Carbon footprint (Part 8)

If we look closely, news items we watch on TV or read everyday actually offers a glimpse of what we have been discussing in the previous 7 articles. Yesterday, weather reports in Australia indicate that they might have a 41-degree-Celsius temperature this week. Some say it might not be significant because they had one 71 years ago. But within the same hour, another news channel showed a storm system in the Middle East which threw temperatures in Cairo and Tel Aviv to all time lows. It's both the extreme figures and the increasing frequencies that they occur, which is bothersome, or worse, ominous.

Jump to a news article over the weekend - “Car sale up 16%!” In another perspective, this would have been excellent news. But 16% more cars on the roads means approximately and relatively 16% carbon dioxide (++, meaning other GHGs) emissions into the atmosphere in this part of the world. Consider this. Our population growth rate has deflated to 2%; GDP rose by 6.6% last year. But a car sales jump of 16%? Knowing Filipinos, do you think the number of cars retired or sold as junk is also significant? Negligible would be a better word.

Enrique Peñalosa is always reiterating, in many of his lectures worldwide, that's it's not just the increase of trips that's the problem of congestion and mobility, but also that the trips are becoming longer. I had touched this issue in an article last year, making an example of trips to Compostela, north of Cebu, which, 30 years ago would have been visiting or special trips for some but which are now daily commuting trips to and from work, simply because of better roads and the fact that the land use changed and Compostela is now a residential suburb of Metro Cebu. Imagine the same transformation for Metro Manila. Simply staggering!

Oftentimes we neglect the significance of the word “propensity.” What explains the 16% growth? Well, one is that we're building new long, wide, and huge expressways in Metro Manila! We build humongous road infrastructure to solve traffic jams, but more people buy more cars to drive longer distances afterwards. We build more expressways extending father from the metropolis, generating more trips and increasing trip length which will get congested just the same in time. Go back to our discussion on carbon dioxide emissions. Remember, a traffic jam moving at 8 kilometers per hour emits roughly DOUBLE the amount of carbon dioxide than traffic travelling at 16 kph. You don't turn off your engines in a traffic jam!

Remember, they didn't have this problem a hundred years ago, nor in the thousands of years before that. Modern man invented this problem himself especially when he invented the single-passenger, owner-driver car. Why do you think they have car pool-lanes in California (which incidentally, is one state in the US serious about climate change)? The other bad invention (bad because of how we abuse it) is electricity, the use of it also continually going up. These two, and the fact that man continuous to tear down forests (natural carbon sinks) to give way to expanding food production, industrial production, and urban land use, are the three main causes of increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and climate change.

Propensity is a very strong behavior. We announce the construction of kilometers of new expressways and people will buy cars. It is every Filipino's dream to buy a car, and it doesn't help much knowing that most of our relatives living in the US owns cars, not just the family but almost every member thereof. Every new trip generated brings us closer to the devastating results of climate change. But it's a never-ending cycle - governments worldwide try to solve traffic jams by building road infrastructure, which shoots up car sales causing traffic jams down the road. As Peñalosa has it, “Solving traffic jams by building more roads is like curing obesity by buying larger clothes!” And he was not even referring to climate change. If we consider the additional tons of carbon dioxide every kilometer of new road emits, you will realize why we really need to be careful and serious about sustainable transportation.

It can be broken down to individual persons. The total additional CO2 emissions by man's activities, is the sum total of all emissions made by each, and that includes you and me. You may find that mundane, but remember that the whole is the sum of its parts. Governments build roads, but you and I make the decisions each day. The government may influence us but the final will to survive as a species belong to each and every one of us. Choose well!

(To be continued)