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A million road deaths every year? It’s just the price of doing business
George Monbiot, The Guardian
The world’s most neglected public health issue needs a champion, but let it not be the global motor industry
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…Death and injury on the roads is the world’s most neglected public health issue. Almost as many people die in road accidents – 1.2 million a year – as are killed by malaria or tuberculosis. Around 50 million are injured. Some 85% of these accidents take place in developing countries. The poor get hurt much more often than the rich, as they walk or cycle or travel in overloaded buses. The highest death rate is among children walking on the roads.
The annual economic cost to developing countries, in lost productivity alone, is $65-$100bn, roughly the same as the amount they receive in foreign aid. I caught a glimpse of the human cost when I was hospitalised in northern Kenya. Some of the men on the ward had bullet or axe wounds inflicted in tribal wars, others were dying of HIV/Aids, but over half had been smashed up in road accidents. They could not afford good painkillers, and sobbed and screamed through the night. It looked like a scene from the first world war.
The problem is likely to become much worse. By 2020, according to the World Bank, deaths from road accidents are expected to fall by 28% in rich nations but to rise by 83% in poorer ones.
(15 May 2007)
Aviation industry in eye of climate-change storm
Martin Mittelstaedt, Globe and Mail
In wake of a huge increase in air travel, UN body begins effort to figure out what to do about aircraft and the environment
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When it comes to greenhouse gases from airplanes, even Buckingham Palace recognizes it has to be seen doing the right thing.
That’s why on her trip to the United States last week, the Queen made her first carbon-neutral state visit, paying an environmental service to offset emissions from her travel.
Never mind that a return trip across the Atlantic generates only about 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide a person on a commercial flight, which is minute in the scheme of global warming. Or that giving money to environmental organizations to curb emissions would be chump change for the Queen, even with a royal entourage, at the current rates of about $30 a tonne.
But as the Queen’s action makes clear, the aviation industry is in the eye of an unusual climate-change storm. Many travellers, rich and not-so-rich, have recently begun to feel that air travel is a guilty pleasure that needs some kind of environmental atonement.
…A belated attempt to figure out what to do about aircraft and climate change is about to get under way today, at a colloquium set up by the International Civil Aviation Organization, the Montreal-based UN body that oversees air travel and is required under Kyoto to look at aircraft emissions.
The colloquium is a prelude to an assembly in September, where ICAO’s 190 member countries, including Canada, will try to thrash out guidelines on dealing with airlines and their contribution to global warming.
Why air travel has hit such an environmental nerve and will likely continue to do so is evident from the numbers.
(14 May 2007)
Nice piece of reporting, giving background, different viewpoints and human interest. -BA
Shaping the future
Chares Stross, Charlie’s Diary
One of the things that goes with being an SF writer is that people expect you to talk about, well, the future. Last week, engineering consultancy TNG Technology Consulting invited me to Munich to address one of their technology open days. Here’s a transcript of my talk, which discusses certain under-considered side effects of some technologies that you’re probably already becoming familiar with. …)
Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me here today. I understand that you’re expecting a talk about where the next 20 years are taking us… Personally, I’m still waiting for my personal jet car — I’ve been waiting about fifty years now — and I mention this as a note of caution: while personal jet cars aren’t obviously impossible, their non-appearance should give us some insights into how attempts to predict the future go wrong.
I’m a science fiction writer by trade…
The big surprise in the 20th century — remember that personal jet car? — was the redefinition of progress that took place some time between 1950 and 1970.
Before 1800, human beings didn’t travel faster than a horse could gallop. The experience of travel was that it was unpleasant, slow, and usually involved a lot of exercise — or the hazards of the seas. Then something odd happened; a constant that had held for all of human history — the upper limit on travel speed — turned into a variable. By 1980, the upper limit on travel speed had risen (for some lucky people on some routes) to just over Mach Two, and to just under Mach One on many other shorter routes. But from 1970 onwards, the change in the rate at which human beings travel ceased — to all intents and purposes, we aren’t any faster today than we were when the Comet and Boeing 707 airliners first flew.
We can plot this increase in travel speed on a graph — better still, plot the increase in maximum possible speed — and it looks quite pretty; it’s a classic sigmoid curve, initially rising slowly, then with the rate of change peaking between 1920 and 1950, before tapering off again after 1970. Today, the fastest vehicle ever built, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, en route to Pluto, is moving at approximately 21 kilometres per second — only twice as fast as an Apollo spacecraft from the late-1960s. Forty-five years to double the maximum velocity; back in the 1930s it was happening in less than a decade.
One side-effect of faster travel was that people traveled more. A brief google told me that in 1900, the average American traveled 210 miles per year by steam-traction railroad, and 130 miles by electric railways. Today, comparable travel figures are 16,000 miles by road and air — a fifty-fold increase in distance traveled. I’d like to note that the new transport technologies consume one-fifth the energy per passenger-kilometer, but overall energy consumption is much higher because of the distances involved. We probably don’t spend significantly more hours per year aboard aircraft that our 1900-period ancestors spent aboard steam trains, but at twenty times the velocity — or more — we travel much further and consume energy faster while we’re doing so.
(13 May 2007)
About the author.
Energy and Transport Subsidies in Australia: 2007 Update (PDF)
Chris Riedy, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology.
At present, governments in Australia provide substantial financial support for the production and use of fossil fuels, through direct payments, favourable tax treatment and other actions. These subsidies keep the cost of fossil fuel energy artificially low and make it harder for renewable energy to compete. They distort energy markets, encourage greater use of fossil fuels, create higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions and improve the profitability of energy companies that produce or use fossil fuels. In an era when climate change response has become urgent, continuing to subsidise fossil fuel production and consumption is unacceptable.
This report provides an estimate of the size of subsidies to fossil fuels and renewable energy in the Australian energy and transport sectors during the 2005-06 financial year. It provides details on specific subsidies and offers recommendations on subsidy removal.
… The research reported here identifies total energy and transport subsidies in Australia during 2005-06 of between $9.3 billion and $10.1 billion. The range in the estimates is due to uncertainty about the size of particular subsidies and differing assumptions used to deal with this uncertainty. However, both estimates are based on conservative assumptions.
… The largest identified subsidy results from the failure of governments to capture sufficient revenue from the road network to cover the cost of maintaining the network and to achieve an appropriate rate of return. In other words, motorists do not pay as much to access and use the road network as they should. In 2005-06, the cost of providing the road network was $4.7 billion more than the revenue received from road users. This shortfall – the road user deficit – is a major subsidy in the transport sector.
The biggest source of revenue from road users is the Federal Government’s fuel excise, which is a tax of 38 cents per litre included in the price of petrol. The Energy Grants Credits Scheme, which provided refunds on fuel excise for fuel used in specific on-road and off-road activities, was a major contributor to the road user deficit in 2005-06. The Energy Grants Credits Scheme reduced net fuel excise revenue by $3.5 billion in 2005-06, accounting for much of the observed road user deficit. Fuel excise revenue was reduced by a further $710 million in 2005-06 due to the exemption of alternative transport fuels (e.g. natural gas and LPG) from excise. This also contributes to the road user deficit.
A Fuel Tax Credits Scheme has now largely replaced the Energy Grants Credit Scheme. Under the new scheme, a wider range of activities and fuels are eligible for rebates on excise. As such, the size of the road user deficit is likely to increase in the future.
(30 April 2007)
The full report is an 83-page PDF.
