The reality, though, is that the potential for reducing energy use and GHGs through travel behavior changes is far more modest than through low-carbon and advanced technology strategies. Consider the impressive two-and-a-half-year effort by the Sacramento region to develop a transportation and land use plan to reduce travel and enhance the region’s quality of life, one of the most ambitious and engaged initiatives in the nation.

Its most aggressive travel reduction scenario for 2050 produces only sixteen percent less travel per household. More reduction is plausible, but it would need a restructuring of the transportation system.

The real lesson may be that more effort must be devoted to creating synergies among strategies. If land use were managed in such a way as to encourage the use of neighborhood vehicles, then the limited performance and size of those vehicles would facilitate the use of electric power (since large expensive batteries would not be needed).  If electric power interfaces were created at transit stations to allow hybrid and fuel cell vehicles to serve as paid sources of peak power backup, then both transit and alternative fuel vehicles would receive a boost. And if a variety of local strategies were developed to encourage the use of low-carbon vehicles and fuels and innovative low-carbon mobility services (such as smart paratransit), then large reductions in greenhouse gases and fuel use would be possible. These synergistic opportunities are at hand, and their benefits are broad. The historical resistance to change can and must be overcome. A new culture of innovation is needed in the transport sector.

INNOVATION AND ACTION

As this essay suggests, and as participants at the Asilomar conference quickly concluded, dramatic changes are needed in both technology and consumer behavior. Indeed, they go hand in hand. While it is true that entirely new technologies and new services are both desirable and needed to meet the energy challenges of tomorrow, the reality is that behavioral changes in established industries and the consumer marketmust come first.

As to the other questions posed to conference participants—the role of transportation vis-à-vis other sectors and the effectiveness and desirability of policy instruments—it was widely understood that these questions are second order. The more salient concern is the paucity of innovation and investment, and the lack of commitment. While some strategies may not be particularly efficient in meeting societal goals, such as ethanol from corn, the real point is that creating a culture of innovation and action must be the number one strategy.

In that light, the three Asilomar declarations are not radical. Conference participants simply agreed that global climate change is real, and that it is possible to reduce GHG emissions and still have an efficient and effective transportation system. One day soon the Asilomar Declarations will likely be regarded as startlingly timid. But at this time and place they represent an important statement. The challenge, enmeshed in the 3^rd declaration, is how to proceed.

The key group, the responsible party, is the consumer of transportation services—us. The consumer lies at the intersection of three public and private groups—transportation, vehicle, and energy providers; infrastructure builders and managers; and land use planners and decision makers.

Ultimately it is personal behavior—how we access transportation services and how we settle upon the land—that dictates the actions of infrastructure, energy, vehicle, and transportation providers. Since every individual is his or her own transportation planner and decision maker, the challenge of climate change can be addressed only by broad empowerment and participation.

But researchers and policymakers have only a weak understanding of consumer behavior. It is increasingly clear that transportation has symbolic meaning to consumers beyond its utility—our travel behavior is clearly not explained by simplistic principles of economic rationality. Why did consumers binge on SUVs in the ’90s? Why are hybrids, despite their large cost premiums, appealing to so many consumers? We are still a long way from knowing how to design effective policies that direct consumers toward more socially responsible behaviors.

One could blame automakers, oil companies, and politicians for the unsustainable energy path of the US and the world. Car companies happily supply those gas guzzling vehicles, oil companies eagerly deplete oil reservoirs, and politicians passively watch from the sideline.

But they are not the real culprits.

It is us: individuals acting singly as consumers and citizens.

As consumers we purchase those gas guzzlers and embrace car-dependent lifestyles.

As citizens we elect passive politicians unwilling to tackle oil dependence and climate change.

All of us are ultimately responsible.

Consumers could vote with their dollars and buy fuel efficient and alternative fuel vehicles.

We have not.

Citizens could vote for politicians committed to reducing pollution and fuel use.

We have not.

We are to blame.

Not totally, because it is not really true that car and oil companies innocently provide consumers only what they want or that politicians merely respond to the interests of their constituents. But ultimate responsibility does fall on each of us.

We need to reconceptualize what we know about climate change to articulate the problem effectively, to identify key questions, to develop a set of possible responses, and to prioritize what needs to be accomplished. These are not trivial tasks. The environmental community has been struggling with exactly this challenge for some time, largely unsuccessfully.

They have not been able to conceptualize and articulate what is important about climate change nor develop climate action plans in ways that resonate broadly. But the failure to meet these challenges is not theirs alone. The problems face all of us.

Which brings us back to knowledge and expertise. The culture of the academic world is built around the search for knowledge. Academics speak in the languages of metrics, analytical frameworks, statistics.

But as Henry Kissinger once said,

“Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.”

He went on to say,

“It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.”

We agree.

