Taking cars off the road

In measuring the impact of various carbon reduction strategies, communicators often reach for expressing the scale of the effort by saying that it is "the equivalent of taking x cars off the road". Using statistics like this, that bring large measurements down into a humanly comprehensible scale, is generally a good thing when trying to communicate incomprehensible figures, such as tonnes of a gas not being emitted.

However, it does make me think: why don't we also actually take cars off the road? Road transport is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (far from the only or even the largest, but it is a significant sector, accounting for around 10-20% of all emissions, depending how you cut the cake). Of course, there are many strategies already aiming at reducing the carbon tyreprint: public transport, cycling lanes, user-pays road tolls, congestion charges, pedestrian-friendly new urbanism, public bicycle sharing systems, improving fuel efficiency standards, car share networks, car pooling websites, electric vehicles, improving intercity rail connections and more.

So, why then, is the "greenest government ever" announcing an end to the "war on motorists"? What does this mean? For a start, it means the removal of various restrictions on parking and other disincentives to driving, as well as a significant lift in the cap on the rate at which rail prices can rise. And it is not as though there was much a war to begin with, except perhaps for rising petrol prices due (amongst other things) to the apparent peaking of conventional oil production. As Jeremy point outs, "the best thing the government could do for motorists is promote buses and trains", since fewer cars means less traffic. As a recent billboard advertisement memorably put it: "You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic."

Driving cars (particularly in cities) seems to be another example of thinking "red", seeking short-term personal gain that leads to everyone losing.

Fortunately, in addition to the policy measures listed above, there is something even more effective we can do to ensure we're not stuck in traffic on a warming world. We can choose to drive less, to make fewer trips, to share journeys with others, to live closer to where we want to go (and to make the places we want to go closer to where we live), to renounce desires to go long distances on a whim, to joyfully embrace less.

Cash for cars: government funding for the auto-industry

Both the American and Australian governments are spending a lot of time at the moment talking about spending a lot of money to prop up struggling automobile industries. While I understand that there are tens of thousands of jobs at stake, the longer term future of the industry must also be considered. If the future of petrol is expensive (despite recent drops - don't expect oil to stay low for too long!), then the future of transport will not lie in ever increasing government support for increasingly unpopular gas-guzzlers. Perhaps some of that money could be better spent on developing public transport?

And here is a thought from the Australia Institute's Between the Lines, 13th November 2008:

Government assistance is not coming back into fashion—it never left. The Howard Government gave billions away to the childcare industry, the agriculture industry and the mining industry, to name a select few. The Bush administration was never serious about free markets and small government; it gave hundreds of billions away to its friends in agriculture, oil and defence.

Hopefully, what is coming back into fashion is the creation of a coherent set of criteria for awarding such assistance, along with some transparency about the likely benefits and some evidence on the actual outcomes. The car industry is now required to spend its money on making cars green; similar obligations must be placed on the electricity industry.

Review and restart

It has been a few weeks since the last post. And before that, posts were thin on the ground for some time. Where have I been? What have I been doing?

• Packing and preparing to leave our beloved home in Sydney;
• Travelling in India, visiting old friends and meeting some locals;
• Moving into Edinburgh, staying first with a friend of a friend and then moving into longer term accommodation;
• Conferencing in Rome, concerning which I might post a few thoughts in the coming days;
• Helping Jess start a new blog;
• Conferencing again, this time in Dunblane on a more intimate scale with my supervisor, two other academics (including his wife) and a few PhD students from Edinburgh and Oxford;
• Enrolling and being oriented at New College for my PhD studies in the School of Divinity at Edinburgh University;
• Adjusting to a new city, its geography, topography, demography and public transport; and
• Waiting for a reliable broadband connection to be set up.

Thus, I haven't had much space or opportunity to blog, and the little time I have been able to grab on the net has largely consisted of writing emails and Skyping. Hopefully, I will now have a little more space and things can get rolling once more. Enough of the excuses; time to re-start.

The good oil: oil and the common good

One point where the rubber of individualism really hits the road is transport. We love our cars. What an amazing ability we have: to select a destination that would take hours to arrive at on foot and get there in minutes! But this has become so normal that we think we have a right to get anywhere we want in a minimum of time and without reference to others. Perhaps that's why we get so angry at traffic. Or high petrol prices.

