As human-caused climate change continues to drive temperatures and sea levels higher and higher, so too does it drive our collective awareness of an urgent need to transition to ways of moving ourselves and our stuff around that don’t gravely harm the ability of our planet to maintain a stable environment; A.K.A. clean transportation. With that awareness naturally comes a few questions, like, what is that? Why don’t we have that already? And, how on Earth do we achieve that?
What is Clean Transportation?
Clean transportation is a general term for forms of transportation that don’t interfere with the lovely environmental conditions that have allowed humanity to thrive since we showed up on the proverbial block a few hundred millennia ago. In other words, ways of moving ourselves and our stuff around that don’t mess too much with the climatic or biological systems on which we rely: net-zero greenhouse gasses, low pollution, and minimal ecological disruption.
Why Don’t We Have Clean Transportation Already?
For all but the last blip of human history, we’ve been moving ourselves and our stuff around on muscle power, with some help along the way from energy differentials in various fluids (wind, rivers, ocean currents, etc.). This meant that, with vanishingly few exceptions, all the energy we used for transportation was part of the carbon loop between the atmosphere and the biosphere; e.g., grass uses carbon from the soil and the air to grow → horses eat grass and we use their energy for our transportation needs → the horse exhales carbon dioxide into the air and poops carbon into the soil → repeat.
This worked fine for a long time, despite not being particularly fast or efficient. This placed fairly tight constraints on the rates at which we could transmit things and ideas around, limiting our growth rate.
But then we got real good at burning fossil fuels — so named because they are made of “fossilized” organic matter that had long been removed from the aforementioned carbon loop. And because fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas are a) relatively stable, b) easily portable, and c) very energy dense they were tremendously useful in helping us move ourselves and our stuff around much further and faster than ever before. That ultimately meant that we could make more of ourselves than ever before, to the point where we now have an interconnected grid of transportation systems spanning the entire planet to serve the nearly eight billion of us. And, for better and worse, the design of these systems has been heavily influenced by expansionist Western nations, chiefly the United States.
Systems of transportation reflect the needs and desires of the society in which they arise, and the current car-centric model popularized in and by the United States is no exception. After an initial wave of investments into more efficient mass transit options like trolleys and trains in the 1800s and early 1900s, individual passenger vehicles became more and more popular in the U.S. throughout the mid to late 20th century as the American desire for a backyard and a white picket fence manifested itself in sprawling suburbs and webs of freeways. Funding for mass transit dried up as usage dwindled, and automotive interests became increasingly present within political processes. Trolley cars were dismantled, railways torn out or buried, and bus lines cut.
All this has left us in the present U.S. with the predicament of having nearly one motor vehicle per person, almost all of which are burning climate-changing (and air-polluting) fossil fuels. Our oil overreliance has resulted in decades of conflicts around the world that have harmed many innocents as well as American national security. The embedded physical and sociopolitical infrastructure of this collective decision has largely prevented improvements, despite the status quo’s obvious (traffic, smog, car accidents, fuel price instability, oil spills) and non-obvious (climate change, a couple generations of lead poisoning, environmental racism) drawbacks.
Efforts thus far to create clean transportation systems in the face of this resistance have been piecemeal and inconsistent, largely being driven by top-down policies in a few key countries like China and states like California. So…
How On Earth Do We Achieve Clean Transportation?
From here, we have three general pathways to cleaner transportation systems (barring unforeseeable circumstances like benevolent extraterrestrials gifting us the secrets of free energy) of which our future selves and children will choose between, described below in the broadest of strokes.
The first is to keep the trajectory we’ve been on: more fossil fuels, more internal combustion vehicles, more low-density communities. Over time, unabated greenhouse gas emissions will trigger one or more climatic tipping points that will lead to runaway global warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinction. Human populations will shrink as large swathes of the planet become uninhabitable, and we become unable to produce enough food and clean water, both of which will drive increased conflict over limited resources on local and global scales. The ability for societies to support specialized occupations like artists, scientists, and academics will diminish as basic survival becomes a higher priority, reducing our technological and cultural potentials.
Besides the human and environmental toll this will take, it will also disrupt global supply chains crucial for maintaining our complex fossil fuel transportation systems. We recently got a glimpse of what the early stages of this might look like in the COVID-19 pandemic, although in this scenario the underlying cause (climate change) will take a few thousand times longer to abate. Fewer and fewer people will have access to working vehicles, fuel, and maintained roadways, a trend that will only continue as manufacturing and maintenance capacities dwindle. And thus, transportation emissions will drop — at a heavy price.
