Are any Britons here? They’re always travelling.
In 1929, long before manmade climate change had been detected, the Russian journalist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote this.
the automobile… can’t be blamed for anything. Its conscience is as clear as Monsieur Citroen’s conscience. It only fulfils its destiny: it is destined to wipe out the world.2
He had seen something the rest of us are only beginning to comprehend.
The production of carbon dioxide by land transport should be easier to solve than the other problems this book addresses. Everyone can see how inefficient the transport system is: thousands of people, one to each overpowered car, heading in the same direction every day then heading back again. The technologies and economic policies required to address it have been available for decades. Far from costing more money, a rational, efficient system, producing 10 per cent of current emissions or less, would save us billions. But the real problem is neither technological nor economic. It is political or, more precisely, psychological.
In managing our transport systems, our governments must constantly negotiate the paradox of mass movement. They must create a system which, for the sake of speed and efficiency, treats us like a herd, constantly prodded and coralled, divided, re-formed and forced into line. At the same time it must grant us the illusion of autonomy. The songs of the open road, the pictures in the advertisements of cars on lonely mountain passes, the names of the vehicles, especially the all-terrain vehicles which seldom venture beyond the suburbs – Defender, Explorer, Pathfinder, Cherokee, Touareg – all speak of a freedom which is not to be found on our highways. But this is the fantasy that governments must strive to preserve.
Having freed ourselves, with the help of fossil fuels and the technologies they permit, from the constraints of the past, we have embarked not upon the wild life of the spirit but upon a life of compression and self-control. Thanks to the blessings of modern medicine and agriculture, we live in crowded countries, in which the freedom to swing your fist leads invariably to someone else’s broken nose. Prosperity raises fences: as we become richer we can travel further, but there are fewer places into which we can venture.
Restrained by our freedoms, polite, obedient, safe, we lead lives of metaphor – metaphor that constantly invokes an age of ecological and social hazard. In the financial press the abstractions of money are illustrated by bulls, bears and tigers, sharks and mammoths, men lost in woods and wolves in sheep’s clothing. Until 2005, the highest-paid executive in the world, Michael Eisner of Disney, ran a corporation whose core business was that of investing animals with human characteristics, a practice by which the first hunters, living in ecological time, came to know their prey.
In 1990 I stayed for a few weeks in a world released from sublimation. In the garimpos – the informal goldmines – of northern Brazil, in the rainforest hundreds of miles from the nearest town, lived an ephemeral society untroubled by the law. Disputes were resolved by gunfire: within six months, 1,700 of the 40,000 miners there were killed.3 Wealth was not earned but dug from the ground.
The mines represented everything I have spent my adult life fighting. Governed by violence, occasionally all-out war, they tore open one of the richest ecosystems on earth, and introduced to the Yanomami Indians guns, disease, alcohol and prostitution. But nothing there shocked me as much as myself. I loved it. In the garimpos I found the freedom I had always been promised but had never seen. I didn’t use it. I killed no one, felled no trees, dug no gold. But I could have. The mines were the metaphor. They were the inner life I had led, of which, until then, I had scarcely been aware.
The freedom of the road, of that strip of concrete laid down in order to herd us better, is an expression of the tension between civilization and the life of the spirit. Under the bonnet lurks a beast which could, were it not hemmed in by social and physical restraint, roar into murderous speed – 120,140 miles per hour. The opportunity the engine forgoes is another manifestation of the metaphor: the inner life of both the car and the mind. The faster cars become and the more the roads fill with traffic, the greater the tension between the metaphor and reality.
I believe that the growth in driving is one of the primary reasons for the libertarianism now sweeping through parts of the rich world. When you drive, society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming and speed limits become a nuisance to be wished away. The more you drive, the more you seek the freedom that the road promises but always denies. From time to time this frustration takes political shape, as motorists blow up speed cameras4 or, when petrol prices rise, blockade the oil refineries. But the new libertarianism is also now driving down the pavement. Organizations such as the Association of British Drivers, which began by campaigning against speed cameras and road humps, have now joined forces with people calling for lower taxes and the destruction of the ‘nanny state’.5 The car has become an agent of political change.
Governments, while pretending to do otherwise, indulge the fantasy of freedom as much as they can. Whenever they introduce the slightest restraint upon the available road space or the behaviour of the people who use it, the tabloid newspapers start thundering about ‘the war against the motorist’. Our governments know – as a British transport minister first admitted in 19386 – that demand is a function of capacity. The more roads you build, the more the volume of traffic will rise to fill them. Unless they wish to cover the entire country with concrete, they know that they cannot keep accommodating rising demand. So from time to time they announce policies which are supposed to dissuade people from using their cars. As John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, promised in a rare moment of lucidity in 1997:
I will have failed in this if in five years there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car. It is a tall order but I want you to hold me to it.7
Between 1997 and 2004, car journeys in the United Kingdom increased by 9 per cent.8 The government expects this growth to accelerate:
The central projection is for traffic to grow by 26 per cent between 2000 and 2010, implying an annual average increase of 2.3 per cent over the whole decade (around 2.6 per cent per year for the rest of the decade).9
One of the reasons for this can be found in the paper it published in 2005. The graphs there show that though gross domestic product has risen by 60 per cent since 1986, the cost of driving has fallen.10 The government expects the two lines to keep diverging to 2025 and beyond. While bus and coach fares have risen in real terms by 66 per cent since 1975, and train tickets by 70 per cent, the cost of owning and running a car has fallen by 11 per cent.11 This gulf seems to have widened since Mr Prescott took office. Rail and bus fares have risen by 7 per cent and 16 per cent respectively since 1997, and motoring costs have declined by 6 per cent.12
To give him his due, half of Prescott’s promise has been met. The number of people using public transport has also been rising:
Our central projection shows rail passenger kilometres increasing by 33 per cent between 2000 and 2010. This implies a pick up in growth to around 3.5 per cent a year for the rest of the decade… Growth in bus patronage over 2000 to 2010 is projected at around 11 per cent.13
This, as far as climate change is concerned, is the worst of all possible worlds. Instead of replacing cars, trains and buses are supplementing them. Transport which does not require the use of fossil fuels, by contrast, has declined. In the past ten years, according to the National Travel Survey, the number of walking trips has fallen by 20 per cent.14
In 2004 we cycled 6 per cent less than we did in 1992.15 Many of those who once walked or cycled now use cars for the same trips instead: one quarter of all car journeys cover less than 2 miles.16 The table below shows how the United Kingdom’s journeys are distributed. The government does not include walking and heavy goods transport in these figures.
