CHAPTER 7

HOW WE GET AROUND

16 percent of 51 billion tons a year

Let’s start with a quick quiz—just two questions.

1. Which of these contains the most energy?

   A. A gallon of gasoline

   B. A stick of dynamite

   C. A hand grenade

2. Which of these is the cheapest in the United States?

   A. A gallon of milk

   B. A gallon of orange juice

   C. A gallon of gasoline

The correct answers are A and C: gasoline. Gas contains an amazing amount of energy—you’d need to bundle 130 sticks of dynamite together to get as much energy as a single gallon of gas contains. Of course, dynamite releases all its energy at once, while gasoline burns more slowly—which is just one reason we fill up our cars with gas and not sticks of explosives.

In the United States, gasoline is also remarkably cheap, even though it may not always seem that way when it’s time to stop at the gas station. In addition to milk and OJ, here are some things that it’s less expensive than, gallon for gallon: Dasani bottled water, yogurt, honey, laundry detergent, maple syrup, hand sanitizer, latte from Starbucks, Red Bull energy drink, olive oil, and the famously low-cost Charles Shaw wine you can buy at Trader Joe’s grocery stores. That’s right—gallon for gallon, gasoline is cheaper than Two Buck Chuck.

As you read the rest of this chapter, keep these two facts about gasoline in mind: It packs a punch, and it’s cheap.*1 They’re a good reminder that when it comes to how much energy we get for each dollar we spend, gasoline is the gold standard. Aside from similar products like diesel and jet fuel, nothing else in our daily lives comes close to delivering as much energy per gallon at such a low cost.

The twin concepts of energy delivered per unit of fuel and per dollar spent are going to matter a lot as we look for ways to decarbonize our transportation system. As you’re no doubt aware, the burning of fuels in our cars, ships, and planes emits carbon dioxide that’s contributing to global warming. To get to zero, we’ll need to replace those fuels with something that’s just as energy dense and just as cheap.

You may be surprised that I’m bringing it up so late in this book and that transportation contributes only 16 percent of global emissions, ranking fourth behind how we make things, plug in, and grow things. I was surprised too when I learned it, and I suspect that most people are in the same boat. If you stopped some random strangers on the sidewalk and asked them what activities contribute the most to climate change, they’d probably say burning coal for electricity, driving cars, and flying planes.

The confusion is understandable: Although transportation isn’t the biggest cause of emissions worldwide, it is number one in the United States, and it has been for a few years now, just ahead of making electricity. We Americans drive and fly a lot.

In any case, if we’re going to get to net-zero emissions, we’ll have to get rid of all the greenhouse gases caused by transportation, in the United States and around the world.

How hard will that be? Pretty hard. But not impossible.

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For the first 99.9 percent of human history, we managed to move around without relying on fossil fuels at all. We walked, rode animals, and put ships under sail. Then, in the early 1800s, we figured out how to run locomotives and steamboats on coal, and we never looked back. Within the century, trains were crossing entire continents and ships were moving people and products across the oceans. The gas-powered automobile came along in the late 19th century, followed in the early 20th century by the commercial air travel that would become so essential to today’s global economy.

Although it’s been barely 200 years since we first burned fossil fuels for transportation, we’ve already come to depend on them in a fundamental way. We will never give them up without a replacement that is nearly as cheap and that’s just as capable of fueling long-distance travel.

Here’s another challenge: We won’t just need to eliminate the 8.2 billion tons of carbon we produce from transportation today; we’ll need to get rid of even more than that. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts that demand for transportation will keep growing through at least 2050—even after accounting for the fact that COVID-19 has limited travel and trade. It’s aviation, trucking, and shipping—not passenger cars—that account for all the emissions growth in this sector. Maritime shipping now handles nine-tenths of the goods traded around the world by volume, producing nearly 3 percent of global emissions.

A lot of the transport emissions come from rich countries, but most of those countries hit their peak in the past decade and have actually declined somewhat since then. These days, nearly all the growth in transport-related carbon is coming from developing countries as their populations grow, get richer, and buy more cars. As usual, China is the best example—its transportation emissions have doubled over the past decade and gone up by a factor of 10 since 1990.

