Sustainability Series Part 1: Transport

Welcome to Part 1 of my Sustainability Series – a series of articles on sustainability (no, really).

In all seriousness, the struggle against unsustainable economics (and the politics which underpins it) is likely to become as important in our time as the 20th-century struggles against tyranny in all its guises – Nazism and Stalinism first and foremost. The stakes are, of course, quite different, yet just as high if not higher.

The 20th century saw some degree of liberty of conscience and action triumph over overt forms of oppression, and no-one should deny the fundamental role played by Western-led and inspired consumer capitalism in these achievements. Likewise, we should acknowledge that leftist beliefs in privileging the collective over the individual continue to this day to be tarnished by one of the great mass delusions of the past: that Soviet-style authoritarian communism was a viable and morally acceptable path to prosperity. The point, I think, is illustrated well by a disconcerting moment during my to-date only brush with one of the Australian incarnations of the global Occupy movement in Melbourne last month.

The few-hundred protesters marching through the streets were, to be fair, a pretty diverse bunch. No doubt there were advocates of new ways of rethinking prosperity in the context of greater equality, cooperation and ecological sustainability among them. The crowd seemed to be dominated, however, by old-school statist socialists. Here’s a selection of what I read on some banners and placards amidst the demonstrators (see photo above):

CAPITALISM EQUALS CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY!

LET THE RULING CLASSES TREMBLE; WE HAVE A WORLD TO WIN!

REVOLUTION IS THE SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE

Perhaps these guys haven’t ever had the chance to take a close look at the history of the last century. The collapse of the Soviet Union clearly had as much to do with the statist repression it came to embody as with the lure of the materialist consumption-based lifestyles of the West and its ethos of wealth accumulation.

More likely they’re just opposed to – quite understandably – the increasingly untenable excesses of globalised consumer capitalism but lack a clear, credible alternative for the 21st century.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the world is straining at its ecological limits. Global population is projected to stabilise at somewhere around 9 billion people by century’s end. With heavily populated nations such as India, China and Brazil developing at a breakneck pace, hundreds of millions of people are likely to join the ranks of the global middle class over the coming decades.

Unfortunately, the wealthy, consumption-based lifestyles to which many inhabitants of developing countries aspire are unsustainable. If even conservative scientific projections about anthropogenic global warming turn out to be accurate, it will rapidly become clear that even current levels of consumption – about 80% of which accrues to the richest 20% of humanity – have been utterly unsustainable. The swelling numbers attaining high-consumption lifestyles as the Asian economic powerhouses develop can only exacerbate the problem – accelerating the depletion of finite fossil fuels, the growth in climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions, and putting strains on global food supplies.

Catastrophe of a similar kind has only been averted in the past by sweeping technological advancement; the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century being the most notable example. Those technologies – centring primarily on mechanised agriculture and the development of new pesticides, synthetic fertilisers and grain species – nonetheless appear highly susceptible to depleted fossil fuel reserves and associated price spikes. If large-scale industrial agriculture is again going to put paid to Malthusian concerns about widespread famine as global population balloons, new techniques are going to have to be developed and implemented on an extremely rapid scale.

In any event, any objective appraisal of the situation inevitably leads to the conclusion that corporation-dominated global financial, economic and political systems – and notably the sectors most key to human survival such as agriculture and water – are ill-suited to the impending challenges. The contention that technological innovation within these global structures can overcome the converging threats of climate change, resource shortages and free-market capitalism’s evermore frequent systemic crises (which only serve to exacerbate already gaping inequalities) appears optimistic at best.

Defenders of the status quo – essentially the entire mainstream political and cultural establishment – like to point to the ‘false alarms’ of recent human history (civilisation collapse through nuclear war, Malthusian notions of global famine and so on) as justifying scepticism about the claimed implications about our current array of potential civilisational crises. The following, quoted from the Future Scenarios climate change and peak oil reflections blog, neatly summarised the implications of this tendency:

[T]here is a long tradition of millennialism in Judeo-Christian culture which periodically leads to predictions of the “end of the world as we know it” based on the idea that our current world is fundamentally flawed in some way. The simplicity and mostly incorrect nature of these past predictions suggest caution when considering current predictions of doom. The fable of the “boy who cried wolf” is sometimes cited to suggest current concerns are also false alarms. But this history also has the effect of inoculating society against considering the evidence. Exposure to a small dose of millennialism leads to resistance to the effects of larger doses. Ironically, the point of the fable is that the threat of the wolf is real but that no one takes any notice because of past false alarms.

