Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
them, even while growing road and airport congestion often make a
mockery of the idea.
People's appetite for travel seems to be the hardest to assuage. If travel
becomes cheaper, as air travel has with budget airlines, then people make
more flights and take more holidays abroad. If travel becomes quicker, as
it has with high-speed trains in Europe, then people travel further or more
frequently. Most enticing of all is the car, with all its prized autonomy and
flexibility.
The need for travel is obviously greater in large countries with spread-
out populations. Yet it seems that income plays a more important role
than distance. For instance, according to the OECD, the average American
travels 30,000 km per year (all forms of transport combined), which is
almost twice the annual travel of the average Canadian or Australian,
whose countries are no more compact than the US. It is the higher income
of the average American which makes the difference.
Multiply rising incomes with big population numbers, and you end up
with environmentally frightening prospects, such as China's fleet rising
from around 25m cars today to around 250m cars (roughly the number
now in the US) by 2030. Happily, the Chinese government is also a bit
concerned about this. It has introduced fuel efficiency standards that are
tighter than the US's, as well as investing in electric cars and developing
bio-fuels.
Some savings have been made on the fossil fuels going into transport.
Among the majority group of IEA member countries, in the 1990-2004
period the distance travelled by their citizens rose 31 percent, while the
energy used for transport (all modes) in these countries increased by only
25 percent. Tighter regulatory pressure on fuel efficiency in Europe and
Japan, plus a shift to more efficient diesel engines in Europe, contributed
to this relative saving.
More recently, the Obama administration has backed a tightening
of America's Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards. Oil
consumption in richer countries is flattening out. Tony Hayward, the
chief executive of BP (which is a major player in the US as the result of its
acquisitions there), said recently that “BP is unlikely to sell more gasoline
to Americans than it sold in the first half of 2008” - before the 2008-09
recession hit, that is.
But oil consumption is still galloping ahead in developing countries.
And there is only so much that tinkering with the internal combustion
engine can do to reduce fossil-fuel consumption and the concomitant
CO
2
emissions.
