Improving Transport Sustainability

Thirty years ago the Green message on transportation focussed on the coming threat of climate change, the likely shortages and high prices of oil when demand eventually outstripped the capacity to supply, and the contribution of poor air quality to respiratory disease. We could add to that the poor quality of life and inefficient land use that results from urban sprawl, the isolation of long distance commuters who spend no time in the community where they live, and the large contribution to our dangerously high current account deficit of an inefficient and import-based transport system.

These days the Greens don't need to talk about those things. They are widely accepted, particularly the need to reduce carbon emissions and reduce our dependence on imported oil which may have already reached its historical peak production last year.

The Government, twenty years after Greens and others started calling for it, are introducing exhaust emissions standards for vehicles coming into the country. However, we still have no exhaust emissions testing to qualify for a warrant of fitness, as some were calling for thirty years ago. An emissions trading system will put a price on carbon in the hope of influencing people's transport habits, but the projection is just a 0.3% reduction in carbon emissions from transport because of the very high elasticity of demand.

Much more will be achieved in carbon reduction from the fuel efficiency standards being developed for vehicles entering the country. The NZ Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy has set a target to reduce the average fuel use by these new entrant vehicles, both new and used, by 25% by 2015.

Most people, though, are seeking the answers to the transport question in the wrong place, defining the issue simplistically as just about what we put in the fuel tank. The general assumption in a consumer society is that somewhere out there is an alternative fuel to oil that will be cheap — or at least not much more expensive than we pay now; carbon free or at least low carbon; convenient; and most of all, inexhaustible no matter how much we increase our consumption of transport services.

Our society and our economy are founded on the belief in a limitless universe which will allow us to keep expanding our use of resources every year without end, and if our current resources can't keep up with our demand, we expect that expanding universe to provide substitutes that can.

Before I analyse why that isn't going to be possible and we are asking the wrong question, I want to explore a different kind of future which differs from current expectations not only in that it is possible, but also because it offers a better way of life that is more human as well as more sustainable.

Imagine a world where we move people and stuff around much less than we do now. What would that be like?

The first thing that comes to my mind is, we would have more time. If we spent less time behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, or waiting at airports and sitting in planes, we would have more time for a leisurely meal and a glass of wine with friends; more time to play with the kids or the grandchildren; more time to go tramping, listen to music, sleep in, play sport, read a book, chew the fat with the neighbours, or whatever else is your idea of having a good weekend.

The second thing is how much money we could save. If not everyone had to own a car because we travelled less or there were other ways of getting there, that's a huge capital expense saved. For those who do still need to own a car, there's less fuel to buy, less maintenance if we use it less. For the country, there's a much lower roading bill — in fact we probably mainly have all the roads we need if there is less traffic on them, but could afford to maintain them better. With less spent on importing vehicles and fuel, our seriously out of whack balance of payments would improve and our international credit rating improve with it, with a likely effect on interest rates. With lower carbon emissions our Kyoto bill would be less too.

If we carpooled we would get to know neighbours and work mates better. If we lived closer to work so we could walk or cycle we would be healthier and be part of a real community where we know people and spend time with them, rather than a dormitory where all we see of our neighbours is when we drive past their SUVs as we pass on the way to work or the shops.

Denser communities would develop around commuter rail stations where people who preferred not to own a car lived within walking distance of their work trip, shops and schools and hired or shared ownership of a few vehicles of different sorts for when they needed one.

Imagine that instead of sitting in a conference hall like this you are sitting at home in your favourite armchair, sipping a cool drink, watching on a screen, and that all the time you spent getting here was available for doing something else.

When we did drive the roads would be less congested and the journey more pleasant. A lot more freight would be going by rail or coastal shipping because of their inherent greater energy efficiency so we would see — and hear - fewer big trucks on the road.

We would grow more food locally and eat things in season when they taste best. Instead of importing beautiful looking but tasteless nectarines from the other side on the world in our winter we would eat more of our own delicious fresh apples and kiwifruit in season which needed less transport, and enjoy our own nectarines more in January because we haven't had them all year round.

