Science Friday - Degrees of Change: Transportation. December 13, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

Transportation—whether it be your car, aircraft, cargo ships, or the heavy trucks carrying all those holiday packages—makes a big contribution to the world’s CO2 emissions. In the U.S., the transportation sector accounts for some 29% of the country’s emissions, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. And despite the Paris Agreement mission to decrease global emissions, demand for transportation around the world is on the rise—and with that increased demand comes increased energy use. Air travel is growing at a rate of 2-3% a year, for instance—a trend that could cause the emissions effects of air transport to almost double by 2050.  But there are some initiatives and technologies that aim to alleviate the energy costs from this transportation glut.  In this chapter of our Degrees of Change series, we’ll talk about transportation, and some of the technology and policy changes that could be made to make getting around more sustainable. Daniel Sperling, founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis joins Ira to talk about personal transportation in the U.S., and how individuals get around. We’ll talk with Steven Barrett, director of the Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about greener flying. And Rachel Muncrief, of the International Council on Clean Transportation, joins the conversation to talk about improving heavy vehicles like buses and cargo trucks. And, as the climate crisis deepens, the effects are increasingly ravaging developing nations, which had little or nothing to do with warming the planet. Now those nations are asking industrialized countries to help them deal with the damage—but major powers, like the United States, don’t want to pay up.  Those tensions were playing out this week and last at the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid, and New York Times climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis joins Ira to catch us up on that international drama.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The climate is changing, and because we need to deal with it now, we open the next chapter of our series, Degrees of Change. Our series explores the challenges of a changing climate, and how we as a planet and a people are adapting to the crisis. Coming up, a look at how the climate connects to transit. But first, we're going to check in on the gatekeepers, the decision makers, the controllers of the purse strings. Many of them were in Madrid at the UN Climate Change Conference this week. And last, and an ongoing conflict was playing out there between developing nations, which are largely bearing the brunt of the climate crisis,

and industrial powers like the U.S., who are largely, well, they largely created the crisis, but don't want to pay to help those developing nations deal with it. Kendra Pierre-Louis has been following that news. She's a reporter on the New York Times climate team and joins us here in the United States. in our New York studios. Welcome back, Kendra. Thanks so much for having me, Ira. Let's talk about this big theme of the Madrid meeting

is climate justice. What does that mean? Right. So climate justice essentially says that a handful of nations really are disproportionately responsible for climate change and that as we sort of deal with this climate issue, that those countries that created the problem have to also do things to sort of equalize the harm

that they've caused to other countries. And so whether that's transitional technology, so helping them invest in renewable energy so that they can more quickly modernize without increasing carbon emissions, or if they're slammed by a hurricane, providing some money to help them recover from that storm. But what happened at COP was a draft proposal was circulated, and I think Emily Ackin had heated sort of was the first one to report this, and which the United States wanted to make sure that it was not going to be held responsible for other countries. because of our climate issues or climate emissions, and not only like not held responsible, but would continue to not be held responsible even as we pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Wow. I mean, was that a surprising thing?

Who's surprised by that? I guess it's somewhat surprising. It comes out of this earlier study that came out of the Paris Climate Agreement which said that they would sort of study how that blame kind of gets distributed. And in that it said that, even as we study how like who's responsible and who bears the brunt, we're not going to hold countries liable.

And so it is kind of surprising because it's sort of like doubling down on making sure that they're not going to be held liable based on the contents of that study. And so there was a huge protest, I think on Thursday I want to say, and like 100 people from people from developing nations and indigenous people and youth climate activists. And some people got kicked out of the facility. And some people said this is part of the growing trend of like the corporatization and the big, nation sort of pushing their weight around and not really dealing with the fact that the people who are so many people are being harmed who didn't create this problem. Do they have any rationale for saying we're not going to help? So the document that was circulating is kind of leaked.

And so I don't think anyone really, so like there has been an ongoing conversation with the United States government as to like the underlying rationale. It's been linked to two separate sources. Emily got one and I think BuzzFeed got one. So like we don't really know why they're doing it. We just know that they have been circulating this draft proposal. But what do the developed nations in general say when you ask them to pay? And what's their rationale for not?

The developed nations? Yeah, I mean, if we're asking. They're saying it's costly. It costs money. Yeah. I mean, if you can avoid paying, if I hit your car with my car and I can avoid getting a ding in my insurance or I can avoid fixing your car, I mean. It's just good business. It's good for business.

