Despite Push For Cleaner Cars, Climate Benefits To Be Undone By Quantities
The delegates to the United Nations climate conference in Le Bourget, France, confront a sobering fact: The number of automobiles on the world’s roads is on pace to double — to more than two billion — by the year 2030. And more likely than not, most of those cars will be burning carbon-emitting gasoline or diesel fuels.
That’s because much of the expansion will be propelled by the rise of the consumer class in industrializing parts of the globe, especially in China and India, as hundreds of millions of new drivers discover the glory of the open road. Those populous and geographically sprawling countries might be hard pressed any time soon to assemble the ubiquitous electricity grid required for recharging electric vehicles; and much of the electricity China and India will produce in coming decades will come from coal-fired power plants that are some of the planet’s biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.
Given the limitations of electric cars so far — including their limited range between charges — many experts predict that most of the billion additional cars predicted to be on the road in 2030 will have internal combustion engines that spew greenhouse gases.
The United Nations conference will not deal directly with cars or with what countries should do about them or other major sources of carbon emissions, like factories and power plants. Rather, the conference is meant to get countries to commit to reducing their carbon footprints, leaving the details about how to achieve their goals to each individual nation.
But virtually everyone who studies the issue understands that transportation, which is still 95 percent reliant on petroleum, is the world’s fastest-growing energy-based contributor to greenhouse gases. About three-quarters of the total comes from motor vehicles.
Few disagree that the best solutions include the adoption of electric vehicles and, especially in cities, making it easier for people to forgo cars by using public transportation or riding bicycles.
But optimists argue that even in the case of cars with internal-combustion engines, carbon dioxide emissions can be cut significantly by measures like increasing fuel economy and introducing smart-driving technologies to make cars move about with greater efficiency.
Lewis M. Fulton, a researcher at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, cites "carbon intensity" — the amount of carbon dioxide produced for each mile traveled — as an area where advances can be made. By 2030, he said, it should be possible to cut the carbon intensity of new cars powered by fossil fuel by 50 percent from 2005 levels. Already, he said, there has been about a 20 percent improvement.
The countries with the most cars today have set aggressive goals for improving fuel mileage. The United States, under President Obama’s fleetwide standards for carmakers, is aiming for an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, up from about 30 m.p.g. now. China is aiming for 50.1 miles per gallon, and the European Union 60.6.
Still, the math is daunting. If the number of cars doubles, and the average mileage improves by only 50 percent, all of the fuel-economy gains would be offset by the emissions from the new vehicles.