“Understanding Transport Decarbonisation” explores the dualistic denial-vs-panic tension around climate change, through the prism of a British transport policy structure that is ill suited to reconciling it. The text outlines the challenge to that policy structure, and analyses the fractious duality at the heart of our topic. Then destroys any lingering faith that anyone can really understand anything, by documenting the limitations of using money to affect societal transactions, and by considering how to relate to a decentralised freight sector. Before concluding with a couple of bold assertions that place transport and understanding at the heart of climate change, to show how mapping transport onto an otherwise abstract problem of understanding, may allow that problem to be tackled. This essay was inspired by DecarboN8’s recent Real Zero conference, to whose participants I am grateful, although the essay’s method is somewhat more syncretistic.
Choosing Life
The complex and multifaceted challenge of climate change has, perhaps by dint of international treaty, become focused on one big public policy objective: Managing global temperatures by reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions. For transport, that primarily means decarbonisation by elimination of the fossil fuels on which much movement has hitherto been dependant.
The Paris Agreement invited signatory nations to define and then deliver Nationally Determined Contributions for reductions in their Greenhouse Gas emissions. The United Kingdom has upgraded her previous 80% reduction target (relative to 1990) to a commitment to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Net allows residual emissions to be offset, blurring the reduction objective slightly.
Coronavirus pandemic shocks aside, transport emissions have remained stubbornly high for decades, with gains in engineering efficiency offset by changes within travel behaviour, which in turn stem from wider structural changes in society. Deep structural change eschews the effective day-to-day personal agency (active choice) presumed by much contemporary British transport policy.
Individually rooted ontologies have even bled into, and so in public policy practice masked, those parts of the transport system where agency is blindly transactional, such as freight: The consequence of democracy being understood through the prism of consumerism has been minimal state engagement with those systems that citizens do not directly experience themselves. But that does not stop government being held responsible when those systems fail, as recently demonstrated by reactions to visible food shortages on supermarket shelves, rooted in structural shortages of Heavy Goods Vehicle drivers.
Given the resilience implications of climate change, including global warming’s tendency to extreme meteorological events, we might reasonably expect the government’s role in societal stabilisation to shift back from the individual experiential toward the collective structural. Recall that Victorian civic concerns emphasised urban freight and viability of city form, not the punctuality of railway commuters (both forms of stability). However any shift is likely to be more reactive than planned, not least because of stability-seeking desires to maintain or even emphasise the familiar status quo, however paradoxical. Add the scale and rate of change implied by climate change, combined with the kind of deep uncertainties that mock predictive analytics, and we are surely in for a bumpy ride.
Beyond Good and Evil
Transport minister Grant Shapps’ foreword to the broadly welcomed UK Transport Decarbonisation Plan, neatly illustrated the disconnect between official technocratic policymaking and his conservative sensibilities: “It’s not about stopping people doing things”, wrote Shapps, “it’s about doing the same things differently.” Rachel Maclean, then the responsible junior minister, subsequently clarified, “We have talked about the reduction of journeys only in urban areas” (my emphasis). Aviation, the popular epitome of aspiration and wealth, will not be limited.
Yet expert modelling, of the type that informed the plan itself, invariably presumes a significant element of personal travel demand reduction, particularly where decarbonisation is envisaged more rapidly than mid-century. Such demand reduction is primarily sought to balance ongoing emissions from activity in sectors as yet without viable carbon-neutral technology, but often with long investment life-cycles – trucking, shipping, aviation, but also sectors that support transport activity – which thus cannot be rapidly decarbonised without undermining the respective sector’s financial and operational stability. [Added:] Efficiency and equality of electrical grid and fleet provision is another reason. All that complicates the issue by introducing discussion of fairness (especially where individuals struggle to relate their personal dependence on a sector) and power (these sectors tend to be trans-national, so structurally difficult for sovereign states to control).
