January 2007

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BERKELEY, CA - While Arctic ice thaws, weather extremes become more frequent and Midwest tornadoes and Gulf Coast hurricanes become more violent, too little is done to stem the drift towards higher global temperatures to halt or reverse the problem, a respected transportation and environment expert believes.

Daniel Sperling, director of the University of Transportation Studies and professor of environmental science and policy and civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis says that “amazingly, we are re-carbonizing our fuel system when virtually everyone accepts that we should be doing just the opposite.”

Writing in the new fall issue last month of “Access,” a journal published twice annually by the University of California Transportation Center here, Sperling in a report on last year’s conference on transportation and energy policy at the Asilomar Conference Center, Monterey, CA says “climate change” is becoming part of the public discourse:

“Best-selling authors and Hollywood movies feature climate change,” Sperling wrote in his 11-page essay. “Presidents and Prime Ministers are becoming conversant in climate change science and policy.”

“It is time for the transport sector to become part of the solution,” he added. “Opportunities to reduce climate impacts abound in transportation, with broad economic, environmental, and social benefits. We need new partnerships among industry, political leaders, and the public, and a new culture of innovation that builds synergies across technological and behavioral initiatives.”

Sperling says international and local initiatives are expanding and “will eventually force a coherent national policy to emerge within the United States and other nations.” California has been a leader but inaction has been the name of the game in Washington, “explained in part by the nation’s culture of individualism and consumer sovereignty, its historical abundance of energy resources, and relative isolation from international conflict. It is also due to the powerful interests of the fossil fuel industries and the financial woes of the Detroit automakers and many of their suppliers.

“Labor unions and the many states housing auto factories fear that GHG (greenhouse gas) rules will bankrupt many companies and cause great harm to local economies,” Sperling explained. “While this fear is dissipating as the far healthier Japanese and European car companies populate the country with new factories, it remains a powerful concern.”

While opportunities abound to reduce transportation-related GHG emissions - improved fuel efficiency, improved fuel and vehicle technologies, a more robust mix of transportation fuels, and changes in travel behavior - “little progress is being made,” declared Sperling. All trends are towards creating higher emissions: homes and jobs continue to disperse causing people to travel ever longer distance, vehicles are becoming larger and more powerful, and unconventional carbon-intense petroleum sources are replacing conventional petroleum - “and transit is stuck at two percent of passenger travel in the U.S.”

The few changes that are underway are “negative or trivial,” notes Sperling. Corn-derived ethanol “is trumpeted as a clean fuel and received about $3 billion in fuel subsidies in 2005. General Motors touts ethanol in full-page ads claiming 'yellow is green.'

“It is not,” says Sperling. “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.”

Technically, today’s vehicles are “far more energy efficient” than those of 25 years ago, explains Sperling, but these improvements, estimated at 1-2 per cent a year, have been offset by increases in size and power: “Today’s granny car would have qualified as a performance car 25 years ago.” This annual 1-2 percent annual efficiency improvement rate 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 with low-carbon fuels and advanced technologies. Fuels made from cellulosic matter, including grasses, trees and crop wastes such as wheat straw “produce forty to ninety percent fewer emissions than gasoline,” Sterling adds. “If vehicles are powered by electricity from the grid, emissions could drop by up to seventy percent in many regions.....And vehicles powered by hydrogen, even when the hydrogen is made from a fossil fuel such as natural gas......would significantly reduce emissions.”

Another large set of solutions to reduce emissions is tied to changes in travel behavior, Sperling asserted. “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,” he added. “The history of modern civilization is one of increasing mobility.”

“Dramatic changes are needed in both technology and consumer behavior,” Sperling summarizes the conclusions of the Asilomar conference participants. “The key group, the responsible party, is the consumer of transportation services - us......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.”

What is really needed, said Sterling, are both a reconceptualization of what we know about climate change, to articulate the problem and identify key questions and to develop a set of possible responses, but also to find and support leaders. Sperling approvingly cites Henry Kissinger as saying once, “most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by the experts,” adding, “It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.”

“More knowledge and more experts are certainly needed in the energy area,” concluded Sperling. But we also need a framework “to channel our tremendous creativity productively and efficiently. What we need is initiative and leadership.”

Contact: Prof. Sperling, dsperling@ucdavis.edu. Sperling’s essay is at www.uctc.net/access/29/Access%2029%20-%2003%20-%20
Asilomar%20Declaration.pdf