COVID-19 is slowing—but not stopping—the growth of transportation emissions. Although emissions will shrink in many places, they will grow so much in low- and middle-income countries that the overall effect will be an increase in greenhouse gases.(IEA World Energy Outlook 2020; Rhodium Group)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll make the same point about transportation that I’ve made about electricity, manufacturing, and agriculture: We should be glad that more people and goods are moving around. The ability to travel between rural areas and cities is a form of personal freedom, not to mention a matter of survival for farmers in poor countries who need to get their crops to market. International flights connect the world in ways that were unimaginable a century ago; being able to meet people from other countries helps us understand our common goals. And before modern transportation, our food choices were limited most of the year. Personally, I like grapes and enjoy eating them year-round. But I can do that only because of container ships that bring fruit from South America and that currently run on fossil fuels.

So how can we get all the benefits of travel and transportation without making the climate unlivable? Do we have all the technology we need, or do we need some innovations?

To answer those questions, we’ll need to figure the Green Premiums for transportation. We’ll begin by digging deeper into where these emissions are coming from.

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This pie chart shows you the percentage of emissions that comes from cars, trucks, planes, ships, and so on. Our goal is to get every one of them to net zero.

Notice that passenger vehicles (cars, SUVs, motorcycles, and such) are responsible for almost half the emissions. Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles—everything from garbage trucks to 18-wheelers—account for another 30 percent. Airplanes add in a tenth of all emissions, as do container ships and other marine vessels, with trains accounting for the last bit.*2

Cars aren’t the only culprit. Passenger vehicles are responsible for nearly half of all transportation-related emissions. (International Council on Clean Transportation)

Let’s take these one at a time, starting with the biggest slice of the pie—passenger cars—and look at our current options for getting rid of emissions.

Passenger cars. There are about a billion cars on the road around the world. In 2018 alone, we added roughly 24 million passenger cars, after accounting for the ones that got retired. Because burning gasoline inevitably releases greenhouse gases, we need an alternative—either fuels made from carbon that’s already in the air rather than the carbon that’s in fossil fuels, or some other form of energy altogether.

Let’s take the second option first. Fortunately, we do indeed have another form of energy that—although far from perfect—has already been proven to work. In fact, cars that use it are probably being sold at an auto dealer near you right now.

Today you can buy an all-electric car from more than half the alphabet: Audi, BMW, Chevrolet, Citroën, Fiat, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Peugeot, Porsche, Renault, Smart, Tesla, Volkswagen, and others too numerous to mention, including manufacturers in China and India. I own an electric vehicle, and I love it.

Although EVs used to be far more expensive than their gas-burning counterparts, and they’re still the pricier option today, the difference has come down dramatically in recent years. That’s largely due to a huge drop in the cost of batteries—an 87 percent decrease since 2010—as well as various tax credits and government commitments to get more zero-emissions cars on the road. But EVs still come with a modest Green Premium.

For example, consider two cars, both produced by Chevrolet: the gas-powered Malibu and the all-electric Bolt EV.

Chevy versus Chevy. The gas-powered Malibu and the all-electric Bolt EV. (Chevrolet)

Their features are roughly comparable when it comes to engine power, the amount of space for passengers, and so on. The Bolt costs $14,000 more (before any tax incentives that might make it cheaper), but you can’t figure the Green Premium using only the purchase price of the car. What matters isn’t just the cost of buying the car but the overall cost of buying and owning the car. You have to account for the fact that EVs need less maintenance, for example, and run on electricity instead of gas. On the other hand, because EVs are more expensive, you’ll pay more for auto insurance.

When you account for all these differences and look at the total cost of ownership, the Bolt will cost 10 cents more per mile driven than the Malibu.

What does 10 cents a mile mean? If you drive 12,000 miles a year, that’s an annual premium of $1,200—hardly negligible, but low enough to make EVs a reasonable consideration for many car buyers.

And that’s a national average in the United States. The Green Premium will be different in other countries—the main factor being the difference between the cost of electricity and the cost of gasoline. (Cheaper electricity or more expensive gasoline will make the Green Premium smaller.) In some parts of Europe, gas prices are so high that the Green Premium for EVs has already reached zero. Even in the United States, as battery prices continue to drop, I predict that the premium for most cars will be zero by 2030.