We might use some of that saved time for community gardening and have the freshest food on the planet as well as the satisfaction of growing it. But if we absolutely hate gardening, there would still be plenty of locally grown food to buy.

If we lived closer together in the cities there would be more opportunities for theatre, music, sporting events, exhibitions, festivals in our own community where we could walk or cycle to them, or catch a bus.

If we used some of our saved time or money to offset our remaining carbon emissions by planting up all our steep eroding land in permanent native forest we would have more green space, more biodiversity, more places to walk and picnic locally.

Your programme quotes the UK Daily Mail that "luxury" cars are to be charged a pollution tax, equating luxury with gas guzzling. But in the world I'm describing luxury is the opportunity to spend less time behind the wheel and a luxury car is one that uses very little fuel and is quiet, comfortable and small enough to park easily.

Imagine.

But it's not just about imagination. This is the future we can create if we want to. Or we can choose not to.

Instead we can, if we choose, wait for oil to become very scarce and hard to get, ration it by price so the poor can't drive at all, or per person so we all feel deprived and hard done by. We can, if we choose, continue to pour our taxes into new motorways and neglect public transport so it remains slow, unreliable and infrequent and people don't use it. We can, if we choose, continue to import old, dirty wasteful vehicles that are very cheap and which have driven our rate of car ownership to the highest in the world, at around 620 per 1,000 people — or rather per 790 people who are old enough to drive.

We can, if we choose, build more motorways like Alpurt B which push urban sprawl further and further out from the city and create more need for cars and less viable public transport. We can, if we choose, import more and more food out of season requiring more and more shipping to bring it here. We can, if we choose, continue to leave early, get home late, never see the sun at home in winter, never see the kids on weekdays, go to bed and wake up with a headache and pop pills for stress. Because this is what our current transport decisions are costing us.

We can then watch our economy and our lives get gridlocked as the resources are simply not there to carry on as we are, and we failed to invest in the alternatives when we still had time.

Because this future I've invited you to imagine won't just happen by itself. We need to change our investment patterns, develop new regulations, stimulate the market for sustainable options with new pricing signals, think harder about what we really value and work out how to get there.

A good start would be broadband in every community and video-conferencing in every town so a great many meetings could happen in cyberspace rather than in meeting halls.

Then we need to divert a large fraction of the money we currently spend on new roads into better public transport, fixing up our rail system so it can carry more people and freight with less delay, new more flexible mini-bus systems in smaller cities, better walking paths and cycle ways.

The fuel efficiency standard announced in the Energy Efficiency Strategy is a big move forward, as it's the first time Government has agreed to address the issue but it could go much further. The standard is to be a fleet average of 170g/km of carbon dioxide by 2015 yet we know Europe is already at that average for their whole fleet and heading for 90g within a few years. We are not even fast followers in this game.

I was also delighted to announce a target of a 10% reduction in km driven by single occupant vehicles in cities on weekdays by 2015 which means that work and school travel plans, use of public transport, car pooling and cycling will all be succeeding to the point where 10% of today's drivers use one or more of those options to leave the car at home.

But of course 10% is just the start and there is scope to go much further.

Then, finally, when we have done all the important and fast acting things that are not resource-limited, we come to the question of what we should put in our much smaller and less frequently filled fuel tanks.

Broadly speaking, the short term options are limited to a tiny quantity of biofuel, and in the medium term there are only more biofuels and electricity. Hydrogen is too far away to have an impact before climate change and the depletion of cheap oil supplies impose serious limits on our transport options. Liquid fuels from lignite would be neither quick to develop nor cheap, but most importantly the carbon emissions would be around double what they are now from oil, and we know that is unsustainable already. Even if carbon capture and storage is successfully developed — and in my view that is quite a big if — it is unlikely to be ready in time to address climate change or oil depletion, and it cannot be fitted to the vehicle exhaust so all the carbon combusted in the vehicle itself will enter the atmosphere.

