Moving Towards Transition

Commoning Mobility for a Low-Carbon Future

Peter Adey, Tim Cresswell, Jane Yeonjae Lee, Anna Nikolaeva, André Nóvoa, Cristina Temenos

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786998996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Pianificazione e sviluppo urbano

Drawing on an innovative project exploring current mobility transition policies and practices in 14 countries around the world, including key institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations, this book provides a critique of current transitions, mobility and transport policies. The authors consider how our mobility futures have been imagined, what they will potentially look and feel like, what lives we might live in them and what choices we might have to make to get there.

Chapter 1

Introduction

We write in times of dramatic change. In April 2020, amid an economic and mobility slowdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions declined by as much as 17 per cent. This is the equivalent of a return to 2006 levels. Fourteen years of increases eliminated in one month (Le Quéré et al. 2020). How did this happen? Essentially, governments around the world made it happen by banning, or severely limiting, all forms of travel that involve the use of fossil fuels. Energy continues to be produced, many factories are still producing goods but forms of travel from urban commuting to global aviation have been drastically reduced around the world. Before Covid-19 was recognized at the end of 2019, travel was responsible for about 23 per cent of global GHG emissions. Over 50 per cent of the dramatic reduction is attributable to reductions in surface transport (cars and trucks). In addition, air travel has been cut by as much as 90 per cent almost instantly. Travel by car in the UK went down to levels not seen since 1955 (Carrington 2020). Scientists, politicians, journalists and others are wondering if the Covid-19 crisis might lead to a permanent, crisis-induced transition to a lower-carbon future. Airlines are talking about a long-term reduction in business and the need to significantly downsize as passengers will be wary of travelling in such close quarters even after bans are lifted.

Covid-19 is a global crisis leading to millions of deaths worldwide. Governments have ostensibly responded to that direct threat by reducing the means for the virus spreading – the ways we move. From limiting daily walks to banning incoming passengers, governments have sought to flatten the curve in order to save lives. While the discourse of economic (neo)liberalism has certainly continued, it has largely been drowned out by the threat of societies unable to cope with significantly increased mortality. Alongside the dramatic reductions in GHG emissions largely caused by reductions in, and transformations of, mobilities, there have been significant economic downturns which have been deliberately engineered by governments. The UK’s GDP fell by 19.1 per cent in the three months to May 2020. Similar effects are being felt around the world. While the exact links between Covid-19, GHG emissions and economic growth are nuanced and varied, and indeed still emergent, the current crisis makes one thing clear. If a threat is perceived as big enough, governments have it within their grasp to think and act differently, in ways that can very quickly bring about at the very least a temporary transition in the ways we move or do not move. The question then emerges, why haven’t governments reacted in a similar way to the crisis of global heating – a crisis that is also causing millions of premature deaths as well as mass migration, poverty and homelessness on massive scales? And while the consequences of Covid-19 are stark, the long-term consequences of global heating caused by GHG emissions are many times worse.

We live in a time of human-induced global heating. The production of greenhouse gases by humans is the prime cause of contemporary climate change. These gases include water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. Since the advent of the industrial revolution the production of carbon dioxide has increased by 40 per cent such that the atmosphere now (2020) has around 415 parts per million (ppm), whereas in 1750 it would have been around 280 ppm. The research for this book started in 2013. In that year, carbon dioxide topped 400 ppm for the first time. It has increased by 15 ppm as we have been writing and researching. In that time, and for long before, human activity has resulted in the emission of carbon into the atmosphere. These emissions result from the combustion of carbon-based fuels such as coal, gas and oil which have been necessary for the production and maintenance of industry and economic growth, and have sustained our lifestyles and livelihoods, albeit in highly unequal ways across the globe (IPCC 2013). Industrial-scale combustion, as well as personal and domestic heating, has involved massive socio-material transformations. While these have raised our living standards, they have also meant unearthing hydrocarbon-rich materials from the ground, moving them about the planet and releasing into the air, the ground, waterways and our oceans ever more complex chemical materials and compounds. Some of the localized effects of these exhaustions are expressed on the body and the landscape around us. Air pollution is perhaps one of the most deadly of these. The semi-visible atmospheres of urban haze and smog belie their roles as semi-visible killers in the form of complex respiratory diseases and cancers. D. Asher Ghertner has recently discussed this in the terms of a so-called ‘Airpocalypse’ (2020).