mode of transport |
annual distance travelled (billion passenger kilometres) |
percentage of total |
cars, vans and taxis |
679 |
85.2 |
trains |
51 |
6.4 |
buses and coaches |
48 |
6.0 |
planesi |
9.8 |
1.2 |
motor cycles |
6 |
0.8 |
pedal cycles |
4 |
0.5 |
Total |
797 |
|
i. The government counts only domestic journeys. A more accurate figure would include 50 per cent of the length of international trips. Source: Department for Transport.17
Excluding international air travel and shipping, transport accounts for about 22 per cent of our carbon emissions; 91 per cent of these are produced on the road. The government expects the carbon produced by road transport to rise by between 5 and 7 per cent this decade.18 It proposes, in effect, to do nothing to prevent it.
The main policy for reducing carbon emissions from road transport is the voluntary agreement with European, Japanese and Korean car manufacturers, which aims to reduce carbon emissions per kilometre from new cars by 25 per cent on 1995 levels by 2008.19
This policy (as the government’s projections anticipate) has already failed. In July 2005, Automotive News reported this.
‘Carmakers are very far from reaching their 2008 target,’ said Patrick Coroller, an official at France’s Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maiˆtrise de l’Énergie (ADEME), a state-funded environmental agency… Japanese and Korean carmakers are even further away.20
While invoking miracles which it already knows will not materialize, the British government continues to promote the growth of traffic by building more roads: as I mentioned in Chapter 3, it is spending£11.4 billion on creating more space for traffic,21 knowing that this space will inevitably be filled.
Though journeys by buses and trains can do nothing to reduce carbon emissions while they supplement travel by car, if all the country’s drivers were magically whisked into public transport, a 90 per cent cut could almost be delivered in one stroke. The table below gives the government’s figures for the carbon dioxide emissions produced in travelling from London to Manchester. It assumes that the car is of average size and contains the national mean of 1.56 people, that the train is a modern electric model and 70 per cent of its seats are occupied, and that the coach has forty passengers.
mode of transport |
carbon dioxide emissions |
car |
36.6 |
train |
5.2 |
coach |
4.3 |
Source: written parliamentary answer.22
Two conclusions can be drawn from these figures. The first is that train travel, which in the public mind is equated with low environmental impacts, is less efficient than travel by coach. If we were to put all considerations but climate change to one side, the railways would best be cleared of human traffic and used instead to take long-distance freight off the roads. According to the Strategic Rail Authority, transporting goods by lorry produces 180 grams of carbon dioxide per tonne per kilometre, while transporting them by train emits 15: a saving of 92 per cent.23 At the moment, just 12 per cent of our freight travels by rail.24 But the figures in this table are not fixed. There is plenty of scope for improving the carbon accounts of the railways: Japanese trains, for example, are much lighter then European ones.
The second is that if you switch from car to coach, you cut the carbon you would otherwise have produced by 88 per cent. With some very small efficiency improvements, universal coach travel, if the total mileage we covered did not increase, would meet my target.
The trouble is that people hate coaches, and for good reason. Coach travel is a dismal and humiliating experience. When I take the bus, as I sometimes must, from Oxford to Cambridge, I arrive feeling almost suicidal. First I must cycle for 20 minutes in the wrong direction, into the city centre. Then, usually in horizontal sleet and clouds of diesel fumes, I must wait for a man who looks as if he has just drunk a quart of vinegar to grunt that the bus is ready for boarding. I give my money to someone who makes the other man look cheerful and sit on a chair designed to extract confessions. Then, weaving around bicycles and bollards, the coach fights its way through streets designed for ponies. After half an hour it leaves the city. It then charts a course through what appears to be every depressing dormitory town in south-east England, hoping to pick up more custom. On a good day, with a following wind, the journey from my house to my destination in Cambridge, a total of 83 miles, takes four and half hours. The average speed is 18 miles an hour, about 50 per cent faster than I travel by bicycle. If I made the journey by car, I could do it in 100 minutes.
Unsurprisingly, coaches, on most routes, have become the preserve of those who can’t afford to travel by other means. In both the United Kingdom and the United States they are associated with poverty and exclusion, with people who have time to spare, but little money. Quite aside from the fact that it offers us no fantasy of freedom, a switch from private to public road transport is counter-aspirational, and therefore of little interest either to wealthy travellers or to our political leaders.
It would work politically only if coach travel could, in some way, be presented as a better thing than private transport. It seems to me that there is just one means by which this could be done: to ensure that it is swifter, more relaxing and more reliable than the motor car.
Because everything possible has been done to smooth the passage of the car, this sounds, to say the least, challenging. But an unpublished paper by the economist Alan Storkey appears to have cracked it.25
Storkey’s key innovation is to move the coach stations out of the city centres and on to the junctions of the motorways. One of the main reasons why longcoach journeys are so slow in the UK (often averaging 20 miles per hour or less) is that in order to create a ‘system’ – which allows passengers to transfer from one coach to another – they must enter the major towns, travel all the way to the centre and all the way out again. In the rush hour, you might as well walk. A car travelling from one end of the country to the other, by contrast, can stick to the motorways throughout its journey. Our city centre stations, as Storkey points out, are historical accidents: the coaches they were built to serve were pulled by horses. They were probably almost as fast.