Think of Rachel Carson on environmental awareness (Silent Spring), Jane Jacobs on urban planning (Death and Life of American Cities), and Betty Friedan on the role of women (The Feminine Mystique). None were experts. All were leaders.

More knowledge and more experts are certainly needed in the energy area. But lack of knowledge is not the central problem. What we need is a framework that will allow human society to create mechanisms and incentives to channel our tremendous creativity productively and efficiently.

What we need is initiative and leadership. Too much is at stake.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Asilomar meeting was hosted and organized by the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis (ITS-Davis), under the auspices of the US National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board—in particular, the standing committees on Energy, Alternative Fuels, and Transportation and Sustainability. It was sponsored by prominent governments, companies and foundations, including American Honda Motor Company, California Air Resources Board, California Department of Transportation, Energy Foundation, Natural Resources Canada, Surdna Foundation, US Department of Transportation, US Environmental Protection Agency, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, University of California Transportation Center, WestStart-CALSTART, and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

All presentations at the 10th Biennial Asilomar Conference, 2005, can be accessed at http://www.its.ucdavis.edu/events/outreachevents/asilomar2005/.
 

Executive Summary

The phrase “you can’t get there from here” has a new application.  A commonly accepted US target for climate stabilization is achieve a 60 to 80 percent reduction in CO₂ emissions by 2050 relative to 1990 levels in the United States.  But this paper demonstrates that the transport sector must contribute to this goal, and the transport sector cannot do its fair share through vehicle and fuel technology alone.   We have to sharply reduce the growth in vehicle miles driven across the U.S.’s sprawling urban areas, reversing trends that go back decades.

This report is based on an exhaustive review of existing research on the relationship between urban development, travel, and the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted by motor vehicles.   It provides evidence and insights on how much transportation-related CO₂ savings can be expected with compact development, how compact development is likely to be received by consumers, and what policy changes will make compact development possible.  Several related issues are not fully examined in this report. These include the energy savings from more-efficient building types, the potential to preserve forests that act as carbon sinks, and the effectiveness of pricing strategies—such as tolls, parking charges and mileage-based fees—when used in conjunction with compact development and expanded transportation alternatives.

The term compact development doesn’t imply high-rise or even uniformly high density, but rather higher average “blended” densities.   As important as density is, it is no more fundamental to compact development than mixing of land uses, development of strong population and employment centers, interconnection of streets, and the design of structures and spaces at a human-scale.

Driving Up CO₂ Emissions

The U.S. is the largest emitter worldwide of the greenhouses gases that cause global warming. Transportation accounts for a full third of CO₂ emissions in the U.S., and that share is growing as others shrink in comparison, rising from 31% in 1990 to 33% today^[i].  It is hard to envision a “solution” to the global warming crisis that does not involve slowing the growth of transport CO₂ emissions in the U.S.

The Three-Legged Stool Needed to Reduce CO₂ from Automobiles
Transport CO₂ reduction is a three-legged stool: one leg related to vehicle fuel efficiency; a second to the carbon content of the fuel itself; and a third to the amount of driving, or vehicle miles traveled (VMT).  Energy and climate policy initiatives at the federal and state levels have pinned their hopes almost exclusively on the first two legs of the stool: developing more efficient vehicles (such as hybrid cars) and lower carbon fuels (such as biodiesel fuel).  A stool cannot stand on two legs.

As the research compiled in this report makes clear, technological improvement in vehicles and fuels are likely to be offset by continuing, robust growth in VMT.  Since 1980, the number of miles Americans drive has grown three times faster than population, and almost twice as fast as vehicle registrations .  Average automobile commute times in metropolitan areas have risen steadily over the decades, and now many Americans spend more time sitting in their cars commuting than they do vacationing. 

This raises some questions, which this report addresses: Why do we drive so much? Why is the total distance we’re driving growing so rapidly? And what can be done to alter this trend in a manner that is effective, fair and economically acceptable?

The growth in driving is due in large part to urban development, or what some refer to as the built environment.  Americans drive so much because we have given ourselves little alternative. For 60 years we have built homes ever farther from workplaces, created schools that are inaccessible except by motor vehicle, and isolated other destinations—such as shopping—from work and home.  From World War II until very recently, nearly all new development has been planned and built on the assumption that people will use cars virtually every time they travel. As a larger and larger share of our built environment has become automobile-oriented, car trips and distances have increased as walking and public transit use have declined.  Population growth has been responsible for only a quarter of the increase in the last couple decades. More of the increase has stemmed from factors related to the sprawling environment, such as longer trips and people driving alone^[iii].

As with driving, land is being consumed for development at a rate almost three times faster than population growth.  This expansive development has caused CO₂ emissions from cars to rise even as it has reduced the amount of forest land available to absorb CO₂.

How Growth in Driving Cancels Out Improved Vehicle Fuel Economy

CO₂ is more difficult to control through vehicle technology than are conventional air pollutants.   Conventional pollutants can be reduced in automobile exhaust with sop