Peak oil has come and gone, and we should be looking to trains, trams and buses.
Britomart, photo Adrian Malloch/HoS
For years the International Energy Agency (IEA) refused to discuss the concept of peak oil – the point at which the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached and after which it progressively declines. But recently it acknowledged that production of crude oil, the source of most petroleum, peaked in 2006.
The IEA projects that an increasing percentage of world petroleum production will come from tar sands and shale oils, but admits there are technical challenges to overcome. But Paul Mees, a transport planning specialist from Melbourne’s RMIT University, says the environmental consequences of developing these marginal resources could be disastrous.
Mees says more greenhouse gas emissions are involved in extracting the oil from tar sands and shale oils than are involved in burning it for fuel, “so if we shifted to that kind of fuel for our private transport, it would make the current problems of global warming look like a garden party in the afternoon”.
The automobile age is coming to an end, and to prepare for the future we need to invest in public transport infrastructure – that’s the message Mees, author of Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age, is bringing to a transport conference in Wellington this month. The Smart Transport for New Zealand conference, co-hosted by the Green and the Labour parties, aims to “bring together those who are working to promote diverse sustainable transport modes in New Zealand such as rail, bus, walking, cycling, rail freight, sea freight and coastal shipping”.
Speaking from Melbourne, Mees says, “The automobile age started in 1908 when Henry Ford invented assembly-line production that could produce affordable cars that could be owned by a large segment of the population.
“In my view, the automobile age is when the automobile is the dominant form of transport in countries that are economically developed enough for people to have reasonably high incomes. It has to come to an end because it’s simply not environmentally supportable.”
Transportation is the world’s second largest emitter of carbon dioxide, with most emissions coming from cars and light trucks. Reducing vehicle emissions will be a crucial part of our commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decade.
What’s more, petrol prices have been higher this year than they have ever been, and as oil gets scarce, driving a private car will become even less affordable.
Early hopes that alternative fuels would replace petroleum are increasingly unlikely to be realised. Mees says biofuels “are a good example of a situation where the cure might be worse than the disease” – as well as concern over the amount of CO2 emitted in the production of biofuels, they have already been accepted as being the main factor behind escalating global food prices.
So, does this mean the end of the private automobile? Not at all, says Mees. “‘Beyond the automobile age’ doesn’t mean that cars will disappear. But we need to move beyond a situation where the car is the overwhelmingly dominant form of transport.” Public transport is the answer, he says, and we already have all the technology we need – for the most part buses, trams and trains. The recent innovation in the public transport sector is the way individual modes of transport have been integrated into a complete travel system that will take you anywhere you want, any time you want.
“Essentially there’s only one model of successful public transport and it seems to work across a range of urban forms. What you effectively have is a kind of spider-web concept, where every individual component of the public transport system connects with the next component as effortlessly as one road connects with another when you’re driving a car.”
In Zurich, Mees’s pin-up city, only 19% of residents take cars to work and only 2% of all students, from primary age through to university, travel to school by car. Many people still own cars, but they use them in the weekends, or for holidays, rather than for the daily commute.
Mees plans to tell this month’s conference that there are working models of an integrated public transport system we can copy now. And he stresses that in Switzerland, and in every other place with a well-functioning integrated public transport system, it came about “through concerted political action rather than simply being something that had always been part of the culture”.
So, how are we doing in New Zealand? The Government is investing $1.6 billion in Auckland’s metro rail system and nearly $500 million in upgrading Wellington’s metro rail system, but there are no plans to implement a European-style integrated public transport system. The emphasis of the New Zealand Transport Agency is still on roads.
“New Zealand at the moment is like a museum of the very worst transport policy ideas of the 1950s, as if we’d learnt nothing at all in the last half a century,” says Mees. The NZ Transport Agency’s recently released policy statement outlines spending allocations for the next decade, and allocates an average, across a possible range, of $13.7 billion to new or improved state highways and only $372 million for public transport infrastructure. This emphasis on roading is at odds with the international trend towards a bias in favour of public transport.
“Policymakers from almost anywhere in Europe observing New Zealand at the moment would be scratching their heads and wondering what’s going on.”
IS IT ALL AN ILLUSION?
Getty Images
If you’re of an existential bent, you might sometimes wonder why we exist or why the universe exists. The July 28 issue of New Scientist, an existence special, takes things a step further. Perhaps we don’t exist. In an article by Marcus Chown, Fermilab’s Craig Hogan talks about his studies of gravitational waves and the “tentative evidence” he has found that the universe is a hologram. Theoretical physicists have long suspected that the universe is pixelated, or grainy, and the idea that the entire universe could be a hologram, projected from the edge of the universe, would help explain this.
If we’re not part of a hologram, writes Michael Brookes, we could be living in a computer simulation. As computer technology advances, he says, “the ‘original’ universe will eventually be populated by a near-infinite number of advanced, virtual civilisations”, some of which could develop autonomous conscious beings. How do we then know that our own reality is not a simulation run by entities from a more advanced civilisation? We don’t.
YOUR FAVOURITE MOLECULE
Which molecule has had the greatest impact on New Zealand society? As part of the 2011 International Year of Chemistry, the molecular anthology project has compiled a list of molecules or materials that have changed New Zealand society. Now it’s time to have your say. Some nominations, like keratin and casein, acknowledge our economic dependence on farming. Others are more fundamental, like carbon or caffeine. Some, such as cyanide, 1080 and methamphetamine, have negative associations. For me, it’s a toss up between theaflavin, created during the oxidation of tea leaves, and 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, the molecule “responsible for the herbaceous, grassy characteristics of a Marlborough-grown sauvignon blanc wine”. Cast your vote at molecularanthology.massey.ac.nz