MiM reports back: LowCVP sixth annual conference
The line-up of this year's LowCVP annual conference was impressive. Even Lord Andrew Adonis showed up on his first day in office as UK Secretary for Transport, replacing Geoff Hoon who resigned a few days earlier. MindsinMotion was there to report on some of the day’s most interesting presentations.
The sixth Low CVP conference is off for a gloomy start, as professor Kevin Anderson of
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research presents the latest scientific data on the pace of climate change.
Anderson shows that to have a fifty-fifty chance of the average global temperature to stabilise at an increase of two degrees Celcius (already considered ‘dangerous’ by the European Union), humankind needs to reach a greenhouse gas emission peak by 2020 at the latest and then cut emissions by around ten per cent annually.
Such reductions are unprecedented, explains Anderson, and renders the current long-term emission reduction target of sixty to eighty per cent by 2050 for the European Union highly inadequate. He shows what share the transport sector should have in cutting greenhouse gas emissions at such a pace that even a ‘four degrees Celcius future' can be avoided. He thinks mandatory efficiency standards will be needed, for all new cars, of 130 grammes CO2 per kilometre (g/km), dropping to 70 and 35 grammes by 2020 and 2030 respectively. Furthermore, ‘just-in-time delivery' should be rejected; the focus should be on optimising flow rates, rather than increasing speed.
Global approach
One of the next speakers is David Ward, Director General of
FIA Foundation, which is a UK road safety, environmental protection and sustainable mobility charity. Because the biggest growth in transport demand will be in countries that are not members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), he stresses the need for a global approach.
Holding on to your old car to modernize the car fleet: interesting thought. (Photo: CC Miss_Rogue)
Hence the
Global Fuel Economy Initiative, a joint initiative from FIA Foundation, the International Energy Agency, International Transport Forum and United Nations Environment Programme. In March, this coalition launched the 50by50 challenge, which targets at – you guessed it – a fifty per cent improvement of the entire world car fleet efficiency by the year 2050.
Medium-term targets for new vehicles are thirty and fifty per cent improvement of fuel efficiency by 2020 and 2030 respectively, relative to a 2005 baseline. For front-runners Japan and the European Union, this would mean that by 2030 new cars will be allowed to emit between seventy and eighty g/km. This is still twice as much as professor Anderson deems a fair share for the transportation sector.
Flair
A good move of the organisation’s to have Tim Smit of
Eden Project to chair the afternoon session. He may have a bit of luck to have a couple of good speakers in his session, but his casual flair and charm do a lot of good as well.
First citizen
First speaker is Mr Boris Johnson, London’s first citizen. He throws a challenge at the car manufacturers: “To add to the sense of urgency, I will not replace my twelve year old Toyota unless a family-sized EV [electric vehicle, MiM] makes it to the showrooms.” That should convince the GMs and Toyotas of this world to get moving at a somewhat faster pace!
Johnson considers London the place to introduce novel solutions for transportation. He has committed to establishing 25,000 charging points for EVs by 2015 and expects to have 100,000 EVs on the London roads by that year. “And these are even modest predictions,” he adds.
Swapping
Charles Stonehill, CFO of Project Better Place, explains how Better Place is addressing some of the major obstacles for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. A very interesting innovation is the battery switch station, which makes swapping an empty battery pack for a full one even quicker than filling up a tank with petrol. Switch on our Youtube channel and
see for yourself!
Food for thought
After hearing lots of talk about the need to make vehicles greener and how this can be done, Dr Doug Parr, senior scientist at Greenpeace, drops a fundamental question during the day’s final session. He says that transportation in itself shouldn’t be a goal, but a means to fulfill certain human needs. Obtaining access to such needs can be achieved by motorised transportation, but also in many other ways. In fulfilling their needs, people who use motorised transportation make it more difficult for people who rely on non-motorised transportation to fulfill theirs.
Where did we hear something similar? Right here, on MindsinMotion.net, actually, when we talked to Dr Udo Becker in a series of two (see: Related articles, below).
Food for thought for the delegates circling down the city hall’s never-ending corridors. However, after exiting the building there is something else grasping their attention. During the conference, a parade of green vehicles participating in the Revolve Eco-rally has arrived. Young Londoners are seemingly very interested in the green cars lined up. Or is it the Tesla Roadster in particular that attracts their awareness…?
There was much more going on than we could address in this article. A selection of presentations can be found in LowCVP’s online resources library. Alternatively, make sure to be there next year.
Related articles
Udo Becker:
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