Instead of dragging motorway transport into the cities, Storkey’s system drags city transport out to the motorways. Urban buses, he remarks, currently serve the distant suburbs very badly. If the buses (or for that matter, trams or light railways or underground lines) travelled a little further, to the nearest motorway junction, they could take people from their homes or to their destinations without affecting the speed of the coaches. If they used dedicated bus lanes, and the buses were given priority at junctions, they could move people into and out of the cities at busy times faster than travel by car. By connecting urban public transport to the national network, Storkey’s proposal could revitalize both systems, as it would greatly increase the number of passengers while providing better services for the suburbs on the way to the motorway junctions.
Unlike train companies, which are economically viable only when their locomotives can pick up dozens or hundreds of people at every station (which means they must travel infrequently), coach firms can afford to deploy much more stock.
With 200 coaches on the M25 there would be a coach within a mile of a stop most of the time in both directions, and the waiting time would be some two or three minutes… With an effective network many of the inter-city motorway journeys could have a waiting time of five minutes or less. Once people could use this system with confidence in its regularity, demand would surge. Then high-occupancy coaches could emerge.26
To enhance their speed and regularity, the coaches would be given dedicated lanes on the motorways and the orbital roads. Traffic lights responding to a radio frequency would grant them priority at junctions and roundabouts (ambulances in this country already have transponders that turn the lights green). The tabloid newspapers might fulminate, but it would not be long before people stuck in their cars began to notice the buses roaring past on the inside lanes.
There is a sound mathematical reason why people in coaches travelling in dedicated lanes will move faster than people on the rest of the road. The safe stopping speed of a car travelling at 30 miles per hour is 23 metres, and at 60 miles per hour, 73.*27 Storkey uses the M25 (the vast orbital road around London) to show how this affects motorway capacity. The road is 118 miles long. It has three lanes in each direction most of the way, but four lanes along 35 per cent of its length. The table below shows the numbers of people it can accommodate.
average speed |
number of cars |
number of passengersi |
30 |
33,050 |
52,880 |
50 |
15,655 |
25,048 |
60 |
11,589 |
18,542 |
70 |
8,924 |
14,278 |
i. Assuming an average occupancy of 1.6. Source: Alan Storkey.28
I had to rub my eyes when I first read these figures. When the cars are travelling at 60 miles an hour, the entire motorway – all 6.7 lanes, 790 miles in total – can accommodate just 19,000 people. Every coach, by contrast,
hoovers up a mile of car lane traffic… This mode of transport can carry nearly five hundred people in a mile of roadway, not a mere thirty, and the capacity of the M25 moves from 15,000–20,000 in cars to 260,000 in coaches.29
Released from congestion, the coaches are less likely to bunch up. Some services would constantly circle the orbital roads around our major cities. Others would travel up and down the motorways that link them.
In order to achieve average speeds of 50 mph or more, coaches need to travel at 65 mph and have stops at intervals of ten or twenty miles. This means that stops do not necessarily occur at every motorway junction.30
When the faster urban links Storkey proposes and relief from the need to find a parking space are taken into account, this could bring the overall average journey time to below that of car travel. At rush hours and on bank holiday weekends the public system could be very much faster. While drivers would lose their sense of autonomy and the convenience of being able to sit, without shifting themselves or their luggage, in one place throughout the journey, they would gain time to read, watch films, make phone calls or sleep.
To make this work, the coaches will need
good leg room, seat quality, work stations, food, drinks and media stations… In other words these vehicles can be an elite form of road travel… Coaches, in principle, are another form of stretch-limousine.31
This might mean losing a certain amount of efficiency, as they couldn’t accommodate quite as many people as they do today, but this would be offset by the fact that the coaches no longer need to travel in and out of the city centres, which reduces the distance they must travel. Automated luggage systems would make the stops much shorter. In other words, the country’s slowest, most uncomfortable and most depressing form of mass transport could be transformed into one of its fastest, smoothest and most convenient systems. Instead of feeling like social outcasts, its passengers – watching films and making calls while they flit past the cars stuck in their congested lanes – could begin to see themselves as the kings and queens of the road.
In terms of what we usually spend on transport, Alan Storkey’s system costs next to nothing. It requires no new roads, no railway lines, no significant subsidies. Coach stations need to be built, new lines need to be painted on the motorways, coaches bought and the traffic signalling system adjusted. Storkey suggests his proposal would cost about £1 billion to implement. This is 27 per cent of the price of widening the M1. But even this, I think, is an overestimate, for he does not take into account the money to be made by selling the land in the city centres that is currently used for coach stations. It seems to me that his system is likely to be self-financing from inception. And it releases some of the staggering sums of government money used to keep the existing system alive.
The motorists’ lobby points out that drivers pay about £30 billion a year in tax, compares this figure to the cost of road building, and claims that drivers are subsidizing the government. But as Storkey points out, the government also pays for policing and ambulances and the health costs of people affected by local pollution* or caught in traffic accidents. If roads, like railways, were to generate an 8 per cent return on their asset values, the income forgone by the government would amount to £32 billion a year.35 As coaches are very much safer than cars† and (per passenger) produce less pollution, both the costs which can be quantified and those which cannot are likely, under his system, to fall. The private costs of transport will decline more dramatically.