Yet rising petrol prices are good. Because rising prices are a signal telling us that, as a society, we are using petrol faster than we can produce it. If there's not quite enough to go around, then prices will rise until demand falls to the level of the available supply. Of course, rising prices might be telling us something else: that petrol companies are ripping us off, that there has been a brief disturbance in the global oil supply due to political instability or natural disaster, that the government is unfairly taxing a useful commodity, that speculators are pushing the price up in order to make a quick buck. But sustained global price rises (the cost of oil has doubled in the last year, quadrupled in the last six) tells us that whatever other short-term causes there might be, something very basic about supply and demand is probably going on behind it. And that is something worth pondering.

Oil is a finite resource. There is only so much of it beneath our feet and so far we haven't worked out how to make any more any time soon.* This means that at some stage, we will reach a point where we can't get what's left in the ground out any faster than we already are.** If not now, then within a handful of years, most geologists think that the world will hit that maximum possible oil production. And from there the only way is down. And that means more price rises.

At least, that's what companies like Ford, General Motors, Toyota, British Airways, American Airlines, Dow Chemical and United Airlines - all of whom whom rely heavily on oil - are assuming, based on their recent moves to start radically reshaping their activities. They don't expect prices to significantly drop in the medium to long term and so are working out how to adjust as a result.

But it's not just companies. There are all kinds of implications for governments and individuals too. The end of cheap oil will affect all of us and not only when we fill up. Readily available oil has been one of the basic assumptions upon which our modern society is built. But higher prices are a signal that it's time for a re-think of many things.

For a start, we'll need to re-examine the way we build our lives around the almost ubiquitous use of cars. And one thing that might mean is working out how to live more locally. Another might be a greater reliance on public transport (for instance, you might like to support this campaign).

For the last six months, Jessica and I have been blessed with a car on loan from a friend who has been overseas. He returns this weekend, which will force us to be more deliberate about our transport options again - a good thing! The habit of believing I ought to be able to go anywhere anytime is hard to shake. Cars can be a lovely luxury, but they are also one of the primary sacramental experiences of an individualist culture. In my car, I feel I am master of my own destiny, able to negotiate a path through life to where I wish to go. The only community consists of paying just enough attention to one other's movements such that we might avoid bumping into each other. Perhaps rubbing a few more shoulders on the bus will be good for our soul.
*I realise that it is possible to turn coal and natural gas into oil, but this process is currently very polluting and in any case both coal and gas are likewise finite, and so even massive investment in this technology would simply postpone the issue a little.
**I realise that I'm simplifying here too, but not - I hope - irresponsibly so.

One dollar jackpot

Here's the deal. Answer simple questions in twenty-five words or less and win a dollar. Not just any old Canadian, Kiwi, Singaporean or even Australian dollar, but a genuine, PayPal American greenback.

This new website is a simple idea, and word is spreading. No luck is involved. All you need is a keyboard, a (free) PayPal account and a brain (or, failing that, a team of a million monkeys at a million keyboards and a bit of time). The best entry (as chosen by the team at Brown Box) wins the dollar. The current competition asks you to complete the sentence "I wish that I..."

There's a new competition every couple of days. You can enter as many times as you like. Previous competitions have included such difficult questions as "How could Tom Cruise be more crazy?", "What's good advice?", "How to tell someone they have bad breath", or my personal favourite, "Write a story about public transport". I don't know how my entry didn't win: "Bus meets Train. Train meets Ferry. Bus is jealous of Ferry. Ferry is chronically late. Train dumps Ferry. Bus gets back together with Train."

You can read old competitions and see previous winners here, or find out more. I've already made the grand total of two dollars, and one of them was even won without promising to give the site a free plug on this blog.

Imagine...

Imagine a world in which public transport was almost free, in which it produced almost no carbon emissions or other environmental nasties, and in which it didn't rely heavily on oil and so was not substantially contributing to a society vulnerable to the dangers of peak oil. However, in this world, running a car still sets you back hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, still produces huge amounts of carbon dioxide and is still dependent upon cheap oil. The disparity between them is so great that one trip in a car costs about as much as using public transport regularly (multiple times a day) for a year. Furthermore, imagine that this idyllic public transport system was directly connected to every house and building in the city, so that using it was only ever metres away. Sounds nice?

