1 Chapter 3 Patrick Moriarty and Damon Honnery The Global Environmental Crisis of Transport Introduction Road vehicular travel is now in its second century. From almost zero vehicles on the world’s roads in 1910, total vehicle numbers (those with four or more wheels) have grown to 1003 million in 2007, of which 823 million – including sports utility vehicles in the US – were passenger vehicles (Altschuler et al., 1984:2; Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC] 2010:81-90). By 2030, OPEC expects total vehicles to number over 1,700 million, including 1,370 million cars. US transport researchers Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon (2009:4) also foresee similar vehicle numbers in 2030. There is little doubt that such figures reflect the intentions of both the governments and citizens of the world, as discussed in Chapter 1. Populous countries like China and India, presently with very low car ownership, wish to move to high-mobility societies, based on high ownership levels of locally manufactured vehicles. Given that most of the world’s population still live in countries with under 25 cars per thousand population, compared with over 400 in OECD countries, there appears to be plenty of room for growth. At present, global vehicular travel is mainly constrained by incomes, and to a far lesser extent, by lack of road and parking space in some densely populated cities. In this chapter we first examine other possible constraints on future road travel, and select two, global oil depletion and global climate change from greenhouse gas emissions, as having crucial impacts on the prospects for future car travel. We then examine the various technical solutions proposed to overcome these constraints, namely improving the efficiency of transport vehicles and shifting to carbon neutral fuels, and find that they will only be of marginal help. Given the limited value of such technological fixes, we then argue that a low-transport future is needed, and sketch out how this might occur. Finally this chapter discusses what urban transport might look like in the decades to come. The global challenges facing road transport Although this section will largely focus on the severe problems that oil depletion and global climate change present to transport worldwide, it will also examine three other challenges, namely road vehicle traffic casualties, air pollution from road vehicles and the local environmental effects of oil extraction. Together, these are already widely acknowledged to be killing more than a million persons annually world-wide, with additional tens of millions either seriously injured or made ill, and with disruption of societies and environments. Unlike the oil depletion and global warming issues, there is no disagreement about the basic facts. We have simply become used to this annual sacrifice for the doubtful benefits of high mobility. Even more importantly, only a small share of these high costs are being borne by the wealthy OECD countries.