Capital investment in coaches is far more productive… than our present use of cars, because they are used so much more intensively. One piece of equipment costing, say, £150,000 can carry people on nearly 100,000 substantial person/journeys a year, while a car costing£ 15,000 would be likely not to clock up 1,000 such journeys. This is a tenfold increase in the efficiency of capital use.36
According to the Royal Academy of Engineering,
Congestion already costs the UK an estimated £15 billion each year and that figure is expected to double over the next decade as more of our transport system reaches capacity.37
This is not the only cost that will keep rising. If it is true that global oil production will peak soon then go into decline, profligate fuel use will become not only unaffordable but also impossible: all current transport systems will more or less grind to a halt. The UK government’s plan for addressing congestion – a road pricing system reliant on perpetual surveillance and satellite monitoring– will be extremely expensive, punitive for the poor, far more intrusive and coercive than Storkey’s system and of little use in reducing carbon emissions. Again, even if climate change were not happening, a transformation of the kind Storkey describes would be necessary.
But when a proposal similar to his, though on a smaller scale, was put forward by the government’s consultants (they proposed a coach system around the M25), the government crushed it. The transport secretary, Alistair Darling, was asked in the House of Commons ‘why has he specifically rejected the recommendation… for a strategic authority to create a high quality orbital coach network?’38 This was his response:
Given everything that the honourable gentleman said about bureaucracy, I am astonished that his one new policy announcement is that he wants a strategic authority for coaches. I should have thought that running buses and coaches was best left to existing organizations.39
It’s reassuring, isn’t it, to see how seriously the government takes these questions.
Storkey’s proposal does not solve all our transport problems. As a means of addressing climate change, it would work only with the help of two other policies: the capping and rationing of the carbon we use, and the capping and rationing of the road space we use. Otherwise it merely liberates space into which traffic can expand, while releasing money for investment in energy-intensive processes, as the Khazzoom–Brookes Postulate, which I explained in Chapter 4, predicts. Reaping the carbon benefits of Storkey’s proposal means giving buses and coaches some of the lanes that cars now use, rather than building new lanes to accommodate them. In city centres, it means reclaiming some of the streets now used by cars for pedestrians and cyclists, as Copenhagen, Vienna and Zurich have done. It means turning car parks back into city squares, and planting trees and installing playgrounds and pavement cafés where there was only tarmac before. It is important, too, that Storkey’s coach stations on the motorway junctions do not become new development hubs: it is easy to see how governments could use them as an excuse to grant planning permission for new superstores, service stations and housing, ‘integrated with public transport’. Developments like this could counteract many of the scheme’s savings.
Reducing the number of cars on the roads is not just a matter of providing alternatives, but also of discouraging driving. A carbon rationing system, like the congestion charge which has reduced the traffic in London, provides a powerful financial incentive to switch to public transport. With these additional policies, Storkey’s coach system provides the means by which people can stay within the necessary carbon limits while travelling almost as much as they do today. While the fantasy of freedom would have to be abandoned, real freedoms would be preserved.
There are some people who would still need cars. Trains and buses are almost impossible for some disabled people to use, and it is hard to see how a public transport service could reach everyone who lives in the countryside without either costing a fortune or restricting their current freedoms. People who live in cities will find that there are some journeys they cannot easily make by coach, though Storkey’s system should ensure that it is more cost-effective to hire a car when you need it, or to join a car club, than to own one. If some cars are to remain on the roads, sustaining a 90 per cent cut in carbon emissions means both improving their efficiency and reducing the need to travel.
Confronted with the twin disasters of climate change and an impending oil peak, it is hard to see how anyone could justify the assertion that the need to drive a car which can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds (the Audi S4 for example) overrides the Ethiopians’ need to avoid recurrent famines, or the whole world’s need to avoid the economic catastrophe we’ll suffer if petroleum peaks too soon.40 The speed and acceleration of our cars is a form of profligacy at which all future generations will goggle. The main reason why improvements in energy efficiency have been so slow to take effect is that manufacturers insist on sustaining performance. If this were not a requirement, the most efficient engines would be many times smaller than they are today.
The average emission for new cars in the United Kingdom is 170 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre.41 The Toyota Prius, rated by the US Environmental Protection Agency as the greenest car on the mass market, manages 104 grams,42 a saving of just 31 per cent. In 2001 Toyota unveiled its ‘Earth-friendly ES3 Concept Car’ at the International Frankfurt Motor Show.43 Though it did not translate this figure into grams of carbon dioxide, it claimed that the ES3 could travel for 100 kilometres on 2.7 litres of fuel. If true, this would have made it twice as energy-efficient as the Prius.* After generating reams of favourable publicity for Toyota, the ES3 was never seen again. It turns out to have been nothing more than an experiment, abandoned, perhaps, because it was insufficiently sexy.
I have an advertisement in front of me extracted from the Daily Telegraph of 20 October 1983,† four years after the revolution in Iran raised oil prices to the equivalent of $80 a barrel. After boasting about reaching a ‘speed that’s well above the legal limit’ (the regulation of advertisements has improved a little since then), Peugeot claimed that its new 205 diesels ‘are the world’s first production cars to do over 72 miles per gallon at a steady 56mph’.44 This suggests, if true, that a car sold twenty-three years ago was 40 per cent more efficient than the best the mass market has to offer today: the Prius manages just 51 miles per gallon on highways.45 But the illegal speeds that Peugeot’s 205 diesels could reach just aren’t high enough for the freedom-seekers of the twenty-first century. Average fuel efficiency in the European Union has improved slowly: by 8 per cent since 1995.‡46,47 In the United States it has deteriorated. In 1988 the average mileage per gallon* of cars and light trucks was 22.1. Today it is 20.8.48 This is 17 per cent worse than the Model T Ford, which – in 1908 – managed 25 miles to the gallon.49 The Ford Expedition, one of the best-selling lines today, achieves 15.5.50
So little importance is attached to fuel economy that we struggle even to find reliable figures. In 2005 Auto Express magazine conducted a study which found that the British government’s mileage calculations for new cars were fictional. ‘The official test is carried out on a mechanical rolling road and bears no comparison to real-life driving on UK roads,’ the editor of Auto Express said. ‘Our test team discovered that on average cars are around 17–20 per cent less economical than the official claims.’51 The same relationship holds in the United States. According to Detroit News, ‘most drivers achieve only about 75 per cent of the laboratory-generated figures.’52 In 2006, Which? magazine tested the new hybrid cars, which are supposed to be the greenest vehicles on the road. It found that the Toyota Prius managed only 68–76 per cent of its official mileage, while the Honda Civic was only 52–63 per cent as efficient as the UK’s Vehicle Certification Agency had claimed.53
In 1991, the Rocky Mountain Institute in the United States published a design for a ‘Hypercar’ which, it claimed, could save at least 70–80 per cent of the fuel other models used.54 The Institute’s critical innovations involved massive reductions in the vehicle’s weight and drag. It proposed that the steel body should be replaced with carbon fibre composites, Kevlar or fibreglass and that the underside of the car be made as smooth as its roof. Then, like the Toyota Prius, it would use a ‘hybrid-electric drive’ (powered by a combination of liquid fuel and an electric motor) which could turn the energy now lost when the car brakes into electricity.
