“Carden of Eden” at Flora Grubb Gardens, San Francisco. All photos by Sven Eberlein
With the upcoming 21st UN Climate Summit in Paris (COP21) this December promising to be a multi-lane highway towards a low carbon society, it begs the question how this lofty aspiration squares with a 1.2 billion fleet of automobiles worldwide, projected to grow to 2 billion by 2035 and double to 2.5 billion in 2050.
While the number of cars and trucks in the United States has plateaued at a chunky 253 million (that's 4000 pounds of steel, iron, rubber, plastics and aluminum for almost every man, woman, and child), global automobile sales are poised to soar to 127 millioneach year by 2035. If ownership in China catches up with the U.S. rate, there will be over a billion vehicles in that country alone.
Take a seat in the ecomobile for a moment to let those numbers sink in.
No matter how hard I try, the math just doesn't add up.
Consider: Science suggests that in order to stay within 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming and have at least some kind of a stable climate, global greenhouse gas emissions will need to be at least 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. For that to happen, industrialized countries such as the U.S. would need to cut emissions more than 90 percent. Yet at the same time, the average fleet fuel efficiency needs to double just to keep carbon emissions levels of the projected 2.5-billion vehicle "global car parc" the same as today.
Seeing that cars are one of the largest net contributors to climate change pollution, it would seem that adding over 100 million of them each year is a bad recipe for greenhouse gas reductions. They would almost have to run on air for that equation to work, and that's not even counting all the fossil fuels it takes just to make such heavy machinery available for our temporary enjoyment.
Perhaps this is a good time to re-envision the car of the future.
Please follow me across the orange axle for a thorough look under the hood of automobility, and stay tuned for Parts 2 & 3, which will delve much deeper into the history and economics of car dependence and show creative solutions to the global gridlock.