That’s great news, and we should get lots of EVs on the road as they become even more affordable. (I’ll say more about how we can do this at the end of this chapter.) But even in 2030, there will be some drawbacks to EVs versus a gas-powered car.

One is that gasoline prices vary a lot, and EVs are the cheaper option only when gas prices are above a certain level. At one point in May 2020, the average price of gas in the United States had dropped to $1.77 per gallon; when gas is that cheap, EVs can’t compete—the batteries are simply too expensive. With the price of today’s batteries, EV owners save money only if gas costs more than around $3 per gallon.

Another drawback is that it takes an hour or more to fully charge an EV, yet you can gas up your car in less than five minutes. In addition, using them to avoid carbon emissions works only if we’re generating electricity from zero-carbon sources. This is another reason why the breakthroughs I mentioned in chapter 4 are so important. If we get our power from coal and then charge up our electric cars with coal-fired electricity, we’ll just be swapping one fossil fuel for another.

Plus, it’ll take time to get all our gas-burning cars off the road. On average, after a car rolls off the assembly line, it runs for more than 13 years before reaching its final resting place in the junkyard. This long life cycle means that if we wanted to have every passenger car in America running on electricity by 2050, EVs would need to be nearly 100 percent of auto sales within the next 15 years. Today they’re less than 2 percent.

As I mentioned, another way to get to zero is to switch to alternative liquid fuels that use carbon that was already in the atmosphere. When you burn these fuels, you’re not adding extra carbon to the air—you’re just returning the same carbon to where it was when the fuel was made.

When you see the phrase “alternative fuels,” you might think about ethanol, a biofuel that’s usually made from corn, sugarcane, or beet sugar. If you’re in the United States, you’re probably running your car on some of this biofuel already—most gasoline sold in America contains 10 percent ethanol, virtually all of it made from corn. There are cars in Brazil that run on 100 percent ethanol made from sugarcane. Few other countries use any at all.

Here’s the problem: Corn-based ethanol isn’t zero carbon, and depending on how it’s made, it may not even be low carbon. Growing the crops requires fertilizer. The refining process, when the plants get turned into fuel, produces emissions too. And growing crops for fuel takes up land that might otherwise be used for growing food—possibly forcing farmers to cut down forests so they have someplace to grow food crops.

Alternative fuels are not a lost cause, though. There are advanced, second-generation biofuels that don’t have the problems of conventional biofuels. They can be made from plants that aren’t grown for food—unless you’re a big fan of switchgrass salad—or from farming residue (such as cornstalks), by-products left over from making paper, and even food and yard waste. Because they’re not food crops, they need little or no fertilizer, and they don’t have to be grown on farmland that could otherwise be dedicated to food for people or animals.

Some advanced biofuels will be what experts call “drop-in” fuels—meaning you can use them in (or “drop them into”) a conventional engine without modifying it. One more benefit: We can transport them using the tankers, pipelines, and other infrastructure we’ve already spent billions to build and maintain.

I’m optimistic about biofuels, but it’s a tough field. I had a personal experience that shows just how hard it is to make a breakthrough. A few years ago, I learned about a U.S. company that had a proprietary process for converting biomass, such as trees, into fuels. I went to visit its plant and was impressed by what I saw, and after doing due diligence, I invested $50 million in the company. But its technology just didn’t work well enough—various technical challenges meant the plant couldn’t produce at nearly the volume it needed to be economical—and the plant I visited eventually shut down. It was a $50 million dead end, but I’m not sorry I did it. We need to be exploring lots of ideas, even knowing that many of them will fail.

Unfortunately, research on advanced biofuels is still underfunded, and they’re not ready to be deployed at the scale we need for decarbonizing our transportation system. As a result, using them to replace gasoline would be quite expensive. Experts disagree on the exact cost of these and other clean fuels, and there’s a range of estimates out there, so I’ll use average costs from several different studies.

Green Premium to replace gasoline with advanced biofuels

Fuel type: Gasoline
	Retail price per gallon	$2.43
	Zero-carbon option per gallon	$5.00	(advanced biofuels)
Green Premium	106%

NOTE: Retail prices in this and subsequent charts are the average in the United States from 2015 to 2018. Zero-carbon options reflect current estimated prices.