What most mainstream analysis of the evolutionary trajectory of our global order lacks is an understanding of a simple insight: our era of rapid economic development and globalisation based on massive consumption of finite fossil fuels is, to the best of our scientific and anthropogenic knowledge, historically exceptional.

We are, when we step back and take a broad, nuanced view of history, very much venturing forth into the unknown if we maintain our current model of development. Merely observing humanity’s tendency to exaggerate past threats is a useful rhetorical tool for those opposing systemic change in our societies, yet offers little to debate about the sustainability of the current global economic and political order other than sounding a (necessary) note of caution against excessive hubris.

The sheer range and scale of the challenges awaiting us – indeed which are in many cases already upon us –, as well as the undeniable unprecedented nature of our historical era, make the issue of sustainability the new key variable in any political or economic debate. Fundamentally rethinking the way we live – in terms of food, water, clothes, shelter, work, transport and other sectors – is surely soon to become a basic necessity. Not only to avoid the potential future catastrophes so ill-suited to our current political order, but also to adapt to the inevitable shifts that will likely come to redefine the very assumptions underlying our current way of life.

An interesting practical manifestation of just how sustainability may work in the real world comes through the notion of community resilience. Put succinctly, resilience is a multi-faceted narrative aimed at fostering maximum self-reliance in national, regional and local communities. Rather than being mediated by mass markets with their attendant anti-democratic power structures and tendency to favour profitability over both sustainability and equitably fulfilling basic human needs and desires, individuals and communities would regain direct control over things such as organic food and basic services. An ethos of cooperation, rather than profit, could come to complement the forms of markets we really can’t avoid (consumer goods in particular) by restoring management of public services – from insurance to healthcare to finance.

Whatever the precise form the resilient, sustainable communities of tomorrow may ultimately take, it is widely acknowledged that a reinvigorated prioritisation of some form of political and economic localism will have to be a major part of the solution. This series will seek to map out some key ideas about just how the society of tomorrow – one which will be capable of resolving many of the intertwined issues of environmental degradation, inequality and social injustice, fossil fuel resource shortages, climate change and the democratic deficit at the heart of liberal-capitalist democracies. It will also attempt to look at some of the strategies we could implement – including a fundamental rethinking of our modes of governance and the assumptions on which our economic model is based – in order to realise this vision and perpetuate something akin to our unprecedented levels of current prosperity well into the future.

Areas on which policymakers will need to focus as a matter of urgency include transport, food and agriculture, consumption levels, planning and housing, governance, industry, and energy production and use.

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This article will kick things off with a look at transport.

Moving stuff around – people as well as goods – is central to all current economic activity in developed nations such as our own. Indeed, it is difficult to seriously envisage any form of dynamic, modern society without this distribution of human and physical capital.

At present, however, transport is not generally done in a sustainable way. The sector represents about a quarter of Australia’s primary energy consumption, and around 15% of our greenhouse gas emissions. Like our GHG portfolio in general, our per capita emissions from transport are well above both the world and OECD averages. Current trends are likewise not particularly encouraging. Growth in emissions from transport represent the majority of anticipated future emissions under a baseline, ‘business-as-usual’ policy scenario.

Transport is an integral component of a society’s economic life and therefore of a future resilient community. Personal mobility and the transport of goods will need to be maintained in ways that are far less carbon-intensive and far less reliant on largely imported fossil fuels. These two key considerations will from the basis for much of the analysis in this article.

Private transport

Australia, much like the United States, is very much a land of the automobile. The convenience of the personal mobility they afford us is key to modern lifestyles and economic activity. Cars have, however, a series of deleterious effects on society, including:

• being far less energy efficient and greenhouse gas emissions-intensive than mass transit;
• encouraging unnecessary trips (which could be accomplished using alternative transport modes) and undue reliance;
• the social, health and economic cost of accidents, particle pollution and congestion;
• facilitating unsustainable urban planning, benefiting low-density urban sprawl over vibrant medium- and high-density urban communities;
• creating a ‘personal bubble’ which reinforces the individualistic narcissism of modern consumer-capitalist society – something which must be overcome in order to foster reengagement in political and civic life (restoring people to engaged citizens rather than the passive consumers they are rapidly becoming).