You know, a lot of people would avoid that money. So I think a lot of it is that it's really costly. And also, you know, depending on the impact, you know, we're talking billions or trillions of dollars. So is it only money we're talking about it or is there other kinds of assistance? Could there be food or shelter or something else? Yeah, but all of those are also somewhat, those have monetary value. And there's, in earlier cops, there was a lot of conversations around transfer of technology. So like cleaner coal-powered plants or cleaner solar panels and helping developing countries sort of invest in those things and sort of jump over.

And that's been, to varying degrees successful. Like a lot of the developing countries are still heavily investing in coal. And so that energy transition hasn't fully happened either. Is there some way out of this impasse that we're talking about? I feel like that's a question for someone in a much higher pay grade. But the thing that I guess is still kind of hopeful is remembering that a lot of these tensions and these conversations that are happening are not technical conversations. So we have the technical capacity to reduce carbon emissions. We have the technical capacity to live within sort of our carbon budget.

Those are all real. The question is how we get there. And that is where a lot of this tension is happening. Yeah. And so that meeting is over or is finishing up? It's finishing up. I think it technically ends tomorrow, I want to say. Do they come out with some statement when it's over and try to make good with everybody who's there?

Yes. Yeah. All right. Let's go on to your second story. And it's an interesting one also. It's similarly who pays and who there's a fraud. It's always about the money. Right.

Following the money. Let's talk about Exxon Mobile and a civil case charging the oil company with fraud. Tell us about that. Remind this about it. So New York State basically said that Exxon was double booking, that they were keeping one set of books that they were presenting, that in regards to climate change that they were presenting to the public and they were keeping an internal set of books that kind of completely disregarded climate change that they were keeping internally. a judge today or a judge on Tuesday basically said that like the case was not correct. It wasn't fraud. And that, so it was essentially thrown out.

But in New York was asking, I think, for $1.6 billion in restitution. And it's kind of one of the more recent kind of really big cases that have had a conclusion. But the judge in the case was pretty clear to say that like it only applies to fraud. It doesn't absolve ExxonMobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change. are still a number of climate cases that are making way through courts in the United States and overseas. If I read it correctly, the judge said this is not an environmental case. It's a case about the law.

Yeah. And security, yeah, and security fraud, essentially. And he was essentially saying it doesn't qualify under that, but that they're like, he was not making any bold claims broadly, just this specific case. And the case, the case about fraud was that ExxonMobil didn't tell its shareholders, right, about the impact of climate change on its stock. and the judge basically said, you didn't bring me any shareholders

who've been my, whose ox has been gore here, right? But how can you prove that? You can't prove that yet, right? So that's a reason. And so a lot, that's one of the conversations that happens a lot within the energy sectors. They're essentially calling it kind of like

and the divestment push is they're calling it kind of like the oil cliff, which is everyone's holding these oil stocks and we're still using oil and gas and they're still producing. But if we at one point, stop using so much oil and gas, someone is going to be left holding those shares, and the question is who's going to be left holding those shares? And meanwhile, the price of gas is plummeting down.

Let's move. That's another topic. Let's move on to another story. This one is a really interesting story about the Arctic melting this week, right? It was the annual Arctic report card. It comes out, it's the 14th actual Arctic report card. It comes out roughly this time every year. And basically what they found was it was, I believe, the second lowest for summer sea ice extent.

So that's like, they look at it at the end of summer because that's sort of the lowest level of CIS extent you'll get. And then they often will also look at it in the spring, the beginning of spring, because it's had all winter to grow. And for that it was the seventh. But basically, like, the big takeaway is that the Arctic gets still really bad. It's sort of the last six years have been the lowest levels for CIS extent. So, like, I think it tied three way for the summer CIS extent to tie three ways with, yeah, it tied three ways in the past six years. So, like, it's still really bad. other kind of discont, there were two kind of really big things that came out of it. The first was it was the

first one Arctic report card that sort of explicitly talked about the indigenous people who live in the Arctic independent sea ice for their livelihood. And it included an entire chapter from them about how it's affecting their life from transportation to the fact that a lot of their homes are built on permafrost that's now thawing. Right. And the roads are buckling, their houses are collapsing. So there's that element. They've had to move. Yeah. They've had to move. And also the other kind of issue with the permafrost is like, I joke that like what happens to the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. And so permafrost, which is essentially soil that has been frozen solid for at least two years, but in many cases has been frozen solid for hundreds of thousands of years for a really long time.

