Countdown, how to avoid climate catastrophe. Part 3 Transport

Transport accounts for about 14% of all emissions and is considered to be one of the fastest growing and most difficult to decarbonize sectors. Project Drawdown has 11 transport solutions that account for 4,4% of total emissions avoided or reduced out of 80 solutions modelled to 2050. When benchmarked against the International Transport Forum and International Energy Agency models to 2050 the results compare favourably, with some differences in emphasis.

Project Drawdown prioritizes its solutions according to space, energy efficiency and impact on energy use over those solutions that are more space and resource intensive. This means that higher priority solutions should be promoted to the maximum extent possible over lower priority solutions as follows:

Lower priority solutions often produce the biggest mitigation (because what they replace are the most carbon intensive). This is the case for Electric Vehicles (hundreds of millions of cars going from the Internal Combustion Engine to Battery Electric Vehicles) & Airplanes (over 260 billions of litres of jet fuel consumed per year).

COUNTDOWN QUESTION: How do we transform the ways we move?

RESEARCH ANSWER: Prioritize space, energy efficient and human health positive solutions and "electrify everything".

This landmark poster from 19 years ago already made the point of how much less space buses and bicycles take over cars. Not only are cars much more resource intensive they are inefficient, costly and used less than 10% of the time. Internal combustion engines just make matters much worse due to the deadly air pollution they cause, $trillions of additional health costs they impose on society, energy lost from fossil fuel extraction to combustion process itself and that they require more parts and maintenance than an equivalent electric car .

Just as humans need many less than 1.5 billion cows to have a healthy diet for a future 10 billion human beings the world does not need 1.4 billion cars that are used less than 10% of the time but rather needs more efficiently used electric cars, more telepresence, telecommuting, walking, biking, use of public transport and car-sharing.

Death of the Internal Combustion Engine

The August 12th 2017 edition of The Economist announced the demise of the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) and 2 years later BNP Paribas also explained in its August 2019 landmark report how the ICE would no longer be economically viable. The BNP Paribas report analysed the competitive advantage of Electric Vehicles (EV) + renewables over the Internal Combustion Engine + oil and answered the following questions about oil in transport's future:

1. Can oil can remain competitive with electric vehicles?

No, oil needs long-term break-evens of $10/bbl* to remain competitive in mobility.

For the same capital outlay today, new wind and solar-energy projects in tandem with battery...EVs will produce 6x-7x more useful energy at the wheels than will oil at $60/bbl for gasoline-powered LDVs (Light Duty Vehicles)...

*petrol/gasoline vehicles

2. Can oil rely on its incumbency alone to keep it afloat?

No, althouth oil has a massive flow-rate advantage: "... the economics of renewables are impossible for oil to compete with over the next 25 years".

... the next 25 years would see $25trn spent on mobility, whereas we estimate the cost of new renewables projects complete with the enhanced network infrastructure...at only $4.6-$5.2trn.

3. Are there other benefits to renewable energy powered EVs over ICE?

Yes "climate change and clean-air benefits, the public-health benefits that flow from this, the fact that electricity is much easier to transport than oil, and the fact that the price of electricity generated from wind and solar is low and stable over the long term whereas the price of oil is notoriously volatile"

Yes according to Jacobson et al., switching to renewable energy has the following economic, social, climate, environmental and health benefits:

1. Reduces end-use energy by 57.1%, 
2. Reduces aggregate private energy costs from $17.7 to $6.8 trillion/year (61%)
3. Reduces aggregate social costs from $76.1 to $6.8 trillion/year (91%)
4. Creates 28.6 million more (net) long-term, full-time jobs
5. Needs only ～0.17% and ～0.48% of land for new footprint and spacing

4. How big an impact will the death toll of gaosoline/petrol have on oil?

"With 36% of demand for crude oil today accounted for by LDVs and other vehicle categories susceptible to electrification, and a further 5% by power generation, the oil industry has never before in its history faced the kind of threat that renewable electricity in tandem with EVs poses to its business model: a competing energy source that:

1. has a short-run marginal cost (SRMC) of zero
2. is much cleaner environmentally
3. is much easier to transport,
4. could readily replace up to 40% of global oil demand if it had the necessary scale"

If all of this sounds far-fetched, then the speed with which the competitive landscape of the European utility industry has been reshaped over the last decade by the rollout of wind and solar power – and the billions of euros of fossil-fuel generation assets that this has stranded – should be a flashing red light on the oil industry’s dashboard

Sources: Project Drawdown, Cell, BNP Paribas

What can I do to avert climate catastrophe?

Countdown asks the right 5 giant questions on Power, Built Environment, Transport, Food and Nature to avoid climate catastrophe. So what is still needed?

1. The Coronovirus pandemic is taking a tragic toll on human life and livelihoods. The pandemic is a warning of how vulnerable humankind is, just how unprepared we are for climate catastrophe and how big our inaction to prevent climate catastrophe is. Time to rethink the inequality of human society, our relationship with nature, what we eat, how we consume and dispose of what we waste, the pollution we cause, how we move around, our health and shelter. What future do we want?
2. Help deploy sustainable climate solutions that get us there: Project Drawdown researches 100 sustainable climate solutions to avoid, reduce and capture human greenhouse gas emissions for a cleaner, safer, more equitable, biodiverse and healthier world. These solutions from 2017 have been updated in The Drawdown Review , March 2020.
3. Human society willingness to change: As ever more humans suffer directly the consequences of out-of-control climate change and from worsening air, water and soil pollution humans and their communities are taking action.
4. Social media such as Climate Countdown to touch and rapidly reach hundreds of millions of human beings
5. Toolkits to deploy solutions throughout society: Climate Action Accelerator to build communities of best climate practice, Drawdown Campus for campus based organizations to go climate neutral , Drawdown Cities to "fix and feed cities" and The Drawdown Investor so $trillions go into climate friendly investments.

What else can I do?

1. Learn about, share and deploy the solutions to climate change from reliable research based sources such as Project Drawdown, Exponential Climate Action Roadmap, One Earth Climate Model Climate Reality Leadership Future Earth
2. Join the Countdown!
3. Join We Don't Have Time
4. Become a Climate Reality Leader and present on the climate crisis and its solutions