On the flip-side of what Monika Büscher characterised as a “comic faith in technofixes”, can be found a predominantly younger group of people for whom perceived inaction on climate change is a cause of genuine anxiety and helplessness, which ultimately manifests as anger and lack of trust: What was neatly summarised by one as the desire to “make it dangerous for politicians not to act”. Incendiary stuff, this climate change.
The underlying duality being expressed is not at all unique to this agenda. Indeed, it is arguably a defining characteristic of human being: Theologians – conceptually since Zoroaster, although more apparent post-Mani – have juxtaposed ever-inflating hopefulness against some notion of paradoxical ambiguity. The success of political philosophy is that people may happily live in the midst without realising. Its corollary failure surely occurs when they fall out of that comfy space. It certainly feels like policy positions are drifting outwith the arena in which a common logically-constructed understanding is easily attained – that is, into the potentially dystopian umbra of logical positivism. The beauty of the theological model is that we may assert both extremities to be the same – oneness – and thus conceive both positions as similar patterns, without having to constantly trace the logic of each position back to the midpoint of the duality.
So the “understanding” in the title implies better conceiving or managing the dualistic tension that transport decarbonisation evokes within public policy, not specifically comprehending the mechanics of decarbonising stuff.
Money Doesn’t Talk
Different nations, societies, and groups therein, affect relations between members in far more ways than the presence of globalised capitalism might suggest. But perhaps by dint of a mercantilist history, the British have grown particularly fond of using money to communicate concepts which are neither directly experienced, nor readily understood through common systems of knowledge. The use of money to affect complex social transactions has never been easy, but has grown more challenging in the Pikettarian era, when the monetary value of work is so disconnected from that of ownership. None-the-less, policy announcements continue to routinely reference n million pounds of spending, so we presume the metric has purpose.
Typically, transport accounts for an average of 14% of all household expenditure, but only about 5% of all government expenditure. The overall UK tax burden is around a third, so departmental and borrowing distortions aside, households are spending in the order of four or five times more specifically on transport than government. It transpires that personal agency and financial metrics dominate transport policy for a perfectly sensible reason: In most cases, transport is an overwhelmingly personal expense.
National rail is the big exception as the only mode where government proportionately outspends the average household. This one system accounts for half of all government transport spend, in spite of carrying only a tenth of all passenger and freight tonnage kilometres. National railway kinopolitics are skewed to high income groups making above average distance journeys, which are equated to economic benefit. Rail’s widely perceived environmental benefits have been indelibly influenced by railway union funding of campaigning. And all this is wrapped up in a politically unchallengeable romanticised nationalistic notion of Victorian suburban utopia. National rail illustrates the depth and complexity of the societal dynamics expressed through the funding of transport. But that complexity is not so readily rationalised by the actual monetary transactions involved.
Dig further and a hornet’s nest of potentially hard-to-rationalise transactions emerges. The future of road taxation is already hotly debated – not least because decarbonisation plans stand to reduce long-run motoring costs, generating traffic and congestion. But at least road taxes are transparent, even if their policy justification is fluid. Other topics transpire to be impenetrable: For example, the relationship of public funding to the fairness of most bus fares is lost in the mish-mash of different policy initiatives, geospatial structures and corporate cultures that have come to shape bus markets over many years.
Far from assisting the understanding of societal transactions, contemporary emphasis on somewhat arbitrary monetary quantifications would seem to be a recipe for misunderstanding.
The quantitative reaction to all that is to create separate narrowly-focused currencies or pseudo-markets. There are many pertinent industrial precedents, including carbon emission trading and California’s zero emission vehicle mandate. But the concept stumbles when applied to consumer-centric markets with no intrinsic community of interest or strong status symbology – conditions typically found in successful virtual examples. Meanwhile the very idea of trying to map a bespoke currency onto something as inherently cross-sectoral as transport seems entirely likely to result in a currency almost as complicated and remote as Pound Sterling.
