Wean transport off fossil fuels, or grind to a halt by Nicholas Low

The Conversation

Over the next 50 years the world will increasingly confront a dilemma. On the one hand, the global economy and local lifestyles depend on the mobility of people and goods. On the other, that mobility depends on a diminishing supply of cheap oil and the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions and other environmental impacts.

Reducing Australian carbon emissions to near zero over 50 years will require a transformation in the way we think about urban transport.

Local transport is a global problem

City transport – traffic congestion, motorways, rail services and timetables, bus routes – are local issues aren’t they? Don’t they mostly have to do with cars, trains, buses and commuting? Well, no.

Urban transport confronts a global dilemma which will not be resolved by patching up the transport systems of our cities with a new motorway link here, a new rail service there, and a few new bike paths and footpaths. The global problem is not mainly one of passenger traffic, but of goods traffic.

The mobility of people and goods worldwide is still at present almost completely (98%) dependent on cheap oil, and the economies of cities are connected seamlessly with the global economy. But the supply of oil is now close to a ceiling, and the environmental impact of burning fossil fuel is unacceptable.

The annual figure for merchandise trade (intra and inter-regional) just after the global financial crisis in 2009 stood at $US12.178 trillion. That is goods in motion.

The US economic journalist Thomas Friedman wrote of the intensively organised travels of Dell digital notebook parts. Key elements of the notebook’s hardware come from the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, Germany, Mexico, Singapore, Thailand, India, Israel, and of course many different cities in China. This is just one example.

Almost everything we use now has a large element of mobility built into it: not only food, but white goods, electrical equipment, computers, clothes, furniture, cars and their components, even books. We can reasonably speak of the “embedded mobility” in almost all consumer goods.