Transportation Is A Big Honking Deal
10/31/2007 Update: We have new versions of these transportation charts for each Northwest state in shareable forms.
In the Northwest, it's impossible to address climate change without doing something about transportation. Take a look at this chart showing CO-2 emissions from fossil fuels in Washington.
In Washington (as in Oregon), everything else pales in comparison to the emissions that come from transportation. In fairness, the chart above shows only emission from fossil fuels. But fossil fuels represent better than four-fifths of the state's entire portfolio of greenhouse gas emsisions. They're also the emissions that are best understood, and by far the most practical to cover in carbon legislation, such as cap and trade.
Whether we aim to reduce our climate emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels (the amount that scientists say is necessary in the developed world if we're to slow climate change) or by 50 percent (the target that the state's leaders have proposed), there's pretty much no way to get around making big cuts in transportation emissions.
On a related note, the Western Climate Initiative -- the group of western states and provinces setting a joint climate strategy -- just announced their shared target. I was actually a bit surprised when I saw the numbers.
Two Good Columns
In the Seattle Times, Danny Westneat hits the nail on the head, making much the same point that Clark made a few days ago about the traffic apocalypse-that-wasn't. Westneat also adds this:
In 1998, British researchers studied what happened to traffic in more than 100 highway and bridge shutdowns in Europe and the U.S. They found that on average 25 percent of all car trips simply evaporated. People still went to work. Some commuters drove, some found another way in. Some other trips were just not made.
It's definitely worth reading the whole piece.
And behind the soon-to-be-history paywall at the New York Times, Thomas Friedman points out that energy efficiency is properly considered a source of energy. We can treat it that way by changing the way utilities operate and other smart features (that Sightline has long advocated for) including things like smart grid and decoupling. This about sums it up:
Mr. Rogers’s proposal is based on three simple principles. The first is that the cheapest way to generate clean, emissions-free power is by improving energy efficiency. Or, as he puts it, “The most environmentally sound, inexpensive and reliable power plant is the one we don’t have to build because we’ve helped our customers save energy.”
I think there's a common theme here. Sometimes the best solutions aren't about doing more with more; they're about doing better by being smart about how we use our current resources.
