Degrees of Change: Transportation. December 13, 2019, Part 1

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🗓️ 13 December 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Transportation—whether it be your car, aircraft, cargo ships, or the heavy trucks carrying all those holiday packages—makes a big contribution to the world’s CO2 emissions. In the U.S., the transportation sector accounts for some 29% of the country’s emissions, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. And despite the Paris Agreement mission to decrease global emissions, demand for transportation around the world is on the rise—and with that increased demand comes increased energy use. Air travel is growing at a rate of 2-3% a year, for instance—a trend that could cause the emissions effects of air transport to almost double by 2050. But there are some initiatives and technologies that aim to alleviate the energy costs from this transportation glut. In this chapter of our Degrees of Change series, we’ll talk about transportation, and some of the technology and policy changes that could be made to make getting around more sustainable. Daniel Sperling, founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis joins Ira to talk about personal transportation in the U.S., and how individuals get around. We’ll talk with Steven Barrett, director of the Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about greener flying. And Rachel Muncrief, of the International Council on Clean Transportation, joins the conversation to talk about improving heavy vehicles like buses and cargo trucks. And, as the climate crisis deepens, the effects are increasingly ravaging developing nations, which had little or nothing to do with warming the planet. Now those nations are asking industrialized countries to help them deal with the damage—but major powers, like the United States, don’t want to pay up. Those tensions were playing out this week and last at the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid, and New York Times climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis joins Ira to catch us up on that international drama.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.
0:10.6	The climate is changing, and because we need to deal with it now, we open the next chapter of our series, Degrees of Change.
0:18.7	Our series explores the challenges of a changing climate and how we as a
0:22.4	planet and a people are adapting to the crisis. Coming up, a look at how the climate connects to
0:28.2	transit. But first, we're going to check in on the gatekeepers, the decision makers, the controllers
0:33.3	of the purse strings. Many of them were in Madrid at the UN Climate Change Conference
0:39.2	this week. And last, an ongoing conflict was playing out there between developing nations,
0:45.3	which are largely bearing the brunt of the climate crisis, and industrial powers like the
0:50.4	U.S., who are largely, well, they largely created the crisis, but don't want to pay to
0:55.5	help those developing nations deal with it. Kendra Pierre-Lewis has been following that news.
1:01.2	She's a reporter on the New York Times climate team and joins us here in our New York studios.
1:06.0	Welcome back, Kendra.
1:06.8	Thanks so much for having me, Ira.
1:08.2	Let's talk about this big theme of the Madrid meeting is climate justice. What does that mean? Right. So climate justice essentially says that a handful of nations really are disproportionately responsible for climate change. And that as we sort of deal with this climate issue, that those countries that created the problem have to also do things to
1:29.0	sort of equalize the harm that they've caused to other countries. And so whether that's
1:34.5	transitional technology, so helping them invest in renewable energy so that they can more quickly
1:39.6	modernize without increasing carbon emissions, or if they're slammed by a hurricane, providing some money
1:45.0	to help them recover from that storm.
1:47.9	But what happened at COP was a draft proposal was circulated, and I think Emily Akin had, he did, sort of, was the first one to report this,
1:55.4	in which the United States wanted to make sure that it was not going to be held responsible for other countries because of our
2:03.6	climate issues or climate emissions, and not only like not held responsible, but would continue
2:09.1	to not be held responsible even as we pull out of the Paris climate agreement.
	...

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