Biofuels get their energy from plants, but that’s not the only way to create alternative fuels. We can also use zero-carbon electricity to combine the hydrogen in water with the carbon in carbon dioxide, resulting in hydrocarbon fuels. Because you use electricity in the process, these fuels are sometimes called electrofuels, and they have a lot of advantages. They’re drop-in fuels, and because they’re made using carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere, burning them doesn’t add to overall emissions.

But electrofuels also have a downside: They’re very expensive. You need hydrogen to make them, and as I mentioned in chapter 4, it costs a lot to make hydrogen without emitting carbon. In addition, you need to make them using clean electricity—otherwise, there’s no point—and we don’t yet have enough cheap, clean electricity in our power grid to use it economically for making fuel. It all adds up to a high Green Premium for electrofuels:

Green Premium to replace gasoline with zero-carbon alternatives

Fuel type: Gasoline
	Retail price per gallon	$2.43	$5.00	(advanced biofuels)
	Zero-carbon option per gallon	$2.43	$8.20	(electrofuels)
Green Premium	106%	237%

What does that mean for the average family? In the United States, a typical household spends around $2,000 a year on gasoline. So if the price doubles, that’s an extra $2,000 premium, and if it triples, that’s an extra $4,000 for every conventional passenger car on the road in America.

Garbage trucks, buses, and 18-wheelers. Unfortunately, batteries are a less practical option when it comes to long-distance buses and trucks. The bigger the vehicle you want to move, and the farther you want to drive it without recharging, the harder it’ll be to use electricity to power your engine. That’s because batteries are heavy, they can store only a limited amount of energy, and they can deliver only a certain amount of that energy to the engine at one time. (It takes a more powerful engine—one with more batteries—to run a heavy truck than a light hatchback.)

Medium-duty vehicles, like garbage trucks and city buses, are generally lightweight enough that electricity is a viable option for them. They also have the advantage of running relatively short routes and parking in the same place every night, so it’s easy to set up charging stations for them. The city of Shenzhen, China—home to 12 million people—has electrified its entire fleet of more than 16,000 buses and nearly two-thirds of its taxis. With the volume of electric buses being sold in China, I think the Green Premium for buses will reach zero within a decade, which means that most cities in the world will be able to shift their fleets.

Shenzhen, China, electrified its fleet of 16,000 buses.

But if you want to add more distance and power—for example, if you’re trying to run an 18-wheeler loaded with cargo on a cross-country trip, rather than a school bus full of students on a route around the neighborhood—you’ll need to carry many more batteries. And as you add batteries, you also add weight. A lot of weight.

Pound for pound, the best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline. In other words, to get the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas, you’ll need batteries that weigh 35 times more than the gas.

Here’s what that means in practical terms. According to a 2017 study by two mechanical engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, an electric cargo truck capable of going 600 miles on a single charge would need so many batteries that it would have to carry 25 percent less cargo. And a truck with a 900-mile range is out of the question: It would need so many batteries that it could hardly carry any cargo at all.

Keep in mind that a typical truck running on diesel can go more than 1,000 miles without refueling. So to electrify America’s fleet of trucks, freight companies would have to shift to vehicles that carry less cargo, stop to recharge far more often, spend hours of time recharging, and somehow travel long stretches of highway where there are no recharging stations. It’s just not going to happen anytime soon. Although electricity is a good option when you need to cover short distances, it’s not a practical solution for heavy, long-haul trucks.

Because we can’t electrify our cargo trucks, the only solutions available today are electrofuels and advanced biofuels. Unfortunately, they have dramatic Green Premiums too. Let’s add them to the chart:

Green Premiums to replace diesel with zero-carbon alternatives

Fuel type: Diesel
Retail price per gallon	$2.71	$5.50	(advanced biofuels)
Zero-carbon option per gallon	$2.71	$9.05	(electrofuels)
Green Premium	103%	234%

Ships and planes. Not long ago, my friend Warren Buffett and I were talking about how the world might decarbonize airplanes. Warren asked, “Why can’t we run a jumbo jet on batteries?” He already knew that when a jet takes off, the fuel it’s carrying accounts for 20 to 40 percent of its weight. So when I told him this startling fact—that you’d need 35 times more batteries by weight to get the same energy as jet fuel—he understood immediately. The more power you need, the heavier your plane gets. At some point, it’s so heavy that it can’t get off the ground. Warren smiled, nodded, and just said, “Ah.”

