When ‘Green’ Travel isn’t ‘Green’. By Greg Pollowitz
Planet Gore/NRO, Monday, June 08, 2009
Here's a great article via Breitbart on the difficulty of determining what the "greenest" form of travel actually is. Worth reading in its entirety, but here's an excerpt:
So you always prefer to take the train or the bus rather than a plane, and avoid using a car whenever you can, faithful to the belief that this inflicts less harm to the planet.
Well, there could be a nasty surprise in store for you, for taking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study.
Its authors point out an array of factors that are often unknown to the public.
These are hidden or displaced emissions that ramp up the simple "tailpipe" tally, which is based on how much carbon is spewed out by the fossil fuels used to make a trip.
Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at the University of California at Davis say that when these costs are included, a more complex and challenging picture emerges.
In some circumstances, for instance, it could be more eco-friendly to drive into a city — even in an SUV, the bete noire of green groups — rather than take a suburban train. It depends on seat occupancy and the underlying carbon cost of the mode of transport.
"We are encouraging people to look at not the average ranking of modes, because there is a different basket of configurations that determine the outcome," Chester told AFP in a phone interview.
"There's no overall solution that's the same all the time."
http://repositories.cdlib.org/its/future_urban_transport/vwp-2009-2/
ReplyDeleteLife-cycle Energy and Emissions Inventories for Motorcycles, Diesel Automobiles, School Buses, Electric Buses, Chicago Rail, and New York City Rail. By Mikhail Chester, UC Berkeley Center for Future Urban Transport, and Arpad Horvath, UC Berkeley Center for Future Urban Transport
This working paper supplements the results from Chester (2008) available at http://repositories.cdlib.org/its/ds/UCB-ITS-DS-2008-1/. In addition, these results follow Chester (2009), a publication by these authors titled "Environmental Assessment of Passenger Transportation Should Include Infrastructure and Supply Chains" in Environmental Research Letters. Additional project information is available at http://www.sustainable-transportation.com/.
ABSTRACT:
The development of life-cycle energy and emissions factors for passenger transportation modes is critical for understanding the total environmental costs of travel. Previous life-cycle studies have focused on the automobile given its dominating share of passenger travel and have included only few life-cycle components, typically related to the vehicle (i.e., manufacturing, maintenance, end-of-life) or fuel (i.e., extraction, refining, transport). Chester (2009) provides the first comprehensive environmental life-cycle assessment of not only vehicle and fuel components but also infrastructure components for automobiles, buses, commuter rail systems, and aircraft. Many processes were included for vehicles (manufacturing, active operation, inactive operation, maintenance, insurance), infrastructure (construction, operation, maintenance, parking, insurance), and fuels (production, distribution). The vehicles inventoried were sedans, pickups, SUVs, urban diesel buses, light rail (San Francisco’s Muni Metro and Boston’s Green Line, both electric), heavy rail (San Francisco Bay Area’s BART and Caltrain), and aircraft (small, medium, and large-sized planes are disaggregated). Given the methodological framework in Chester (2009), the question of applicability of these systems to other U.S. modes, and the data availability of other modes, is extended in this study to motorcycles, light duty diesel vehicles, school buses, electric buses, Chicago commuter rail modes, and New York City commuter rail modes.
SUGGESTED CITATION:
Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath, "Life-cycle Energy and Emissions Inventories for Motorcycles, Diesel Automobiles, School Buses, Electric Buses, Chicago Rail, and New York City Rail" (May 1, 2009). UC Berkeley Center for Future Urban Transport: A Volvo Center of Excellence. Paper vwp-2009-2.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/its/future_urban_transport/vwp-2009-2