The truth is that, as convenient as our cars may be, and as much as they may be an integral part of modern life in Australia, we would actually be collectively better off without them – or at least with far less reliance on them. Of course, the fact that the automotive industry is vast and sprawling raises the possibility of genuine economic disruption as society shifts towards other forms of transport, and also poses significant barriers to change in the form of political resistance.

Frustratingly, emissions from cars would appear to be one of the easier aspects of unsustainability in society to fix. Consider that the average modern car is responsible for only 5% of the total emissions of one manufactured in the 1960s. Although these advances are largely cancelled out by an explosion in the prevalence of private motor vehicles – over 12 million on Australian roads according to the ABS versus about 769 000 in 1950 –, it remains clear that the industry is capable of vastly reducing its ecological footprint given appropriate incentives to do so. Depressingly, however, the fact that we still allow outer-suburbanites to purchase petrol-guzzling 4x4s with no practical purpose within the urban environment in which they are driven is testament to the sheer inability of our current governance structures to adequately respond to the sustainability challenge.

For perspective, it is worth noting that even low-emissions vehicles built today are high in C0₂ output when extraction of resources, manufacturing, fuel and so on are taken into account. Even the forms of personal transport widely fêted as the solution for a sustainable future fall victim to this basic flaw – for instance, electric cars remain emissions-intensive (due to charging) while the electricity generation network has not been fully decarbonised, while the manufacture of hydrogen fuel cells is similarly energy intensive.

The solution, of course, is a balanced approach. The UK’s Stern Review has correctly identified inaction of reducing transport sector emissions and reliance on fossil fuels as a ‘false economy’, meaning that although it’s cheaper and easier in the immediate term, it will end up costing us big time.

There are some very simple measures which governments could be taking to increase the sustainability of private transport in Australia, focusing on reducing the energy intensiveness of our current fleet and overcoming reliance on private motor vehicles for personal mobility (particularly in urban areas). These include:

• congestion taxes. These are political hard-sell because they impact on our overly car-reliant lifestyle, riling conservatives, but they are being implemented in major cities across the world;
• a ‘bonus-malus’ system on new car purchases. This involves applying a bonus or a direct charge to all new vehicle purchased depending on carbon emissions – smaller, more efficient vehicles would in effect be subsidised by taxing emissions-intensive cars, utes and four-wheel-drives. Theoretically, the system could be budget neutral if managed carefully, while a range of dispensations and exemptions, for instance for people reliant on larger vehicles for work, could be contemplated;
• outright bans on high-emissions vehicles (the Hummer comes to mind, but there is no reason why anyone should need to drive a large four-wheel-drive living in the city);
• industry subsidies for low-emissions vehicles. It says a lot about Australia that local car manufacturers have continued to churn out large family cars with inefficient engines for many years (often with direct government support), only to see sales collapse and plants threatened with closure when petrol prices began to spike. Local car manufacturing is a good strategic asset, and governments should offer the industry adequate incentives to switch to fuel-efficient models and to invest in low-emissions R&D;
• mandated efficiency standards for new passenger and commercial vehicles sold in Australia (or a reinforcement of current standards where possible; including a phased-in start-up date);
• end tax breaks for company car fleets and other schemes which unduly encourage personal vehicle use;
• significantly ramp up investment in alternative modes of transport – including mass transit, car-sharing schemes and so on (more on this below).

Freight

For bulk freight, rail transport is up to 10 times less emissions intensive than road transport. Furthermore, privileging trains over trucks for hauling freight would result in reduced congestion, less road accidents, using less fuel for equivalent payloads, less damage to roads and associated repair costs, and improved aesthetics (particularly in dense urban environments in proximity to industrial areas).

Hidden subsidies and other misguided policy decisions have subtly tipped the balance in favour of road freight, resulting in increasing concern in many communities about the health, safety and social impacts of monster trucks such B-double behemoths in the Blue Mountains.

