One response that Governments could take as they try to rescue their economies, national and global, could be to exploit recent consumer experience of elevated fuel bills.
How about taking some of the recent decline of 20 per cent or so and using it to do something useful? This is not an invitation to bail out more banks, but to invest in the transport infrastructure, perhaps, such as the plan that the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer announced on Monday to bring forward planned capacity enhancements on motorways, or in “green” technologies, to make transport more environmentally sustainable.
When petrol threatened to hit 120p/litre on the UK’s forecourts, people thought twice about filling up. It may have been imagination, but roads really did seem emptier. Now that price wars have returned to the forecourts, all that energy awareness is evaporating.
As a recent study of the impact of transport on the climate comes in the shape of another paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), this is a long term challenge that really shouldn't be buffeted about by short-term thinking.
The paper in question comes from Terje Berntsen and Jan Fuglestvedt of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Norway, which earlier this year came up with the notion that shipping could actually cool the climate.
This latest paper adds to the science and gives us some idea of the staying power of pollution from different modes of transport. As the authors tell us, emissions from transport can be long-lived greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, short-lived chemically active gases that indirectly lead to changes in greenhouse gases, and “emissions of short-lived aerosols and aerosol precursors”. Then there are the emissions from aviation that cause changes in “stratospheric water vapour, contrails and cirrus cloud coverage”.
These various crimes against the climate differ in their persistence. By looking at the detailed behaviour of each component, the researchers have come up with what they say is a much better picture of the temporal behaviour of the various components and of the net effect of all of these emissions on global temperature.
The main point of the research is that “the comparison and ranking of the transport sectors and the various forcing agents depend strongly on the temporal perspective chosen”. Different modes of transport exhibit “very different temporal behaviour”. Shipping still looks relatively benign, but only in the short term. On a longer timescale, “the current emissions from shipping cause net warming because of the persistence of the CO2 perturbation”.
Shipping may be important in moving things around the planet, but it is a minority pursuit when it comes to personal travel. Air and motor vehicles are much more popular. Air travel remains a villainous activity to many people, but the numbers tell a different story. “If emissions stay constant at 2000 levels, the warming effect from road transport will continue to increase and will be almost 4 times larger than that of aviation by the end of the century.”
What are we supposed to make of this information? As the authors of the paper say, it isn't just the science that matters. Politicians, not to mention the rest of society, have to make some difficult choices.
This week’s Pre-Budget Report in the UK went some way with its changes to the “climate taxes” on long-distance flights. It also announced investments that should make rail travel more climate friendly. The Chancellor of the Exchequer did, though, mutter about excessive energy prices, or maybe it was excessive profits by the energy companies, and slowed down measures to tax “carboniferous” vehicles.
Yes, the economy is in a mess. But this will, we all hope, be short term. As the PNAS paper shows, climate change is a long-term concern, one that just might be worth a few pence on the price of a litre of fuel.
Further information:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0804844105
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