As it thaws, it releases methane and it releases greenhouse gas emissions. And so what people are afraid of happening is that there's a point in which it starts thawing, it releases so much emissions that it kind of creates a feedback cycle. You have a tipping point. A tipping point where it thaw so much that it continues. it reinforces additional thawing and additional climate change, additional climate warming. And there's some evidence that we may have hit that point in Alaska. We weren't supposed to hit that for a while.

Yeah. So it's not definitive. I want to be really clear. It is not definitive. They only know what they're seeing in Alaska. It is a question mark about whether or not it's happening in the Arctic overall. If it is happening across the Arctic, then it's very concerning. If it's happening across the Arctic at the same scale that it's happening in Alaska,

then it is very concerning. If it is not happening, that means we are not at that point yet, which again means we still have time. And the general consensus among scientists is we need to continue operating, not as though we still have time, but as though we have not yet hit the point of no return. So we need to acknowledge that we have a very limited window within which to do anything about climate change, but also recognize that we are still within the window, which we can still do something about climate change. Because you have to have hope? It's not just about having hope, right?

but like if you sort of, not to bring it back to a car analogy, but if you're in a car and a car cuts in front of you and you don't at least try to swim on the brakes, like the difference between hitting a car at full speed and hitting a car when you slow down a little bit, there is still a difference. You're going to hit the car. You're going to hit the car,

but one might be survivable and the other one might not be. I gotcha. And quickly, we have other interesting stories of the climate about fishing, the fishing populations are moving, right? Yeah, so what's happening worldwide is as the oceans get warmer and they've absorbed 93% of the warmth that we've sort of created because of releasing greenhouse gas emissions. The fish in the warmest trunk in the tropics can't stay there. It's too hot, and as the oceans get warmer, they have less oxygen, so they're heading to the poles.

So the story was about Iceland, and what happened in Iceland is the Kaplan moved. And you probably don't know Kaveland, but it's used a lot in, like, Roe and, like, we eat their fish eggs, and it's used a lot in, like, kind of processed fish fish. products. And so that has gone away and the capling fishery had to shut down for two years in a row. It's never happened before. But on the other side, they're getting mackerel. And so that's actually creating geopolitical tensions between Iceland and the European Union and Norway and the Farah Islands because they're accusing Iceland of overfishing and not fishing to a degree that's sustainable and actually that fishery has lost its sustainability quota or certification. Well, we've heard about, you know, food problems coming.

out of climate change and that's beginning to happen. Thank you. Thank you, Kendra. We run out of time. There's so much. There is so much happening, isn't there? Yeah. Going on there. Kendra. Pierre Lewis is a reporter at the New York Times Climate Team, and we have links to her reporting up at Science Friday.com slash climate meeting. We're going to take a break and continue with our

degrees of change series with a look at transportation. How can we move ourselves on all our stuff more sustainably? We'll talk with lots of folks about that. And your calls, our number 8444724. 48255. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Continuing with our Degrees of Change series, this week, climate activist Greta Toonberg, was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year. And you may recall earlier in the year,

she journeyed from Europe to the U.S. on a sailboat because the climate impact of air travel was just too great. Transportation, whether it be your car, aircraft, cargo, ships or heavy trucks carrying all those holiday packages, transportation makes a big contribution to the world's CO2 emissions. In the United States, the transportation sector accounts for some 29% of the country's emissions, according to EPA data. So, what can be done to reduce the climate impact of all those planes, trains, and automobiles? That's what we're going to be talking about this hour. And if you've had to rethink your travel options to take emissions into consideration, give us a call. Our number 844-8-24-8-255-8-44-Sai Talk. You can also tweet us at SciFri. Let me kick off the conversation with my first guest, Daniel Spurling, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis, and founding director of the Institute for Transportation Studies. Welcome back to Science Friday.

Dan Spurling. Well, thank you, Ira. It's a pleasure to be back. Nice to have. Thank you. It's a pleasure. pleasure being back. It's great to have you. Let's give a quick breakdown of what we mean when we say transportation. What are the big contributors in transportation to our greenhouse gas emissions? Well, the biggest one is our cars, our vehicles that we personally drive around. The second biggest would be the trucks and the planes are the third largest.