When you’re trying to power something as heavy as a container ship or jetliner, the rule of thumb I mentioned earlier—the bigger the vehicle you want to move, and the farther you want to drive it without recharging, the harder it’ll be to use electricity as your power source—becomes a law. Barring some unlikely breakthrough, batteries will never be light and powerful enough to move planes and ships anything more than short distances.

Consider where the state of the art is today. The best all-electric plane on the market can carry two passengers, reach a top speed of 210 miles per hour, and fly for three hours before recharging.*3 Meanwhile, a mid-capacity Boeing 787 can carry 296 passengers, reach up to 650 miles an hour, and fly for nearly 20 hours before stopping for fuel. In other words, a fossil-fuel-powered jetliner can fly more than three times as fast, for six times as long, and carry nearly 150 times as many people as the best electric plane on the market.

Batteries are getting better, but it’s hard to see how they’ll ever close this gap. If we’re lucky, they may become up to three times as energy dense as they are now, in which case they would still be 12 times less energy dense than gas or jet fuel. Our best bet is to replace jet fuel with electrofuels and advanced biofuels, but look at the hefty premiums that come with them:

Green Premiums to replace jet fuel with zero-carbon alternatives

Fuel type: Jet fuel
Retail price per gallon	$2.22	$5.35	(advanced biofuels)
Zero-carbon option per gallon	$2.22	$8.80	(electrofuels)
Green Premium	141%	296%

The same goes for cargo ships. The best conventional container ships can carry 200 times more cargo than either of the two electric ships now in operation, and they can run routes that are 400 times longer. Those are major advantages for ships that need to cross entire oceans.

Given how important container ships have become in the global economy, I don’t think it will ever be financially viable to try to run them on anything other than liquid fuels. Making the switch to alternatives would do us a lot of good; because shipping alone accounts for 3 percent of all emissions, using clean fuels would give us a meaningful reduction. Unfortunately, the fuel that container ships run on—it’s called bunker fuel—is dirt cheap, because it’s made from the dregs of the oil-refining process. Since their current fuel is so inexpensive, the Green Premium for ships is very high:

Green Premiums to replace bunker fuel with zero-carbon alternatives

Fuel type: Bunker fuel
Retail price per gallon	$1.29	$5.50	(advanced biofuels)
Zero-carbon option per gallon	$1.29	$9.05	(electrofuels)
Green Premium	326%	601%

To sum up, here are all the Green Premiums from this chapter:

Green Premiums to replace current fuels with zero-carbon alternatives

Fuel type: Gasoline
	Retail price per gallon	$2.43	$5.00	(advanced biofuels)
	Zero-carbon option per gallon	$2.43	$8.20	(electrofuels)
Green Premium	106%	237%
Fuel type: Diesel
Retail price per gallon	$2.71	$5.50	(advanced biofuels)
Zero-carbon option per gallon	$2.71	$9.05	(electrofuels)
Green Premium	103%	234%
Fuel type: Jet fuel
Retail price per gallon	$2.22	$5.35	(advanced biofuels)
Zero-carbon option per gallon	$2.22	$8.80	(electrofuels)
Green Premium	141%	296%
Fuel type: Bunker fuel
Retail price per gallon	$1.29	$5.50	(advanced biofuels)
Zero-carbon option per gallon	$1.29	$9.05	(electrofuels)
Green Premium	326%	601%

Would most people be willing to accept these increases? It’s not clear. But consider that the last time the United States raised the federal gas tax—imposed any increase at all—was more than a quarter century ago, in 1993. I don’t think Americans are eager to pay more for gas.

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There are four ways to cut down on emissions from transportation. One is to do less of it—less driving, flying, and shipping. We should encourage more alternative modes, like walking, biking, and carpooling, and it’s great that some cities are using smart urban plans to do just that.

Another way to cut down on emissions is to use fewer carbon-intensive materials in making cars to begin with—although that wouldn’t affect the fuel-based emissions we’ve covered in this chapter. As I mentioned in chapter 5, every car is made from materials like steel and plastics that can’t be manufactured without emitting greenhouse gases. The less of these materials we need in our cars, the lower their carbon footprint will be.