Fifteen years later, though the Institute’s design seems to be viable, safe and cheap, and some of its features have been incorporated into real models like the Prius, nothing resembling the whole package has been launched as a mass-market car on either side of the Atlantic. The manufacturers will produce the odd demonstration model – largely, it seems, to keep the regulators off their backs – but while they make most of their money on sports utility vehicles, they are simply not interested in serious fuel economies. It is beginning to look like the last days of the Roman empire.
Unwilling to contemplate either a major reduction in the use of the private car or a decline in performance, both the manufacturers and the governments seeking to keep the metaphor alive are now turning instead to alternative fuels. We can keep driving as we do today, they insist, and save the biosphere, by swapping liquid fossil fuels for either biofuels or hydrogen.
Biofuels, in this context, are transport fuels made from plant or animal matter. At first sight this is a beautiful idea. Instead of dragging a filthy black sludge from the bowels of the earth, we would grow our fuel in swaying fields of grain or flowers. It could be made from rapeseed, sunflowers, maize, wheat, sugar cane, even straw or – one day – wood. There would be no more tankers running aground on rocky shores, no more corrupt regimes propped up by black gold, no more murders of indigenous people, no more wars in the Middle East. Most pertinently, cars would produce only the carbon that the plants had absorbed from the atmosphere.
Unsurprisingly, biofuels have caused great excitement among both environmentalists and governments. In May 2005, George W. Bush gave a speech at the Virginia BioDiesel Refinery in West Point.
by developing biodiesel, you’re making this country less dependent on foreign sources of oil… Our dependence on foreign oil is like a foreign tax on the American Dream, and that tax is growing every year… My administration… would require fuel producers to include a certain percentage of ethanol and biodiesel in their fuel. And to expand the potential of ethanol and biodiesel even more, I proposed $84 million in my 2006 budget for ongoing research.55
This rose to $150 million in the 2007 budget.56 The 2005 Energy Policy Act obliges fuel companies to sell 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel and ethanol a year.57
On the other side of the Atlantic, our governments have started implementing a similar law. The European biofuels directive rules that 5.75 per cent of our transport fuel should come from renewable sources by 2010.58 The European Commission intends to raise this to 20 per cent by 2020.59 The British government has reduced the tax on biofuels by 20 pence a litre, while the European Union is paying farmers an extra 45 euros a hectare to grow them. At last, it seems, a bold environmental vision is being pursued in the world’s rich nations.
There are just two problems. The first is the one I mentioned in Chapter 6: we have a finite amount of agricultural land and of the water required to irrigate it. While this limits the production of wood for burning in power stations or boilers, it imposes a far more serious constraint on the cultivation of the starch, sugar or oil required to make liquid fuels. The crops which produce them have to be grown on arable land. When biofuels are widely deployed, they will help precipitate a global humanitarian disaster.
Used on a small scale – as they are now – they are harmless. The people slithering around all day in vats of filth in order to turn used chip fat into motor fuel are performing a service to society. But there is enough waste cooking oil in the United Kingdom to meet only one 380th of our demand for road transport fuel.* The rest has to be grown intentionally.
Road transport in the United Kingdom consumes 37.8 million tonnes of petroleum products a year.61 The most productive oil crop which can be grown in this country is rape. The average yield is between 3 and 3.5 tonnes per hectare.62 One tonne of rapeseed produces 415 kilos of biodiesel.63 So every hectare of arable land could provide 1.45 tonnes of transport fuel. This means that running our cars, buses and lorries on biodiesel would require 25.9 million hectares. You begin to understand the problem when you discover that there are only 5.7 million hectares of arable land in the United Kingdom.64 Switching to green fuels requires four and half times that. The European Union’s target of 20 per cent by 2020 would consume almost all our cropland.
If the same thing is to happen throughout the rich world, the impact could be great enough to push hundreds of millions of people into starvation, as the price of food rises beyond their means. If, as some environmentalists demand, it is to happen worldwide, then much of the arable surface of the planet will be deployed to produce food for cars, not people. The market responds to money, not need. People who own cars – by definition – have more money than people at risk of starvation: their demand is ‘effective’, while the groans of the starving are not. In a contest between cars and people, the cars would win. Something rather like this is happening already. Though 800 million people are permanently malnourished, the global increase in crop production is being used mostly to feed animals: the number of livestock on earth has quintupled since 1950.65 The reason is that those who buy meat and dairy products have more purchasing power than those who buy only subsistence crops.