Or, we could skip the runaway climate change step and accelerate the already-widening divide between haves and have-nots to the point where only a small percentage of humanity have access to fossil fuels. This isn’t terribly different from where we are today, with the majority of climate emissions coming from a global minority of nations and individuals, and, as our economic systems are already set up to concentrate capital, it would be relatively straightforward just to speed that process along. Once a wealth-based oligarchy was fully realized, transportation emissions would decrease as the global economy contracted and more people lost access to personal vehicles and other fossil-powered transportation.
Of course, the inherent instability of such an unbalanced societal structure makes achieving sustained emissions reductions, among other key societal goals like peace, justice, and long-term survival, uncertain at best.
The third pathway is to actually embrace clean transportation methods; prioritizing them over business-as-usual methods, making them available to all, and considering both the short- and long-term effects of our decisions. The first few steps will need to expand and strengthen cultural and political support for equitable and sustainable transportation solutions in order to lay the groundwork for an efficient, effective transition. Next will be to develop the manufacturing and workforce capacity needed to physically implement those solutions, and then finally to implement iterative feedback processes that make the transportation systems we build work better and have lower or even positive impacts on the environment in which we exist.
To break these steps down in a little more detail, let’s start with the sociopolitical groundwork. As a tragedy of the commons driven by the actions of billions of individuals, climate change needs widespread public agreement on the need for decarbonization efforts like a transition to clean transportation. This agreement can arise through bottom-up social movements like grassroots environmental groups or top-down government action like the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act; or, more realistically, a combination of both that push each other forward. Fostering a cultural attitude of clean transportation as our legacy, rather than an expense, will also be invaluable in helping us sustain our trajectory.
Businesses, as the primary vehicles of economic activity, will be pivotal in this process; driven by shifting consumer demands, evolving government regulations and incentives, and corporate thought leadership. To ensure long-term sustainability, economic growth will need to be planned within the context of our survival on a planet with limited resources, redefining the relationships between corporations, governments, and the general public.
With buy-in from these key stakeholders, serious progress can be made on building out the knowledge base, workforce, and physical infrastructure necessary to transition to clean transportation systems. These components will need to be implemented sequentially and iteratively: grow our knowledge base of different solutions, train a robust workforce, and then support those workers in sustainable resource management, manufacturing, construction, operations, and maintenance.
Regardless of the particular methods chosen, some general trends should be followed for solution implementation. Creating sustainable resource supply chains that minimize extraction and maximize recycling/reuse should be a top priority, along with large investments in renewable energy resources, affordable urban housing, high-quality public transit, and e-mobility.
Because there is no one-size-fits-all technology or approach for all our needs, we’d be best served by employing a portfolio of techniques according to the situation; for example, electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrids running on low-carbon liquid fuels are currently best suited for replacing light-duty vehicles while hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are more practical for medium- and heavy-duty applications. Regions can decarbonize the energy sources needed to power vehicles with whatever renewable resources are most abundant: solar, wind, geothermal, small hydroelectric, and biomass.
Charging and refueling infrastructure build-out needs to be timed in conjunction with vehicle replacements to avoid the chicken-and-egg problem we’ve seen thus far in our EV transition to allow for smoother, less anxiety-inducing adoption. Clean fuels (including electricity) are also able to be produced in a much more decentralized manner than oil and gas, which are limited to specific geologic deposits, creating greater opportunities for democratic access to fuels and fuel revenues. Even today, the technology exists for fueling solutions that would be impossible with oil and gas, such as off-grid, solar-powered EV charging stations or green hydrogen dispensers. As new and better clean technologies, ideologies, and methodologies are developed, even greater possibilities will be afforded to us.
This third pathway to a clean transportation future relies on these types of practical, equitable solutions that allow for greater freedom, reliability, safety, and security. By creating better outcomes for all (yes, even oil company executives), it generates positive cultural, political, and economic feedback loops that will help continue to drive a clean transportation transition, an essential part of the global decarbonization puzzle that has been set as our task for the coming decades. And should we be up to the challenge, our reward will be nothing less than the ability to intentionally control the climate of our planet; the possibility of a stable and thriving future for generations to come.
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