In monetary terms, road congestion costs the NSW economy almost five billion dollars a year, a figure which is projected to double by 2020 without a dramatic shift in policy.

Some what can be done to redress the balance? Here are some ideas:

• strategic investment, funding, planning and construction relating to rail infrastructure and services, based on the notion of a “hub-and-spokes” network (increasing efficiency – currently, the rise of road over rail freight owes largely to the inflexibility of the latter);
• obliging manufacturers and retailers to clearly label “carbon kilometres” on all products
• a progressive levy favouring locally or regionally produced goods;
• increasing capacity through improved signalling and traffic management;
• intermodal freight connections – these encourage long-distance freight to be shifted to rail, with road (heavy or light vehicles) restricted to shorter-range movements;
• increased federal investment in the publicly owned Australian Rail Track Corporation to improve rail freight infrastructure; and
• ending the subsidisation of B Double trucks, which has distorted road-rail competition.

Public transport

One of the key characteristics of living in NSW – and Australia generally, for the most part – is the derisory quality of public transport. Our cities and towns tend to be low density and sprawling, owing no doubt in small part to our material prosperity and wide open spaces. Needless to say, relying on cars for even short-range trips and work commutes is not a sustainable way to live. Dramatically improving Australia’s public transport infrastructure through targeted investment is the biggest single factor in weening ourselves off fossil fuel-guzzling, congestion-causing cars.

Currently, investment in road over public transport is ludicrously slanted in favour of the former. The disparity reaches a disturbing 5:1 at the federal level. Owing to a powerful automotive lobby, however, far too much money continues to be poured into building evermore freeways, highways and overpasses at the expense of clean, safe and sustainable public transit.

Sadly, much of this investment in roads is in vain. Adding capacity to the road network in order to ease congestion is often futile, as the enhanced infrastructure only serves to funnel more cars into already-congested bottlenecks. Motorways in suburban Sydney often resemble parking lots during peak hour.

Increasing road capacity without corresponding investment in public transport usually only exacerbates the problem in the medium to long term. Worse still, overspending on roads encourages greenfield land releases without adequate accompanying planning and investment in public transport.

This latter issue plugs into the unseemly influence of developers in state politics, no matter which major party is in office. Many of our stupendous urban planning failures in Sydney and elsewhere owe largely to developer lobbying. There is a urgent need for coordination and rigorous independence in our planning governance. Illustrating the scale of the problem, the Coalition and Labor in NSW have received well over $20 million from developers alone over the past 20 years. This is institutionalised corruption.

The funding imbalance outlined above is resulting in congestion, air pollution, massive carbon emissions, lost productivity, stress, and a host of other nasties.

So what to do from a policy point of view?

• Ramp up support for regional rail services (currently being neglected or even closed);
• increase infrastructure investment: straighten, maintain and expand rail lines;
• invest in comparatively cheap light rail in built-up urban areas, while encouraging centralisation in development and discouraging sprawl and associated reliance on private motor vehicles (more is needed than eternal feasibility studies!);
• revenue from carbon taxation or auctioning CO₂ pollution permits, plus taxation of fossil fuel profits are valuable avenues for raising the necessary revenue;
• plan and build an eastern-seaboard high speed rail network – Sydney to Melbourne is the world’s fourth-busiest air corridor, suggesting that if this fast rail network can’t be profitable, what can?
• encourage active transport for local journeys – this comes down to planning, infrastructure investment (dedicated cycle lanes, walking paths, etc.), bike rental schemes in CBDs and major suburban areas, etc.).

Put simply, there is a lot we can do as a society to make our economically crucial transport sector more sustainable. The benefits can be reaped in terms of health, economic productivity, visual and aural aesthetics and reduced pollution.

None of what I have suggested here is particularly ground-breaking stuff (I’m saving that for later in the series, I’m promise!) There is a significant part of the community which realises the importance to our future prosperity of the transition to a sustainable future, particularly in terms of transport. Public support for increased public transport investment is consistently very high. More and more people are becoming aware of the scope of the challenge, and what needs to be done.

As always, a variety of vested interests will stand in the way of bold policy aimed at the broader public good. Reform will have to reach far beyond the transport sector before any of the above vision can be realised. More on this in a future article in this Sustainability Series.

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