The environmentalists who support the wider use of biofuels picture the crops they like best. They see the nodding heads of sunflowers, or the blue blossoms of the linseed plant. They talk of algae which can be grown in desert ponds, or the use of straw and other wastes to produce ethanol. They see towns and villages becoming self-sufficient in fuel, as they are supplied by the farmers down the road. But what they will not see – in fact what they flatly and repeatedly refuse to understand – is that a global commodity market selects not the most satisfying vision, but the cheapest commodity. And at present and for the foreseeable future the cheapest commodity is palm oil. What this means is that biofuel production is a formula not only for humanitarian disaster but also for environmental catastrophe.
In 2005, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production.
Between 1985 and 2000, the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia.66
In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5 million in Indonesia. Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan is being opened up by oil planters. The orang-utan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and many other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist.67 The entire region is being turned into a vegetable oil field.
Before oil palms are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon than the palm trees will ever accumulate, must be felled and burnt. The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by palm growers. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are now moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they’ve cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidizes, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the burning trees produce. A paper published in Nature estimates that the fires ignited in Indonesia in 1997, which spread as a result of the felling of rainforest trees, released between 13 and 40 per cent as much carbon dioxide as the entire world’s consumption of fossil fuels.68 The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel.
The expansion of palm oil plantations is already being driven by the rich world’s demand for biodiesel. According to the Malaysia Star,
The focus on a new source of demand for crude palm oil – its conversion to biodiesel – has captured the market’s imagination. The demand for biodiesel will come from the European Community, where it is mandatory for diesel to be blended with at least 5 per cent of vegetable oil. This fresh demand for crude palm oil would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia’s crude palm oil inventories.69
The environmentalist David Bassendine calculates that if 5 per cent of the transport fuel we use in the European Union were carbon-free, this would reduce the world’s carbon emissions by a maximum of 0.2 per cent.70 In other words, the potential carbon saving is a tiny fraction of the possible emissions caused by biodiesel production.
Even when confronted with the construction of nine new palm oil refineries built to meet the European demand for biodiesel,71 the environmentalists who have embraced this technology still refuse to understand the problem. After drawing attention to the impacts of palm oil production in the Guardian, I was bombarded with angry messages insisting that biodiesel could and should be produced at home. But the British government has already investigated and dismissed the possibility of restricting imports. Its report on the subject admitted that
the main environmental risks are likely to be those concerning any large expansion in biofuel feedstock production, and particularly in Brazil (for sugar cane) and South East Asia (for palm oil plantations).72
It suggested that the best means of dealing with the problem was to prevent environmentally destructive fuels from being imported. So it asked its consultants whether an import ban would infringe world trade rules. The answer was ‘yes’: ‘mandatory environmental criteria… would greatly increase the risk of international legal challenge to the policy as a whole.’73
‘So change the world trade rules!’ the enthusiasts respond. There might be some virtues in this proposal, but if we have to fight for a new global trading regime before we can engineer a low-carbon transport system, we might as well give up now. Anyone who has watched the world trade talks – both their snail’s progress and the direction in which they are travelling– can see that it would take too long.
The decision by governments in Europe and North America to pursue the development of biofuels is, in environmental terms, the most damaging they have ever taken. Knowing that the creation of this market will lead to a massive surge in imports of both palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia and ethanol from rainforest land in Brazil; knowing that there is nothing meaning ful they can do to prevent them; and knowing that these imports will accelerate rather than ameliorate climate change; our governments have decided to go ahead anyway.
Hydrogen is rather more interesting. Cars, just like our homes, the proponents say, could be powered by hydrogen fuel cells. They would be quiet, they would produce no local pollutants, and they would be around one-third more efficient than internal combustion engines.* The hydrogen, again, could be made from gas or coal (and the carbon dioxide produced in its manufacture buried) or from the electrolysis of water by means of renewable energy.
The European Commission has already devoted €2 billion to this project,75 and the Bush administration has more or less matched it.76 The US National Academy of Engineering estimates that 60 per cent of the new vehicles sold in the United States in the year 2034 could be run on hydrogen fuel cells, though it admits this is an ‘optimistic vision’.77 The Japanese government says it wants 50,000 hydrogen vehicles on its roads by 2010, and five million by 2020.78 A report by the Tyndall Centre, released in 2002, notes that
The major motor manufacturers are predicting that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will be made available on a limited basis by 2004, and hydrogen-powered internal combustion engines in the next 5–7 years.79
The manufacturers’ claims were nonsense. But hype like this is often swallowed whole by people who ought to know better. In their book Natural Capitalism, published in 1999, Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins – seeking to demonstrate that their ideas were being adopted by the automakers – reported that
In April 1997, Daimler-Benz announced a $350 million joint effort with the Canadian firm Ballard to create hydrogen-fuel-cell engines. Daimler pledged annual production of 100,000 such vehicles per year by 2005, one seventh of its total current production. Six months later, the president of Toyota said he’d beat that goal, and predicted hybrid-electric cars would capture one third of the world car market by 2005… by the spring of 1998, at least five automakers were planning imminent volume production of cars in the 80 mpg range.80
These authors might like to reflect on the fact that in 1929 the president of General Motors predicted that his cars would be managing 80 miles to the gallon within ten years.81 The motor industry makes grand predictions of this kind every few months, in order to excite its investors and show that it intends to save the planet. We would be well advised not to believe a word it says.
Even so, hydrogen fuel cells are beginning to look like a feasible technology for motor transport, if not on the timescale the producers predict. Before they can be widely deployed, they will have to negotiate several major obstacles.
The most immediate problem is that hydrogen cannot be bought in filling stations. The chicken and egg problem I described in Chapter 7 is even harder to negotiate for mobile fuel cells. Stationary models will be supplied from just one pipe. The owners of fuel cell cars need to be sure that they can find hydrogen wherever they happen to run out. The filling stations won’t supply it until they have a market, and the market can’t develop until there are supplies.