The third way to cut down on emissions is to use fuels more efficiently. This subject gets a lot of attention from lawmakers and the press, at least as it pertains to passenger cars and trucks; most major economies have fuel efficiency standards for those vehicles, and they’ve made a big difference by forcing car companies to fund the advanced engineering of more efficient engines.

But the standards don’t go far enough. For example, there are suggested emissions standards for international shipping and aviation, but they’re almost unenforceable. Which country’s jurisdiction would cover carbon emissions from a container ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?

Besides, although making and using more efficient vehicles are important steps in the right direction, they won’t get us to zero. Even if you’re burning less gasoline, you’re still burning gasoline.

That brings me to the fourth—and most effective—way we can move toward zero emissions from transportation: switching to electric vehicles and alternative fuels. As I’ve argued in this chapter, both options currently carry a Green Premium to one degree or another. Let’s look at ways to reduce it.

How to Lower the Green Premium

For passenger cars, the Green Premium is on the way down and will eventually shrink to zero. It is true that as higher-mileage cars and EVs replace today’s vehicles, the revenue from gas taxes will go down, which could reduce the funding that’s available for building and maintaining roads. States can replace the lost revenue by charging EV owners an extra fee when they renew their license plates—19 states are doing this as I write this chapter—though it means it’ll take a year or two longer for EVs to be as cheap as gas-fueled cars.

EVs are driving into another headwind too: America’s love for big, gas-guzzling trucks. In 2019, we bought more than 5 million cars and 12 million trucks and SUVs. All but 2 percent of these vehicles run on gasoline.

To turn things around, we’ll need some inventive government policies. We can speed up the transition by adopting policies that encourage people to buy EVs and creating a network of charging stations so they’re more practical to own. Nationwide commitments can help drive up the supply of cars and drive down their cost; China, India, and several countries in Europe have all announced goals to phase out fossil-fueled vehicles—mostly passenger cars—over the coming decades. California has committed to buying only electric buses by 2029 and to banning the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035.

Next, to run all these EVs we hope to have on the road, we’ll need a lot of clean electricity—one more reason why it’s so important to deploy renewable sources and pursue the breakthroughs in generation and storage that I mentioned in chapter 4.

We should also be exploring nuclear-powered container ships. The risks here are real (for example, you have to make sure the nuclear fuel doesn’t get released if the ship sinks), but many of the technical challenges have already been solved. After all, military submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power already.

Finally, we need a massive effort to explore all the ways we can make advanced biofuels and cheap electrofuels. Companies and researchers are exploring several different pathways—for example, new ways to make hydrogen using electricity, or using solar power, or using microbes that naturally produce hydrogen as a by-product. The more we explore, the more opportunities we’ll create for breakthroughs.

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It’s rare that you can boil the solution for such a complex subject down into a single sentence. But with transportation, the zero-carbon future is basically this: Use electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for the rest.

In the first group are passenger cars and trucks, light and medium trucks, and buses. In the second group are long-distance trucks, trains, airplanes, and container ships. As for cost, electric passenger cars will soon be no more expensive to own than gas-powered ones, which is great; but alternative fuels are still quite expensive, which isn’t great. We need innovation to bring those prices down.

This chapter has covered how we move people and goods around from place to place. Next we’ll talk about the places we’re headed to—our homes, offices, and schools—and what it takes to keep them livable in a warmer world.

Skip Notes

*1 Of course, for people who rely on their cars, gasoline is more of a necessity than the other things I’ve listed. If you’re watching your spending, you will feel the crunch of higher gas prices more than a rise in the cost of, say, olive oil, which you can always decide not to buy. But the point remains that among the things we consume on a regular basis, gasoline is relatively inexpensive.

*2 As a reminder, I’m counting only emissions from the fuel that various vehicles burn. The emissions from manufacturing them—making the steel and plastic, running the factories, and so on—are counted under “How we make things” and covered in chapter 5.

*3 Air speed is usually measured in knots, but most people (including me) don’t know how much a knot is. In any case, knots are pretty close to miles per hour.