Trucks, planes, yeah. So we did a couch. Yeah, cars, trucks, planes. So let's talk about the trucking. Everybody is sending out the gifts for this holiday season. What contribution of all that cargo and trucking making? Well, the trucks overall, you know, there's a lot of different trucks. There's the big long-haul trucks that are doing the long distance.

There's the smaller delivery trucks. But altogether, if you look at it from a climate change perspective, in terms of like transportation and greenhouse gases and transportation, about 20% or so, 20, 25% come from the trucks. So it's significant. And it's actually the two that are going up, the really problematic ones are trucks and planes. We're flying a lot more, and we're using a lot more trucks to move stuff around. When last spoke, you personally drove a hydrogen car. Do you still drive it?

No, you know, I let it go at the end of the lease. what I've been practicing is being carless. I live in this little town, a college town of Davis, California, and we have a lot of good bike paths. And so, and, you know, really what's changed in recent years is the availability of Uber and Lyft. So I know now I'm never going to be stranded anywhere. And that's, that's what makes it possible to give up my car. Well, let's talk about that. With Uber and Lyft getting, you know, in greater usage, Are we not just driving a car more, which we shouldn't be? Well, you know, the research shows that what's happened with Uber and Lyft is they have led to a small increase in actual vehicle use.

That there's some reductions in the sense that people that had been using cars have given up their cars like me. But there's also some that were on transit and switched to Uber, somewhere walking. switch to Uber and Lyft. So the net effect is a small increase. But I think, you know, for me, so I'm a big advocate of these new services because I think about it strategically. It's like to go in the future to really reduce overall vehicle use, make our cities more sustainable, we really have to give up personal car ownership. And I know that's a big leap. But the only way we're going to get there is to create more.

choices for people, you know, more good choices. So Lyft and Uber are kind of in Via, and there's some others, are really the opening of the door that gets people accustomed to the idea of giving up their car, riding, you know, riding in strangers' cars, sharing rides, and using an app to call a vehicle, all these things which were unacceptable, unavailable just 10 years ago. I want to move on to talk about a little bit more about alternative vehicles and the adoption of alternative vehicles. I drive an electric car myself, and I really love it. I want to play a note that Robin from Texas and in on our Science Friday Vox Pop app about choosing a car. Hi, I'm Robin. I live in Texas. I oftentimes will travel either

to Big Bend or towards El Paso. El Paso is 500 miles from where I'm at. Currently, there's not an electric vehicle that can go that far. And it's like two and a half hours from a hospital at a certain point on the highway. So there's definitely no electric chargers. We need a longer distance. And that is that, Dan, is that one of the major problems of not having an electric society where there are enough chargers around? It is. But it's, in that case, it's fast chargers because there are lots of cars now that will go over 200 miles. So for a 500 mile, you might need to do two charges. But you can do these fast chargers available now, and they're building more and more of them. And, you know, it can 30, 40 minutes to get a fast charge.

And they're designing new ones that will be even 10 or 15 minutes. I mean, you know, the end of the day, you shouldn't be driving 500 miles without stopping, right? So it's not such a bad idea to think that you are going to stop along the way. But if you drive a truck, a trucker is going to drive 500 miles. without stopping, and we don't have electric trucks yet. Can we design a truck? And is that sort of a sweet point, a sweet spot, to get a truck that can go 500 miles on an electric charge? Well, you know, the sweet spot for trucks are the smaller delivery trucks, you know, the UPS-type trucks that are making deliveries in neighborhoods because they don't drive very far

in a day. It's a lot of stop and go. And that's where electric vehicles are really good, really, really sore. So that's the sweet spot for trucks. The long haul, those long haul trucks are actually the most difficult ones to electrify. But there are, you know, so I'm also a member of a board member for the California Air Resources Board. And just yesterday, we started a process to require all trucks to become electric. And there's going to be a phase in process. And it includes those big long haul tractor trailers. And, you know, it's unclear exactly how this is going to play out because it can be batteries, it can be fuel cells which use hydrogen, and maybe even some clean biofuels. Our number 844724-8255. I want to bring in Rachel Moncrief, who's Deputy Director of the

International Council on Clean Transportation based in Washington. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, how are you? Let's talk about the contribution of heavy vehicles. And we're talking about trucks, long-haul cargo trucks and city buses, which account for half of the transportation-related emissions in the U.S., and if you look around, you know, pretty much everything you see has been on one of those trucks, right? Mm-hmm. You study heavy vehicles. How do we classify them?

