Welcome to Decarbonizing Transportation. Every two weeks, we go deep on one topic and present the latest decarbonization news at the bottom of the email.
NIMBYs vs NIMBYs
One reason our transportation system generates so much carbon dioxide is that modern cities force us to drive. The typical suburban landscape ensures that you climb into a car just to get a carton of milk.
One way to change that would be to allow for denser urban development, especially near public transit. Fewer miles driven, fewer emissions.
Sounds simple. But building at high density in existing neighborhoods is - to put it mildly - politically fraught. The “Not In My Backyard” attitude is so pervasive that it's got its own acronym: NIMBY. NIMBYism is a powerful political force in most American cities, and it’s one reason that climate action plans often shy away from strategies like denser urban development. It just seems politically intractable.
As an alternative, many climate plans turn to electrification. Electrifying vehicles and plugging them into a grid powered by solar, wind, and other zero carbon energy sources seems ‘easier’ than forcing a big change in urban development. It’s a way to decarbonize transportation without fundamentally altering lifestyles. Americans (or others) can drive just as much as they do now, but rely on electricity derived from renewable sources. And, critically, it avoids wrestling with the NIMBY problem.
Or does it?
In practice, electrification strategies don’t avoid NIMBYism, they just take on a new type of NIMBY. To understand why, you need to know one fundamental fact about renewable power: it takes up a lot of space. Per unit of electric power produced, solar panels and wind farms consume a lot more land than equivalent fossil fuel sources do. (There’s a good primer on some of this here).
You might think that’s not really a problem. The US has a lot of land. But as we start to build out the huge amount of renewable power we’re going to need, the space consumed by solar and wind facilities starts to get significant. To get a sense of the scale, have a look at the map below from a recent Princeton study. It shows the footprint of solar and wind facilities required for a net zero United States in 2050. Remember, we don’t need to just replace the electric power we use today, we need to expand it dramatically to provide new electric power for vehicles, home heating, etc. That’s a lot of power, and producing it takes up a lot of space.
The current footprint of solar and wind facilities is tiny by comparison (see the 2020 map below). And yet, NIMBY opposition to renewable power projects is already here. Even way back in 2010, opposition from ostensible liberals stopped the Cape Wind project off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. And just this month, a wealthy community on Long Island is opposing a new offshore wind farm.
Petty as it may seem given the stakes involved, this opposition is real. And it will make it hard to generate the carbon free power we need. Decarbonizing urban transportation through electrification and renewable power doesn’t avoid NIMBYism - it just shifts the location of the debate.
So what should we do? Well, we should still electrify every vehicle on the road and build as much renewable power as quickly as we can. But we should be careful about thinking that electrification gives us an ‘easy’ route to decarbonization.
We should be working to overcome opposition to sensible urban development and renewable electric power, but we shouldn’t expect to run the table in either place. We’ll win some battles, we’ll lose some.
But we probably need to get organized. NIMBYism has already spawned a movement to oppose it - “Yes In My Back Yard.” The YIMBY movement has been primarily focused on affordable housing, and has been most active in the San Francisco Bay area. Do we need a YIMBY-renewables group to show up to development meetings about offshore wind projects in Long Island? YIMBYs of the world, unite.
New & Worth a Read
A tale of two sectors: electric power is decarbonizing a lot faster than transportation.
Great deep dive on the manufacturing and supply chain of micromobility.
An update to MIT’s interactive tool on EVs costs and emissions - over their lifetime, they can be both cleaner and cheaper than a typical gasoline car.
GM ‘startup’ BrightDrop to make a new electric truck for FedEx and other delivery services. Worth watching the promo video.
Preliminary data for 2020 US emissions shows a decline, led by a steep drop in transport emissions. Globally, carbon emissions fell across all sectors except for one – SUVs.
The Environmental Defense Fund calls for 100% clean trucks in the US by 2040.
I got a chance to talk to Devin Leonard as he profiled Revel’s attempts to scale e-moped travel in NYC.
The Senate is considering $10B for highway removal.
The Zero Emission Transportation Association, a lobbying group calling for 100% zero emission vehicles sales in the US by 2030 that we profiled in an earlier newsletter, released their policy platform.
A-ha! Swedish pop group were EV pioneers.
Ridehail - increases vehicle miles traveled, but also offers a pathway to electrification?
The EV SPAC boom continues. This week, a high profile one: Proterra, the dominant electric bus manufacturer in North America, is going public through a SPAC. Take a look at the presentation deck.
Enjoyed this interview with Bryony Worthington, one of the architects of the UK’s Climate Change Act. We profiled the UK’s climate policy in our last issue.
Massachusetts releases a roadmap to zero emissions by 2050.