The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: The Need to Drive Less In America to Avoid Climate Catastrophe
Dear Diary. Now that the use of coal to generate electricity is in freefall across the United States, and renewables such and solar and wind are reducing our carbon footprint, we can avoid the worse from the climate crisis, right? Wrong. We continue to spew too much carbon into the atmosphere from our internal combustion engine cars and trucks. The transition to all electric vehicles is going too slow.
An article that I spied last week suggests that Americans need to drive less to avoid climate catastrophe. Will they? Probably if the price of gasoline goes back above $5 a gallon, but if so there will be enough complaints to affect politics. If oil companies collude to get the price near $2 a gallon, Americans will drive more, and those companies will remain highly profitable, unfortunately. If that happens the transition to EV’s will be slower. It’s very hard to get Americans to change their habits, especially freedom loving citizens that do not like to be told what to do from the government. Ask dying President Jimmy Carter about that when he tried to get people to use less energy during the late 1970s.
Anyway, here is that article from usastreetsblog.org for food for thought on this Sundays:
USDOT Warns Congress That Americans Need to Drive Less to Survive Climate Change — Streetsblog USA
USDOT Warns Congress That Americans Need to Drive Less to Survive Climate Change
“The U.S. will not be able to decarbonize the transportation sector without addressing increased demand,” a recent DOT report wrote. So why are so few transportation leaders doing it?
By Kea Wilson
12:02 AM EDT on July 29, 2024
Watch it burn.
America cannot meet its goals to decarbonize the transportation sector by switching to electric vehicles without reducing how much Americans drive, according to a new U.S. Department of Transportation report sent up to Congress — but it’s unclear if any level of government is prepared to take the steps necessary to do both.
Earlier this month, US DOT published a congressionally-mandated progress report on the department’s own efforts to reduce our national transportation sector emissions, which has been the country’s leading driver of climate change since transport surpassed the electricity sector in 2017.
The short answer is: it’s not going great. Assuming that no further climate legislation is passed, one study cited in the report found that transport emissions are on track to grow a staggering 23 percent by 2050, rather than falling to net zero, which experts say is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
The Biden Administration’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, will bend the curve slightly “as a result of fuel economy improvements and greater deployment of electric vehicles,” the same analysis found — but that decline will be quickly erased “due to increasing vehicle miles traveled for both passengers and freight,” the report authors wrote.
The report makes it clear that DOT isn’t the only agency that will be blamed if we can’t clean up our transportation system — Congress, state highway offices, and local leaders all need to take a hard look in the mirror if they want to prevent the worst.
That’s in large part, the report suggests, because no level of government has been aggressive enough about reducing how much Americans drive. One recent study cited in the paper found that the only path to meaningful emissions reduction that still allowed for VMT growth required both 80 percent of the vehicle fleet to be electrified by 2050, and the total decarbonization of the electrical grid — and even then, it just barely squeaked in under the line. Meanwhile, experts estimate that only 30 percent of cars will have batteries by midcentury.
Or, as the report authors put it bluntly: “The U.S. will not be able to decarbonize the transportation sector by midcentury without addressing increased demand.”
That harsh reality was also underscored in more subtle ways throughout the report, which routinely placed policies that support biking, walking, transit, and other non-automotive modes at the top of its various lists of decarbonization strategies.
Specifically, DOT says the agency and all of its partners in government will need to “increase convenience” by decreasing the distance Americans need to travel to key destinations (and the safety they can expect along the journey), as well as “improving efficiency” by supporting mass transportation and better freight strategies.
“Increasing clean options” like electric vehicles was the third item on its list.
The question, of course, is why America remains so devastatingly car-dominated if DOT knows that our current level of driving is unsustainable — and what it will take to change course.
Of course, no small part of that has to do with Congress itself, which passed a deeply flawed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that doled out billions of largely unrestricted dollars that states and metropolitan regions are using to build highway expansions, rather than repair the roads they’ve already got or make them more welcoming to non-drivers.
Part of it has to do with state leaders who mount massive lawsuits against US DOT for simply asking them track their transport-related emissions, never mind reduce them, all while defunding transit to build deadly highways and stroads through local communities that only make pollution worse.
Some has to do with local leaders who have resisted the kind of zoning reforms and street-level safety measures that would make walking or biking simply possible, much less an attractive way to get around.
And yes: some has to do with DOT itself, which despite everything it said in this report, has still granted discretionary grants to projects that would expand highways, even as it purports to “reconnect” the communities around them with nominal freeway caps.
This is far from an exhaustive list of all the ways that American policymakers have gotten the transportation sector into this mess, and a 66 page report won’t be enough get them out of it. Now that the basic facts are out on the table, though, the message is clear: our species will not survive if we do not take bold action to reduce car dependency, and the time to start is yesterday.
Kea Wilson has more than a dozen years experience as a writer telling emotional, urgent and actionable stories that motivate average Americans to get involved in making their cities better places. She is also a novelist, cyclist, and affordable housing advocate. She previously worked at Strong Towns, and currently lives in St. Louis, MO. Kea can be reached at kea@streetsblog.org or on Twitter @streetsblogkea. Please reach out to her with tips and submissions.
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is more new July 2024 climatology (More can be found on each prior daily post during August):
Here is More Climate News from Sunday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)