What are they? Okay, that's a good question. Yeah, so, I mean, I think we've, Dan's already started to talk about this. So heavy-duty vehicles basically can range from anything to kind of like the. those big pickup trucks and vans through delivery trucks, buses, vocational vehicles, all the way to tractor trailers, long-haul tractor trailers. When you look at that whole segment, all those different kinds of heavy-duty vehicles, the tractor trailers by far are the ones that are sort of consuming the most fuel

and emitting the most CO2. Of all the heavy-duty vehicles, it's about 70% of the CO2 is coming from the tractor trailers. And what can we, what's the easiest, what's the low-hanging fruit in the heavy vehicles? Well, so the way I look at it is this. I mean, we have to focus on really decarbonizing the transportation sector if we want to meet our climate goals. And we know that no matter what we do and no matter how quickly we go towards zero tailpipe emission technologies, we're still going to be selling a lot of internal combustion vehicles. between over the next 30 years, let's say.

Some people say it could be like $2 billion or more internal combustion vehicles, cars and trucks. So what we have to do is make sure that not only do we push to try to get these zero tailpipe emission vehicles out there, but we also have to make sure that the internal combustion vehicles that we're selling are as efficient as possible. And there's quite a lot of things that can be done today to improve the efficiency of trucks. Give me a couple. Okay. So if you're thinking about a long-haul tractor trailer, a lot of,

of fuel is consumed by basically just trying to get that truck down the road. So if you can actually make that truck more aerodynamic, you can save quite a lot of fuel. If you can put on better tires on the truck, like lower rolling resistance tires, that also saves fuel. You can get more efficient engines that are currently being developed, and that also saves fuel. So basically, starting from a baseline where we are today, there's still many, there's still probably about, I don't know, at least 30 or 40 percent more fuel efficiency savings just from doing these kind of conventional steps. Dan Sparling talked about California coming up with mandatory

truck standards. Do you think that regulations like those will help drive innovation? Yeah, we have to have regulations like those. And California is the first one in the world to propose that. And I think if we don't, the trucking industry is fairly conservative. If the truck makers don't know that for sure they're going to have to sell these new advanced technologies, then they're not going to make the investments now. So I think it's actually critical that we put in place these kind of policies to give certainty so they can make those kinds of investments. What about talking about fully electric trucks? What about hybrid engines? Hybrid cars have been around forever. We see hybrid buses all the time and why not push for more hybrid trucks?

Yeah. And like we were saying, it's really hybrids work best on a specific kind of driving. So the main, the hybrids work the best when you have a kind of driving where you're in a stop and go situation because that's when you regenerate the battery. So it's during breaking. So if you have an application, which is a long-haul truck that's mostly driving on the highway that's not breaking a lot, the benefits from putting a hybrid on that truck are going to just be less than it would be if you put it on a bus who's constantly stopping and going or a urban delivery truck who's stopping and going. So you just have to be smart about picking the right technologies for the right applications. That's interesting because, you know, a person in a long-range truck is never stepping on the brake very much, right? Yeah, not too much. But you actually can still, there is still potential for hybridization in that because you can essentially, even though you might not be stepping on the break, you are going up and down hills.

And when you're kind of going down a hill, you can recoup energy with the hybrid in that application as well. That's quite interesting. So the short-term trucks, like the delivery trucks, they offer them the most, you said, as you said before, depending on the kind of truck, they would, as Dan said, the short delivery trucks would offer the most benefits. for the bang. Bang for the buck? They would offer more, yeah, benefit in terms of hybridization, but they're also a really good candidate for just full electrification. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about green transportation with Rachel Moncrief and Dan Spurling.

Dan, what do you think of what we've been talking about? Yeah, I think Rachel's exactly right. You know, the one thing I'd add is that, Well, I would note that the diesel engines and trucks is a remarkably efficient power plant. And so another idea on top of everything we've been talking about is finding some of these very low-carbon biofuels that could be a liquid that could be used to replace the diesel fuel. And now we're developing diesel engines also that have lower pollutants, what we call criteria pollutants, NOx. and particulate matter. And so, you know, I think that's an option we have to seriously consider. Rachel, before I let you go.