Legislation is before the House at the moment to require a small proportion of the motor fuel sold in NZ to come from biofuels. It will build up from half a percent next year to 3.4% of all motor fuel in 2012. This looks like a good start till we realise that in the five years it will take us to build up a capability to produce 3.4% biofuel, demand is expected to rise by more than that.

A local biofuel industry is likely to begin with waste materials, or rather low value by-products of agricultural production. Tallow from the meat industry and whey from dairy production are the first local feedstocks and together they could provide 4-5% of our fuel - which would be a useful amount if it were not cancelled out every year by growth in demand.

Beyond that, we start to look at purpose grown feedstocks and that is where biofuels start to be positively dangerous.

The US corn to ethanol production is a programme to subsidise corn farmers and keep the price of their product high by turning food grain into motor fuel. Because it is subsidised the price gives no indication that some of that production makes a net energy loss, using more fossil fuel to grow, fertilise, irrigate, harvest, transport and distil the grain than is obtained when it is burned in an engine. In a pure market system of course it would never happen as the input costs would be so much higher than the output value that it would not be profitable. But subsidies allow us to override what common sense the market does possess.

What even a pure market would be blind to though, is that making fuel from food grains in a world where about a billion people do not get enough to eat is a crime against humanity. In a competitive market where the stomachs of the very poor have to compete against the engines of the very rich, the answer can only be mass deaths.

Of course, if the market worked the way economists think it works, there would be no problem — we would simply grow enough grain to feed the people and make biofuels as well. You just have to get the price right and more land would magically appear to provide for it. But we don't live in the limitless expanding universe the economists assume, and in fact most biofuel projects are just replacing one finite resource — oil — with another — quality agricultural land.

Another way of trying to get around this question of finite resources is to convert land that is currently "unproductive" — like land covered with old growth tropical forests in south east Asia — to biofuels crops, such as palm oil for biodiesel. In that case the price is the extinction of the orang-utan and a host of other endangered species who live in this fast vanishing habitat.

This is why the Greens have insisted on a clause in the Biofuel Bill currently before Parliament, prohibiting fuels made from food grains or by clearing biodiversity from meeting the NZ obligation. That will be a very hard standard to draw up. How do you determine whether sugar cane ethanol from Brazil has been grown at the expense of food crops or biodiversity? The outcome will not be perfect but we must do the best we can in the short term, and in the longer term support all international efforts to agree on an international certification of sustainably produced biofuels.

So we can't rely on biofuel to provide all our transport fuel, possibly not even half of it, and certainly not an increasing demand for fuel.

The other promising fuel is electricity, particularly because electric traction is so much more efficient than the internal combustion engine. Currently available electric vehicles are over 7 times more efficient than our current vehicle fleet, so still around 4 times more efficient than the most efficient petrol and diesel cars today.

Hybrid vehicles owe their efficiency to this superiority of the electric motor, plus its ability to capture energy wasted in braking, even though the electricity used in the hybrid is generated from petrol. But hybrids are only marginally more efficient than small engined highly efficient petrol only vehicles, and twice as expensive, so we will have to do better than that.

The motor industry is working on plug in battery cars that draw all their motive power from the grid but significant deployment seems around two decades away. The impacts of this on the electricity system are hard to predict that far into the future but electric vehicles may well be more sustainable than biofuels.

NZ is fortunate that we have the best range of cost-effective renewable resources in the world for generating electricity but they are still not limitless and they all have environmental impacts whether it be draining rivers, effects of geothermal steam bores, or wind farms on valued landscapes.

We may end up with heavy vehicles and rural cars using biodiesel, grown locally, urban cars using electricity and shipping using biodiesel with wind assistance, but whatever the fuel we will need to use it with much greater efficiency and discover the delights of a lower transport lifestyle if we are to call ourselves sustainable.