The Elephant in the Room
Freight already accounts for a third of all UK domestic transport emissions, plus much the same proportion globally through trade. Freight may be the hardest third to decarbonise, not only because of the current immaturity of carbon-free technology for heavier hauls, but because the freight sector accentuates transport’s quirks:
- Freight is a derived demand: Consumers naturally focus on the goods transported, not the transport itself. But freight also tends to a paradox of value – considered mundane, yet functionally essential for modern civilisation.
- Freight scales from container-ship global to home-delivery local, across every spatial and economic geography in between, often for the exact same cargo. This makes it easy to apportion, as Daniela Paddeu put it, as “someone else’s problem”. The corollary, that any expectation of singular control or responsibility is patently false.
Supply chains have grown immensely complex, both in space and time, and in practice are heavily reliant on algebraic computational algorithms. These algorithms effectively relate a decentralised morass of actors, each of which reacts to commercial market signals without much strategic overview. Our consequent conjecture is that freight transport cannot be sensibly understood as a sequence of logical processes within a coherent whole. But it may be better understood through the prism of inherently decentralised structures (where the balancing of powers is part of the ongoing process, not preordained, as in devolution).
I fondly characterise the Spanish (as exposed by Catalans) model as a Bouncy Castle. The high-level role of state is to keep the castle safely inflated, so that none of the bouncing children get hurt. The children are internally complex agents (in reality, well-organised human groups) that lack intrinsic understanding of their surroundings (with no comprehension of the totality), merely an awareness of the ease of their oscillation upon the castle floor – the timing of which they may have to adjust, should another child be bouncing nearby (akin to counter-balancing duopolies). The model is highly reactive, not predictive, and allows agents to focus only on that which they know well, while maintaining effective societal relations with other, almost anonymous, agents.
So perhaps the freight sector need only be detached from the hierarchical structure of UK governance, repositioning freight as the market it functions as, not the unit of carriage it deploys, while learning to regulate the shape of its natural play space. While prominent in freight, similar algorithmic reconciliations increasingly guide individual travel choices, suggesting a much broader role for decentralised thinking in future transport policy.
The challenge would be to deal with these worlds as they naturally are, not as they are remade to be for epistemological ease of administration. Needless to say, this is not a strong suit for the British, who have historically tended to understand the world by making it more like home. And in the rogue fragment of local transport that traditionally exhibits some of these facets – the humble 1847-legislated Hackney Carriage – effective policy intervention has been close to nil.
Incommunicado
Transport, even when narrowly defined, is a versatile form of communication in its own right: Consider the trip to the local pub, the geopolitics of strategic infrastructure, the perception of place reflected in networks, the status symbology of cars. That we felt the need to try and gather all these facets under the umbrella of a single supposedly transactable currency, and use that to communicate instead, reveals much about the extent to which we feel the need to relate to a much larger whole than we can sensibly grasp.
Transport may in parallel be argued as the root of the climate crisis, and not just that industrialisation involves much movement: Transportation feeds our inner explorer, but in doing so inflates our worldview, potentially beyond that scale which is reasonably knowable. We are neurologically little-evolved from our village-centric ancestors. Game design tells us exploration tendencies are a niche skewed to early adopters, while connectivity analysis can indicate tangible differences in worldview, all suggesting different people or peoples have different limits. But broadly, on aggregate, across the societal collective, the result is an over-extension: Of hope, and, dualistically, to ambiguity.
The logical consequence of that argument is that, all other things being equal, the transport problem will persist beyond the current climate problem, because tackling climate change does not necessarily address its epistemological cause.
Further, that we evoke the global scale in reactions to climate change is paradoxical, since when understood first as transport, the climate problem stems from our epistemological weakness in understanding the global scale.
There is no particular truth to these statements, as intriguing the conjectures they espouse. Rather, they are presented to show how, by mapping what is otherwise an abstract problem of political philosophy onto transport, we may gain access to an array of well-established principles and methods with which to tackle the underlying problem of understanding: All manner of forms of communication, weird space-time relations, and oddball organisational structures lurk in the toolbox labelled transport. For this would not be the first seemingly-existential crisis to invite humans to rearrange their thinking a little.
Tim Howgego 