This is compounded by the problem of storage, which is not something the owners of stationary fuel cells need to worry about unless they produce their own hydrogen. Cars would need to take it with them. Though the gas is three times as energy-dense as petrol in terms of weight, it is only one tenth as dense in terms of volume – at pressures of 5,000 pounds per square inch.*
This means that a hydrogen-powered vehicle would need a high-pressure fuel tank ten times the size of a petrol-driven car’s in order to travel as far. High-pressure tanks would take a long time to fill, and could be dangerous. Alternatively, the hydrogen could be liquefied, but this, as I mentioned in Chapter 7, requires a great deal of energy. As soon as the car is parked and the engine has stopped running, it will start to boil off. According to the US National Academy of Engineering,
New solutions are needed in order to lead to vehicles that have at least a 300-mile driving range… no hydrogen storage system has yet been developed that is simultaneously lightweight, compact, inexpensive, and safe.83
One of the new solutions the automakers have attempted is ‘on-board re-formation’ of hydrogen. What this means is that the cars contain a miniature factory. Their fuel tanks are filled with either petrol or methanol and the re-former turns it to hydrogen while they are on the road. But on-board re-formers are expensive, heavy, inefficient and take a long time to start.84 Most importantly, they can make no contribution to tackling climate change, as the production of hydrogen can neither be powered by renewable energy nor accompanied by carbon burial. The only benefits are that the cars are quieter and produce less local pollution. All these problems, of course, also attend the development of hydrogen-powered internal combustion engines.
The only remaining option seems to be storage in the form of a solid of some kind. Hydrogen can be adsorbed by carbon or used to create metal hydrides, which release the gas (and a good deal of heat) when reacted with water. This approach is also beset by problems, such as the likely leakage of hydrogen and the temperatures at which the reactions take place.85 The manufacturers have so far been unable to show how the spent metal hydrides in the car can be extracted and recycled. But experimental vans running on sodium borohydride have already been tested by DaimlerChrysler. They appear to be light enough and to have a long enough range for commercialisation, assuming that the other problems can one day be overcome.
Then there’s the cost. The Tyndall Centre reports that ‘Fuel cells for vehicles currently cost around $1,000 per kilowatt whilst internal combustion engines cost $10 per kilowatt.’86 The National Academy says the whole system
will have to decrease in cost to less than $100 per kilowatt before fuel cell vehicles become a plausible commercial option… it will take at least a decade for this to happen.87
But while the system is expensive, the fuel is not. When oil cost $30 a barrel, the Academy’s charts show, a kilogram of hydrogen produced from gas or coal, even when the carbon dioxide is buried, was only a little more expensive than a kilogram of gasoline.88 At the time of writing, oil costs about twice that amount, which means that hydrogen is currently cheaper than petrol. This is not the case, however, when it is produced by electrolysis.
While hydrogen cars could one day make the world’s oilrigs redundant, they would require a massive increase in other kinds of energy production. In Europe, the fuel is likely to be produced from natural gas, which would, of course, hasten its eventual decline. In North America, whose gas reserves are in freefall, it will be made from coal or (more expensively) electrolysis using nuclear power or wind. This would require roughly a doubling of national electricity production.89,90
But the fundamental problem with cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells is that – because of the unresolved technical problems I’ve mentioned – their development will simply be too slow, despite the billions being thrown at them by the rich world’s governments. The National Academy’s ‘optimistic vision’ looks like nothing more than wishful thinking by the time you have read the whole report. It admits that
although a transition to hydrogen could greatly transform the US energy system in the long run, the impacts on oil imports and carbon dioxide emissions are likely to be minor during the next 25 years.91
This assessment seems to be shared by New Scientist magazine, which in 2003 reported that ‘It will probably be 15 to 20 years before fuel-cell cars gain even a toehold in the market.’92
While mobile fuel cells might one day change the world, in other words, as far as my target is concerned they are pretty well useless. In lobbying for lower emissions, our time would be better spent demanding the mass production of a hypercar – which faces no significant technical barriers – rather than the use of hydrogen.
Alternatively, there might be a means of overcoming the main drawback of the electric vehicle. Electric cars already exist, and some new models are as fast as any vehicle needs to be. But its range is limited by the capacity of the battery: the best ones run out after 100–300 miles and take hours to recharge. The energy expert Dave Andrews suggests a simple solution: the cars should use batteries provided by a network of filling stations. As the battery runs down, you pull into a station, pay a fee and swap it for another one. The stations could charge their batteries from electricity provided by offshore wind farms when the wind is blowing strongly and demand is low. This means that the carbon costs would be roughly zero, surplus wind power would not be wasted and the financial costs would remain small, as the power is bought when it is cheap. This looks like a far simpler and less costly means of reducing the carbon content of transport fuel than a hydrogen network. Given that the alternatives are so much easier to develop, our governments’ obsession with hydrogen cars seems incomprehensible.
In her excellent book Car Sick, the transport analyst Lynn Sloman, drawing on surveys conducted in Australia, three English towns and a rural area in mid-Wales, derives what she calls ‘the 40:40:20 rule’.93 Irrespective of location, some 40 per cent of current car journeys could already be made by bicycle, on foot or by public transport. Another 40 per cent could be made by other means if public transport or cycling facilities were improved. Roughly 20 per cent of car journeys cannot be swapped.
Most of the means of persuading drivers to use other modes of transport are – by comparison to the billions spent on building roads and bridges – simple and cheap. One of the biggest problems, Sloman found, is that people don’t know about existing services. By visiting people’s homes and handing out introductory free tickets, bus companies in some parts of Britain have been able greatly to increase their custom. Advertising can help to correct people’s misconceptions about the alternatives: one survey showed that people overestimate the time a journey would take by public transport by 70 per cent and underestimate the time it would take by car by 26 per cent.94
Local bus services can also be greatly improved. In Germany, Holland and Denmark, the regional or provincial governments determine which services are needed, and require the bus companies to sign a contract to provide them. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, it is left to the market. The companies ply the most lucrative routes at the most lucrative times, and park the buses before they have to pay overtime to the drivers. The idea of ‘cross-subsidization’ (the profits from the busy routes help to pay for services on the quieter ones) is much discussed in this country but seldom imposed.