For the long-haul trucks. We often ask guests for something the average listener can do to have some effect. Rachel, is there anything you can suggest to those of us who don't own or drive a big truck? Sure. I mean, like you said, pretty much if you look around you, every single thing that you're probably looking at has been on a truck at some point. your computer, your coffee cup, you know, whatever it is. So, I mean, one thing you can do, and I know this isn't really a good message

for this time of the year in December, but maybe you could buy less things, so therefore, you know, you'd have less things that were transported on trucks, or you can think about buying things that were sort of made locally, so they have less distance to go on trucks. Some websites offer the option

of a sort of a slower delivery time. That's another option because that gives the shipper a chance to ship things slightly more efficiently. Yeah, and you know, know, if you order five things on Amazon on five different days, it's five different trips. If you order it all on one day, save it up. You've got one trip there. There you go.

Okay. Rachel, thank you very much. Rachel Moncrief is Deputy Director of the International Council on Clean Transportation based in Washington. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you. Dan, do you have anything to suggest to our listeners what they might do for stuff that, you know, is this holiday season or to do with shipping and trucking? Yeah, well, I would take it even further what Rachel was just saying because actually what we're seeing is that people are demanding the delivery of these goods faster and faster. And it's encouraged by Amazon, I call it the Amazon Prime Effect.

And so now Amazon is actually shifting to one-day delivery. That's what they're aiming for. And the result of that is they're building all of these warehouses and distribution centers everywhere. and they're sending out many more shipments in smaller amounts, many more trucks going through neighborhoods. And so this is an example of where we're actually going in the wrong direction on many ways. And, you know, there was a comic strip back in the old days in the 70s, Pogo, and one of the lines was, I have seen the enemy and he is us.

And so I guess this comes back to the message you want to communicate to people is that if you're going to order things, you know, order them as you're saying as a cluster of goods, you know, all of them at once, or don't require them or ask for them to be delivered quickly. That way, they can package them all together and make bigger deliveries and fewer truck trips being made. Our number 844-8255, we're talking about green transportation. We're going to take a break on. I want to come back and talk Dan with you. more about, you know, in Europe and China, when they want to go someplace, they build a railroad.

We haven't built railroads in years, and there are a couple of things on the drawing boards about railroads, and maybe we should talk about them and talk about what is so resistant in this country about building railroads instead of, you know, more airports. So our number 844-8255, you can also tweet us at SciFry. We'll be back with Dan Spurling and other guests after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

Continuing with our degrees of change series, I'm talking with Daniel Spurling of University of California, Davis, founding director of the Institute for Transportation Studies. We have, as you can imagine, lots of calls coming in and tweets. Let's see how many we can get in. Let's go to Troy and Phoenix. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Fine. How are you? Go ahead. Yes, I was talking about I drive an electric car, and I also have a reservation for an

truck. I own a delivery business, and I currently use any Zuzu NPR type delivery truck, kind of like the bigger FedEx and UPS truck. And I'm currently spending about $1,200 a month in fuel for that vehicle. And with the electric truck and charging it during the day, I also have solar panels on my roof, charging that truck with very little help from the grid, that more than covers the note for that truck. So the return on investment on an electric vehicle for a delivery business is very fast, and it's an almost no-brainer economic decision. That's a great, thank you.

That's a great comment. Dan, there must be a lot of people like him waiting for their electric trucks to come out. Well, that's what Elon Musk thinks with his new cyber truck. I don't know if you saw that. But it's true. But there are, there's a number of companies now really, planning to roll out some electric pickup trucks. And I think, you know, there is a big market because indeed, you say the electricity cost for

operating these vehicles is much less than the gasoline or the diesel that you use in it. So, you know, even though for now the trucks still cost more, the electric trucks, the battery cost, you know, the big story in vehicles is battery costs are coming down so fast. They've come down, they were like $1,200 per kilo. a watt hour 10 years ago. Now they're about $200. So that's six, you know, six times, you know, it was six times higher. And it's, and all the forecasts are it's going to continue coming down. So that means that really the future of battery vehicles, whether it's cars or trucks, is really very promising. Here's a tweet from Jessica who says, I would love to reduce

my carbon footprint by taking Amtrak, but this isn't feasible on my schedule. How can we increase awareness and viability of rail travel when so much of our infrastructure has been hostile towards such efforts. Is it possible, Dan, do you think, to resurrect rail travel? And, you know, you hear about efforts in California between San Francisco and L.A. going, having trouble getting going. I just heard the other day that they're talking about Portland, Oregon and Seattle coming out. Has rail got any lifeblood left in this country? Well, maybe a little, but, you know, the reality is that this country, a hundred years ago, started down the path of cars. We built our cities around cars.