We also live in, or around, the time of ‘peak oil’. That is to say that we have probably passed (or, optimistically, will soon pass) the point of peak oil production globally (Hubbert 1956). Nobody argues that the supply of oil is infinite. The only arguments are over when we will pass, or whether we have passed, the year in which the most oil is extracted. The most optimistic projections say that this point will occur around 2040. Many believe we have already passed that point. The actual point of maximum extraction is, of course, a product of both supply and demand. As oil that is easy to extract becomes depleted, more difficult forms of extraction occur, and these are more expensive, more polluting and create an even greater risk of environmental degradation. At some point the cost of extraction is greater than the value of the oil and extraction decreases. This process is subject to dramatic fluctuations in the short term. Again, as governments restricted global mobility in the wake of Covid-19, we saw in April 2020 the price of oil drop to below zero for the first time in history. In the long term, supply will be depleted and extraction will be too expensive. At this point humans have to look elsewhere for sources of energy. Thankfully, we already are. Global social movements have declared a ‘climate emergency’ and have demanded global political action. Unfortunately, like the response to the current Covid-19 crisis, despite the broad scientific consensus over what is happening and why, and largely positive citizen and public appetite for change, inconsistent and ineffective political leadership on the challenges has not galvanized global change nor fulfilled the potential of global action promised in the early climate action movements of the 1980s and 1990s.

Linking these observations on climate change and the decreasing economics of oil extraction is human mobility. As much as mobility is essential to the global distribution and exhaustion of the materialities of energy and resources to the atmosphere which is at the root of climate change, the mobility of people and things is one of the prime producers of greenhouse gases. It is estimated that the transportation sector is the second largest contributor to carbon emissions after the production of electricity and heat. Globally the transportation sector was responsible for 23 per cent of carbon emissions in 2010 (IEA 2012) – a figure that had grown by 45 per cent in the previous twenty years. Road transport accounts for 72 per cent of all transport-related carbon emissions, marine transport for 14 per cent and aviation for 11 per cent. Marine emissions are particularly polluting as large ships use minimally refined forms of fuel. Ninety per cent of the world’s trade travels by ship (George 2013). The aviation sector is the fastest growing of the three and the most carbon intensive. One return flight from London to New York generates roughly the same emissions as a European citizen does through heating their house for a whole year.¹ While the movement of people as drivers and passengers is a significant factor in carbon emissions, the movement of goods is even more significant and one we have the least control over as individuals. So too are the movements and logistics of military personnel, munitions and vehicles (Cowen 2014) which are rarely transparently measured or clearly publicized. On liquid fuel alone, the US military’s ‘carbon bootprint’ places the institution between Peru and Portugal in fuel purchasing, and on fuel alone is the forty-seventh largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and the largest institutional purchaser of hydrocarbons in the world. For Belcher et al. (2020) militaries are not only important for climate change in terms of simply vehicle emissions either but the vast mobilities of geo-ecological material flows of fuel, water, concrete and sand that they marshal within their extensive supply-chain systems and operations.

In addition to being a significant source of carbon emissions, the transportation sector is the most important consumer of oil. In 2012 around 63.7 per cent of the oil that was consumed was consumed in the transportation sector. In 1973 the figure was 45.4 per cent.² While other energy users are moving to more sustainable non-carbon-based energy sources, the transport sector is easily the most oil dependent. It will, therefore, be one of the most vulnerable to the post-peak oil world.

While these figures provide us one way with which to grapple with the scales of climate change, or the indebtedness of the problem to the energy use and emissions of various mobilities, they are also part of an aesthetic of climate change reporting that simplifies massive, complex global changes to flows and budgets, inputs and outputs to be reduced to beguilingly simple global figures. In this way they tend to reduce the issues to a calculative imagination, which can occlude the social and environmental implications of this way of organizing the world (such as Belcher et al. 2020 show). The effect can be to dematerialize the light and heavy, intensive and extensive infrastructures and systems that produce those worlds, while they also hide the very lives and their relations, practices and habits that have depended upon such a system of carbon-intensive mobility for their livelihoods and lifestyles.

Researchers critical of the putative ‘Anthropocene’ have been equally careful to understand the deformation of the world, its atmospheres and geologies, without separating those processes from the marginalized lives caught up in the violences, extractive practices and infrastructures (Cowen 2020; LaDuke and Cowen 2020) necessary to its production (Yusoff 2013, 2018). Baldwin and co-authors have recently suggested we think now of ‘Anthropocene mobilities’ as a way to reposition mobility as a ‘key reference for thinking with, through and against, the Anthropocene’ and, moreover, to centralize understandings of the dynamic nature of the earth, with ‘the inescapable reality that climate change stands to effect new patterns of migration and mobility (of flora, fauna, water, fire, etc.) globally’ (Baldwin, Fröhlich and Rothe 2019: 290) within the ontological assumptions we make about moving in the world – about mobilities.

