Transport – May 13

May 13, 2007

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage


When it comes to giving up our cars, government must drive a better bargain

Lisa Pryor, Sydney Morning Herald
I suffer from “car brain” every time I am handed car keys. I lose all sense of logic. Somewhere deep in the reptilian core of my brain, lizard-thinking takes over. When car brain rules, any vague feeling of goodwill I have towards the environment evaporates. I enter a persistent vegetative state where I avoid walking and public transport at all costs.

Ashamed as I am to admit it, I was one of those rubberneckers who caused traffic chaos a few months ago by driving down to Woolloomooloo to gawk at the Queen Mary 2. In a borrowed four-wheel-drive, no less.

On weekends when I have access to a car, I drive to suburbs I know I should not drive to – Pyrmont, Kings Cross, Bondi Beach – then waste precious time clogging the roads on a quest for the holy grails of weekend parking: work zones that convert to untimed parking spots at 5pm on a Friday; loading zones that cut out at noon on a Saturday; and strips of road the council has forgotten to mark.

What can we do to stop car brain? Drivers whose essential motivations are laziness and cheapness? Motorists who abandon all civic responsibility for the sake of saving a bit of time and cash?

There is only one solution: we need to accept humans are cheap and lazy, and adopt transport policies that reflect this. Only when driving is more annoying and expensive than public transport will people get off the roads.

Let’s stop worrying and learn to love the tolls. We should rejoice in exorbitant metered parking. We should cheer when petrol prices go up. Bring on the congestion charges. Gouge, gouge, gouge, I say.

Making each individual car trip cost something is the best way to stop us driving, lessen congestion, reduce pollution and make buses faster.
(12 May 2007)


Public purse props up fossil fuel industries

Wendy Frew, Sydney Morning Herald
GOVERNMENT subsidies to some of Australia’s electricity generation companies are so big they exceed the profits made by those companies, a report on energy and transport subsidies says.

Government support for the coal industry and coal-fired electricity is so generous that in some cases it has led to the construction of coal-fired power plants when other types of electricity generation would have been cheaper, the report by the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney has found.

Subsidies to fossil fuel energies, worth close to $10 billion, result in a serious market distortion, create an unfair disadvantage to renewable energy, and help increase greenhouse gas pollution, says the report, written by the institute’s research principal, Chris Riedy, and commissioned by Greenpeace.

The report identified energy and transport subsidies in Australia during 2005-06 of between $9.3 billion and $10.1 billion. More than 96 per cent of that money flowed to fossil fuel production and consumption, with the remainder going to renewable energy and energy efficiency.

“This effectively creates an uneven playing field for renewable energy, making it much more difficult to respond to climate change in the energy and transport sectors,” the report says. “Fossil fuel subsidies can increase greenhouse gas emissions because they reduce the price of fossil fuel energy, which encourages greater use of fossil fuels and higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions.”

The report notes some fossil fuel subsidies can help cut emissions, such as subsidising a coal-fired power plant to improve efficiency.

However, over 90 per cent of the subsidies identified in the report would increase greenhouse gas emissions, it says.
(8 May 2007)

The Institute for Sustainable Futures report “Energy and Transport Subsidies in Australia” is available online as an 83-page PDF.


Air traffic out of control

George Monbiot, Guardian
The latest figures on flights are a disaster for the environment. There is only one way to turn things around: a reduction in the capacity of airports.
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The governments of the rich world are committed to two contradictory policies. One is to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases. The other is to increase the number of flights. The success of the first policy has been limited. The success of the second has been spectacular.

New figures from the aviation company OAG suggest that the number of scheduled flights has risen by 5% worldwide between May 2006 and May 2007. Bookings for this month are higher than they have ever been, and the peak holiday season has not yet begun. Nor has the new Open Skies agreement on transatlantic flights (which was negotiated and reported without reference to its impact on greenhouse gas emissions) yet come into effect. It is likely greatly to increase the volume of traffic.

…It is as if we inhabit two parallel worlds. In one – the world of the travel supplements, the Open Skies agreement, the British government’s “master plans” for the expansion of our airports – we expect to travel ever further and more frequently, enjoying stag nights in Prague, wine tasting trips in Australia and shopping weekends in New York. In the other world we wring our hands and lament the imminent death of the biosphere.
(9 May 2007)


Flights reach record levels despite warnings over climate change

David Adam, The Guardian
· 2.51m take-offs scheduled worldwide this month
· UK most popular country for international flights

Less than a week after the world’s scientists warned there may be just eight years to act on greenhouse gas pollution to avoid the worst of global warming, the aviation industry has announced record increases in the number of flights worldwide.

Booming demand for domestic flights in China has helped nudge the number of global take-offs scheduled for this month to more than 2.5m for the first time. A surge in the popularity of low-cost airlines means more than 114,000 more flights are expected than during the same period last year – a 5% rise.
(9 May 2007)


Tags: Culture & Behavior, Transportation