19 February 2008The Independent
For those of us trying to live a greener, more carbon-conscious life, the first two commandments should perhaps be these: "Thou Shalt not Own a Car" and "Thou Shalt not Fly Away on Vacation."
If you look at how the typical person in the developed world generates climate-changing carbon emissions, the No. 1 culprit for many if not most of us is personal transportation.
The emissions generated by car travel - commuting, grocery shopping, driving children to school - dwarf the emissions created in heating or lighting your home. And the emissions generated when you fly far away smother all your good green intentions.
"Personal travel is generally dominant over items like electricity use," said Christian Brand of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University. "Car travel is very much the dominant factor. Air travel can be big, too. They count for 90 percent of personal travel emissions."
In Britain, emissions from personal transport account for nearly 20 percent of the country's total, and that figure is much higher if international transport is included in the figure, according to government studies.
And while industrial emissions overall are decreasing, personal emissions are rising.
When Brand and his colleagues were commissioned by Tesco, the British supermarket chain, to analyze employees' carbon emissions over a year, they found that car and air transportation contributed the largest portion - more than 75 percent - of personal emissions for many people, particularly those younger than 30.
All over the developed world, people are turning down the thermostats in winter to reduce heating emissions. They are changing conventional light bulbs to low-energy fluorescents. They recycle cans, bottles and newspapers as never before. But few have been willing to give up the car or the chance for an exotic summer vacation.
A survey released this year by Defra, the British environment agency, found that 80 percent of people were concerned about climate change, and three quarters would be prepared to change their behavior "in some way" to limit climate change.
But not in the ways that count most: Only 5 percent of car drivers said that they had driven less because of environmental concerns. Only 10 percent of people who had flown in the past year said that they would fly less this year because of climate-change concerns.
Unfortunately studies have shown that car ownership tends to be one of those one-way doors: Once you have one, there is no going back.
And once you have one, you want a bigger, better one, the next time around. With cars, bigger tends to mean more polluting.
Studies also show that when you have a car you tend to use it. Car use goes up fairly linearly with the number of cars a family owns; households with two cars or more produced twice as many emissions as households with one. With a car sitting outside the front door, it is hard to make your teenager take a bus to school or to ride a bike to the nearby market.
Of course, part of the resistance is practical. Many people have evolved lives in which cars are an essential ingredient. They live in suburban or rural places with little or no public transport. They work far away. Their children go to school in another town.
Buying a hybrid is presented as the more eco-conscious option. But the real green option is: Do not buy it. Think: Can I structure a life that does not require car ownership, like renting my next apartment in a place with good public transportation?
This is easy for me to say. I like cities. I like walking. For me, the financial cost of car ownership involves significant trade-offs. I have owned a personal car for only brief periods of my adult life.
For me, it is far more difficult to resist the lure of travel, especially in an era when discount airlines abound. Personal emissions from air travel increased by 85 percent from 1990 to 2002, a recent report found, and that was before the big boom in discount air travel.
This week, I will fly four hours with my family of four to a winter beach holiday. I do not commute by car. I use long-life bulbs. But according to Brand's calculations, our flights will generate the same emissions as driving to work for a year.
In his study for Tesco, travel accounted for 60 percent of personal carbon budgets, with heating and electricity each accounting for about 20 percent. As a rule, higher -income households generated more transport-related emissions.
Some solutions will take time. New housing developments must be built with public transportation. But in the meantime: Take a holiday closer to home, by train, if possible. See if you can work from home part of the week. For your next car, buy a vehicle with lower emissions, even if it is not as "peppy." For short trips ride a bike - it is better for health anyway.