Given the fact of anthropogenic global warming, the fact that we are entering a post-peak oil world, the contribution of mobility to the production of carbon emissions and the reliance of transport on oil, it is clear to us, as well as others, that there is going to have to be some kind of mobility transition. Such a transition to forms of mobility that produce less carbon emissions and use less oil is both desirable and inevitable. It is for these reasons that the central concept of this book then is the ‘mobility transition’. We mean by this the necessary and inevitable transformation from a world in which mobility is dominated by the use of fossil fuels, the production of greenhouse gases and the dominance of automobility to one in which mobility entails reduced or eliminated fossil fuel use and GHG emissions and is less dependent on the automobile. Such a transition is similar, but not identical, to the ‘sustainable mobility transition’ (Nykvist and Whitmarsh 2008) – that includes multiple economic, social and environmental factors of sustainability within it. While the transition outlined earlier is central to this book, it is equally clear that a number of other hoped-for and/or actual transitions are connected to this and that mobilities are transitioning in many ways across the globe, including ways that are not helpful in combatting climate change. There are, indeed, multiple mobility transitions.³

The need for a transition to low-carbon (or carbon neutral) mobilities is hardly surprising. Various efforts to enact such a transition come to us in our daily paper or newsfeed. Often such stories focus on technology. It is hard to read the paper or browse a news site these days without coming across a story about some technology or other that will help humanity move towards a future of lower-carbon emissions. Many of these technologies involve the ways we move and the ways we move the stuff of capitalism. Consider three stories from The Guardian. In 2017 The Guardian reported that the benefits of Elon Musk’s ‘hyperloop’ concept ‘really kick in . . . when you consider its environmental benefits’ citing a US Department of Transport study that estimated that the hyperloop ‘could be up to six times more energy efficient than air travel on short routes’ ( Harris 2017). The same newspaper reported on Norway’s leadership in electric car ownership, stating that ‘Norway is the undisputed world leader in electric cars, run almost exclusively off the nation’s copious hydropower resources. Nearly a third of new cars sold in the country this year will be a plug-in model – either fully electric or a hybrid – and experts expect that share to rise as much as 40 next year’ (Vaughan 2017). Finally, in 2016, The Guardian news site featured a story with the title, ‘Why aren’t ships using wind-power to cut their climate footprint?’. Noting the growing contribution of container ships to global carbon emissions as they move ‘90% of everything’ around the world, the report suggests that the problem could be eased by using ‘more efficient, low-carbon ships’ and possibly using advanced super-size kites in order to save 2–4 tonnes of fuel per day (Levitt 2016).

A focus on the transformative potential of technological shifts in the battle against climate change is not limited to newspaper stories. The promise of new or reconfigured transport technologies is also featured in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) update report, after which a Chinese official is reported to have said that ‘this is more about technology than about politics’ (quoted in Watts 2018). While the uncoupling of technology from politics is clearly naive, the commentary does not do justice to some of the other pathways to decarbonization that have made their way into the latest IPCC report. The panel allocated percentages to certain decarbonization pathways in the transport sector including 29 per cent from ‘efficiency improvement’, 36 per cent from the increased use of biofuels and 15 per cent from electrification. The share allocated to electrification is larger than previous estimates due, in the panel’s words, to ‘the recent growth of electric vehicle sales worldwide’ (IPCC 2018: Chapter Two, 65). There are clearly considerable hopes being pinned on the ability of transformations in technology to enact a transition to a decarbonized mobile future.

Novel technology can make for appealing, or even spectacular, stories and provides a seemingly painless pathway to a cleaner and greener future. By focusing on technological solutions to wicked problems such as global heating, a number of other key issues are ignored. The implication is often that by changing one technology for another we do not have to think about the structures that surround technology: the basic operation of capitalism, existing social hierarchies of class, race, gender, ability, etc., or even the general spatial structure we inhabit. Technosolutionism seems to absolve us of other worries. It lets us off the hook.

There are other routes to transition that sometimes grab our attention. Before the dramatic reductions in plane travel that came with Covid-19, the media was fascinated by responses to the environmental consequences of plane travel and the movement to reduce travel by air. So-called flight shaming (or flygskam in Swedish) identifies excess air travel and seeks to instil guilt in those who fly unnecessarily. The flight shaming movement emerged in Sweden and has become associated with the teenage activist Greta Thunberg who took to train travel and boats to spread her message, connecting global heating to species extinction, across Europe.⁴ The movement led to an increase in scheduled trains and a decrease in air passenger numbers in Sweden, as well as defensive announcements from the aviation and airline industries.⁵ Thunberg’s non-aerial journeys suggest a simplicity that mirrors the arguments for technosolutions. Perhaps all we need to do is change our behaviour. In 2019, Thunberg crossed the Atlantic by yacht in order to attend the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. The yacht was offered by a member of Monaco’s royal family. This is clearly not an option open for everyone. Yet relatively cynical and patronizing critics have labelled Thunberg’s activism as a kind of slow mobility privilege that the rich could only enjoy or have time for.⁶ This kind of critique tends to see slow or low-carbon mobility as a kind of regressive, even de-modernizing fantasy that activists or time-rich liberal intellectuals want to foist upon the rest of us.

Thunberg is certainly not the only advocate for saying no to air travel. Sociologist Roger Tyers, who researches carbon emissions in the aviation industry, recently travelled from the UK to China and back by train in order to carry out research. While the cost of his journey in money and time was large, he saved 90 per cent of the emissions he would have caused by flying (Tyers 2019). Changing behaviour is far from a simple solution to the production of GHG emissions. Just as a focus on technology elides the structures that surround them so, too, does a focus on behaviour. The beg...