Imagine your shock to find that in this world private car use continues to grow by 10% each year and that car manufacturers are making huge profits. How can this industry possibly be flourishing? Perhaps they have run scare campaigns spreading misinformation about the dangers of public transport (when in fact, it poses the same or fewer dangers than regular use of a private automobile). Perhaps they have successfully branded car use with a variety of attractive identities - healthy, natural, convenient - despite the actual facts about the situation.

I imagine you might be worried. Not only are your fellow citizens being duped out of their money and helping to unnecessarily destroy the environment, but if more and more people switch to their own (far more expensive, far more polluting, far more oil-dependent) car, the government will have less reason to maintain the excellent public transport system at its present standard. What of those who can't afford a car and rely on the public system?

Oh, and imagine that in this world, using public transport actually improved your teeth.

Now stop imagining, because in Sydney, this is world in which we live. Except rather than transport, I'm talking about drinking water.

Bottled water makes no sense. Tap water is just as safe (if not safer), comes in at about 1/2400th of the price, uses very little energy and produces very little pollution. Bottled water costs about as much for a bottle as you spend on drinking tap water for a year: one tonne of tap water costs about $1.20, while the same amount of bottled water costs around $3,000. Water is heavy (and thus energy-intensive) to transport (and refrigerate) in bottles, compared with Sydney's tap water, which is largely gravity-fed, or occasionally pumped, through an amazing pipe system that connects to almost every building in the city. The bottles themselves are energy-intensive to produce (being plastic, an oil-based synthetic product), and in Australia only about one third are recycled (with the exception of South Australia, whose enlightened policies manage to get a recycling rate around 70%), while the rest make their way into landfill, where they take hundreds or thousands of years to decompose. The production of a plastic bottle ironically uses about seven times more water than will ever be able to fit into it, and results in about one hundred times more carbon emissions than the production of a glass bottle.

And all this is entirely unnecessary, yet sales of bottled water continue their astonishing growth (180 billion litres sold last year and growing at 10% p.a.): a testimony to the victory of consumerism over common sense.

A friend of mine has done the logical thing and started a Facebook 'cause': Reject Plastic Drink Bottles.

Having been cynical about The Daily Telegraph in my previous post, I applaud them for running a story the SMH seems to have missed on this topic.

This site summarises the pros of tap water and the cons of bottled water, encouraging us to "think global, drink local".

In praise of... taxation

    Give to everyone what you owe: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.       - Romans 13.7

Thank God for taxes
Taxation: as inevitable as death, and usually about as welcome. Both major parties in Australia have promised large tax cuts at the start of their respective campaigns, and the electorate rejoices in its new-found wealth.

But before joining the celebration, spare a thought for the cost of these cuts. Taxation is a good thing. "Taxes are the price we pay for civilisation", according to US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The creation and enjoyment of wealth is not possible without stable society, which, in a world riddled with mistrust, requires effective government, and thus taxation. The government is not stealing "your" money; it is creating the conditions of possibility for an effective economic system at all. It makes no sense to speak of the money you would have had if the government did not levy taxes.

Ethicist Peter Singer considers a hypothetical corporation producing automobiles:

...the corporation could not make its cars without a legal system that fosters and protects mining rights, private ownership of land, an accepted currency, systems of transport, the production and sale of energy, the existence of an educated labour force, corporate oversight, the protection of patents and the prevention of monopolies, judicial resolution of disputes, national defence and the protection of trading routes. Even if it could make them, without security and at least a moderate degree of prosperity, few people would buy them. In other words, without taxes, and the system of regulation that could not exist without taxes, the corporation would not be able to pay [its employees] and if, somehow, [they] did get paid, the money would be of little value because [they] could not be secure in [their] ownership of anything [they] bought with it.

Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has estimated the proportion of income in wealthy countries that is the result of social capital - including technology and organisational and governmental skills - rather than individual effort. Given the enormous differences betrween average incomes in rich and poor countries that cannot be explained by differences in effort, he suggests that social capital is probably responsible for at least 90 percent of income in wealthy coutries like the United State.

- Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil, 16-17.

Of course, there is such a thing as intolerably high taxation, which ends up detracting from the common good. And of course, there are no guarantees of efficiency, especially when governments value re-election over public service. Nevertheless, taxes are fundamentally a blessing towards the common good, for which we ought to give thanks. Let us praise what is good.
Eight points for the country in the picture. Or twelve for the building, a national seat of government. But please don't guess both.