So, you know, all of our 20th century cities are all sprawled. Our suburbs, even in the older cities are sprawled. And that just is not very conducive for using rail transportation. And we have so many cars and land use is so diffused. So it's really a tough sell. You know, I was just in Europe, and I just loved using the bullet trains there, but it's just going to be a tough sell. So I think what we're looking at here is coming up with other ways of providing that inner city travel. And, you know, aviation is part of our challenge.

But for the shorter trips, you know, one of the longer-term options are these automated cars that can be like vans. and they can be pretty inexpensive. They can be electric, so there's no emissions. And that's not tomorrow, but, you know, 10, 20 years, that could be one part of the solution. Let's go to the phones to Brandon in Mayden, North Carolina. Hi, Brandon. Hey, I've been waiting on this conversation for a long time.

So I've got two questions. One, has anybody thought about battery degrade, how to store it, how to dispose of it? Because they have really toxic chemicals in those batteries. And I'm just thinking about a car battery ended up in the dump and that leaching into the soil. And why haven't we moved more towards, like, compressed hydrogen vehicles? Because the only emissions from those is water. and it takes a lot less hydrogen to make the same amount of combustion that fuel and air make. All right, good, good questions.

Well, that gives me the opportunity to bring in another guest. Early in the hour, I mentioned Greta Tunberg sailing across the Atlantic, because you didn't want the emission burden that goes with air travel. Air travel as a whole contributes only 2.5% of the world's carbon emissions, but any given flight can produce hundreds of kilograms of CO2 per passenger, with a large portion coming during the 10%. taxi takeoff and landing portions. So what can we do, can be done to cut back on those emissions? Joining me now is Stephen Barrett. He's professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

and Director of the Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment at MIT. And he joins me by Skype from South Korea where it's around 4 a.m. Thank you for staying up. Well, I didn't stay up. I'm afraid to say, but I got up and I'm glad to be with you. So thanks for having me. Well, it's great to have you. How carbon intensive is air flight? It kind of depends how you measure it. So it depends on the question.

If you compare seat miles, so kilograms or tons of CO2 per seat mile, it actually looks pretty good and ends up being about the same as a really modern car like a Honda. So, yeah, when you measure it like that, compared to a Honda, say, an occupancy of two people, then it comes out to be the same. The difference is that a Honda doesn't travel, you know, 10,000 miles through the night at 600 miles an hour. So, you know, when you look at it that way, the absolute numbers can be pretty high per passenger. I heard, I saw a pilot on YouTube talking about this, and he said that just in the taxiing and on the taxiway waiting to take off and then the takeoff mode is a tremendous release of carbon dioxide and air pollution, and that's phase. Yeah, I mean, in absolute terms it can be.

It's still probably only about 10% of the overall CO2 emissions of a typical flight. But to give you a sense of the scale, something like a Boeing 737 or A320 on the take of roll, full engine power. Two engines, each are burning about a liter of fuel per second. So, you know, that's what, two, four pounds a second roughly of fuel going into the engines on the takeoff roll. And what about the news this week that there was a small electric plane being tested? It had its first flight, a sea plane. I think that's a pretty exciting development. I mean, we're seeing more and more electric planes for initially, you know, niche and small range applications.

But this is an important development because in the long term, you would like to see aviation to become more and more electric. And there are real challenges with making long-haul flights electric. not even obvious if long-haul flights could be made electric because of challenges with energy density and batteries. But for short-range flights and for, for example, for urban air mobility or, you know, air taxis, then electric makes a lot of sense because it does seem like you could get flights that last 30 minutes or an hour to be electric with something not too far off today's battery technology. And this is a great step along that path. So it's very excited to see that development. What are some of the areas that your lab is looking at to make planes more carbon neutral?

One of the areas we look at is fuel. So, I mean, really, you've basically got a few options. You can either kind of fly the plane smarter so they use less fuel, and that's about rooting more efficiently. But there's only so much you can win there. You might get 5 or 10%. So that's important to do, but it's, you know, there's a limit to the scale of the benefit. The second thing is you could fly better planes that use less fuel.