Our public transport systems are blighted by a lack of imagination. While a bus service in the United Kingdom means just one thing – a bus trundling up and down a fixed route at set times – in parts of Holland, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark, it describes several different kinds of transport. There are, for example, taxi-buses, using vehicle tracking systems, global positioning satellites and call centres. These are a kind of shared taxi service, which you book in advance and which comes to your door, but which picks up other passengers – who have also made bookings – along the way. There are ‘bell buses’, which run on quiet routes to regular timetables, but only if someone has already phoned to request the service.95 This enables them to cut both costs and emissions.
Other European countries – especially Holland, Germany and Switzerland – also possess integrated transport services of the kind the United Kingdom was promised in 1998,96 but which still hasn’t materialized. Buses are scheduled to meet trains. Trains, trams and buses carry bicycles, free of charge and at most times of the day. Safe, continuous cycle lanes connect with each other and traverse entire cities.
In a few towns in the United Kingdom, parents take turns to escort ‘walking buses’ – crocodiles of children – to school. By obliging children to use appendages which have otherwise become almost vestigial – their legs – they reduce both traffic and obesity. Because only two adults – a ‘driver’ and a ‘conductor’ – are needed to herd the children, their parents don’t have to travel to school every day.
None of this is either expensive or difficult to implement, but most local and national governments in the United Kingdom, like those of the United States, are just not interested. They are obsessed with congestion – with the impediments, in other words, to motorists’ perceived freedom – and seek to reduce it by creating more space for the car.
Another means of cutting carbon emissions without the need for new technologies is to reduce our need to travel. In Chapter 9 I propose a shopping system which more or less eliminates the requirement for private cars, with an associated carbon cut of around 70 per cent. There is also scope – though not as much as some of its boosters have suggested – for reducing the need to travel to work.
Studies in California, the Netherlands and Germany suggest that people who are able to work at home for part of the week cut the total distance they travel, for all purposes, by between 10 and 20 per cent.97 This might be offset a little by the fact that they could be tempted – if they don’t have to go in so often – to live further away.
By 2001, 2.2 million people in the United Kingdom, or 7.4 per cent of the workforce, worked from home at least one day a week.98 The government’s advisers suggest that if the number continues to grow at the current rate, in ten years around 30 per cent of the country’s workforce will be teleworking for at least some of the time.99
But the growth of teleworking can’t go on for ever. It is hard to see how factory workers, shop assistants, nurses, drivers, builders or gardeners could take much of their work home. The advisers point out that the jobs which can most easily be taken home (those which involve computers and telephones) are the ones which have been growing fastest. They forget to mention, however, that these are also the sectors which are most likely to disappear overseas: if your boss can allow you to work from home, he can also send your job to Hyderabad.
A study in the United States suggests that 50 per cent of employees there are ‘information workers’, and 80 per cent might be able to work from home, which would mean that the maximum proportion of teleworkers would be about 40 per cent.100 If everyone who was able to do so spent two days a week teleworking, this would cut the number of commuting journeys by 16 per cent. This is optimistic. An opinion poll in the UK suggests that of those who use computers but don’t yet work from home, 77 per cent don’t want to do it, 17 per cent would like to do it but wouldn’t be allowed to, and only 7 per cent would and could.101 But a rationing system would change these proportions, and video broadband might help to counteract the feeling of isolation that often discourages peoples from staying at home.
There is also some potential for sharing journeys. Several companies and councils in the UK already encourage their workers to share their cars, or round them up in minibuses. One study suggests that an average of 14 per cent of the workers in the companies running car-sharing schemes are making use of them.102 Two firms – Marks and Spencer Financial Services and Computer Associates, both of which give money to people who share – have persuaded around one third of their staff to join the system.103
There are also car-sharing schemes for people who don’t work together. To use the Liftshare system, for example, you simply post the journey you intend to make and the date on which you wish to travel on its website and say whether you are offering or seeking a lift. The scheme will attempt to find someone else who is going the same way.104 The site will tell you how much the journey costs, and how many kilograms of carbon dioxide you save by travelling with someone else. In other words, it’s a form of hitch-hiking that relieves you of the need to stand on the hard shoulder in the rain being abused by Volvo drivers. It’s also likely to be safer. Liftshare claims to have 104,000 members, who share just over 41 million kilometres of journeys a year. It says 32 per cent of its requests lead to a successful match.105 All these numbers – for both workplace and public schemes – would be greatly boosted by a rationing system, which would encourage people to share the carbon costs of travel.
Many of these proposals are likely to be as effective at glueing communities back together as they are at reducing carbon emissions. Just before I wrote this chapter, I counted the number of people I passed on the pavement when walking from my house to the local bakery, four streets away. Out of sixteen, I knew twelve by name. It was a slow journey, but I cannot think of a better way of spending my time.
It is not hard to see how a universal switch to hypercar technologies or electric vehicles and a return to lower speeds and lower standards of performance, accompanied by car sharing, tele-commuting, a car-free shopping scheme, better public transport and better facilities for cyclists and walkers, could cut emissions by more than 90 per cent across the journeys that Storkey’s system could not replace. But the problem is political, not practical. We need governments to start deciding how best to run a transport system, rather than how best to accommodate the private car. That means confronting a lobby which appears to become more confident by the year, as the libertarian politics encouraged by driving make any limitations on drivers harder to achieve. The longer governments prevaricate, the less plausible substantial change becomes; the problem which in other respects is the easiest in this book to fix is in danger of becoming insoluble. One of our greatest political challenges is to prove Ilya Ehrenburg wrong.