And a lot of aeronautics research, including some we do, is focused on designing aircraft to the future that would use less energy. But the third would be having the same planes operating in the same way, but burning a fuel that's intrinsically greener. And that would be biofuels that have a lower life cycle carbon intensity. And we do a lot of work on assessing biofuels to provide imparting. information to industry, policymakers, and the public on the carbon intensity of different fuel options. Are all planes in common use around the same air modern propulsion system, or are they different? I know that people think that all jets are the same, but there are a lot of different kinds

of jets, and some are more green-friendly than others, are they not? They're generally pretty comparable for a given generation. So if you take, for example, a 1990 design versus a 2010 design, there'll be a significant improvement there of perhaps you might say, you know, 20%, something, maybe 25%. But the main manufacturers, competing manufacturers, whether it's Rolls, Royce and Pratton and Whitney in the engines, or Boeing and Airbus on the airframes,

they do tend to keep pace. But if you take a look at the long arc over the last 30 years and more, there's something like a 1.5 or 2% year-on-year improvement in the fuel efficiency of airplanes, and that's been a long-term trend. And to sustain that over many years is kind of impressive. The problem is that aviation is growing at 4 or 5% per year, so that's far out stripping the improvements in efficiency. Let's see if we can get a phone call or tweet in before we have to go.

Let's go to Kristen in Manhattan. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks so much for having me on. I was just looking online trying to get some information on paying a voluntary carbon tax for air travel. And then your show came on. So maybe you guys can answer this for me. I'm recently retired and traveling now like I never have before. I just got back from Vietnam.

I'm going to Peru in February. And, you know, I see beautiful Greta Thunberg. and I feel like a guilty, I feel terrible. Yeah, let me ask our guest, Steve, can you pay a voluntary carbon tax or Dan? Yeah, I think that's a wonderful thing to do for those who want to do it. I think the only thing to keep in mind is one is to make sure you research the integrity of the offsetting scheme that's offered. And you can look up online reviews of the integrity of the scheme that's being offered by a particular the vendor. And the second is that in the long run, I don't think we can rely on kind of, you know,

moralizing people to do the right thing. We ultimately will need some rational way of incorporating these effects into the economic system. And that ultimately really means a carbon tax or carbon price of some kind. I think that's where we've got ahead eventually. Amira Plato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. talking with Stephen Barrett and Dan Spurling about alternative transportation. We have a lot of tweets that have come in. John asked, why can't they have batteries that just swap out like a battery in a drill for a long-haul truck? This seems, I was talking about this before with my staff about this.

You know, a truck or even a train. If you make an electric train and you swap out the battery, the trains, you know, it has a couple of days. to travel? What's an hour swapout? Going to take out of that kind of travel? I mean, in the context of airplanes, I'm sorry, is this the... Go ahead. You can go soon. Yeah. Okay. In the context of planes,

one of the good things about using a fuel is that, you know, as you fly, you're burning the fuel, so the plane's getting lighter. So for a long-range mission, you know, it's really beneficial to have a plane that gets lighter, the further you go, because then it gets easier to go further. So that's one of the reasons why batteries,

tend to look a bit better in the shorter range because they're very heavy anyway relative to fuel and they get even heavier for an aircraft longer the ranges and then you're not burning it up. So having batteries long range is difficult. Then when it comes to swapping, if you want to swap, you have to have more structure in the aircraft

to enable the swapping. So it would be a less efficient aircraft structure which makes it heavier, which then means more energy. So it's just a much more difficult thing to do for a plane than it would be for a ground vehicle. Dan, you have last word here. Yeah, I mean, we are going towards electrification for everything except aviation. You know, there are the exceptions with aviation for a short haul,

but basically we're electrifying transportation. And I think that's the future. And we're trying to figure out exactly how. Part of that includes hydrogen fuel cells, which are electric, battery electrics. I don't think swapping is going to play much of a role, but there's fast charging technology that's coming along. And a lot of it's on the individual perspective. We have to adjust a little bit.

You know, it is easy. Electric vehicles really are easy. It's a lot easier to charge up at home than to go to a gas station. So a lot of this is people adapting to this new reality that we're going to be. You have to leave it there. Thank you, Dan. Dan Sparling, Professor of Civil Engineering at UC Davis, Steve Barrett, Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

at MIT. And a reminder, we're continuing our climate series of change each month, and if you want to get involved in our series, tell us what you think or what's happening in your community. You can find out more at ScienceFriety.com slash degrees of change.

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