How cities are detoxing transportation Monica Araya
Transcriber: TED Translators Admin
Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
We have known for a long time
that air pollution kills people.
We also know that a climate
emergency is happening.
These are hardly motivating
facts to start a conversation,
but I’m actually here to share good news.
For the first time in our lifetimes,
a big detox of transportation is possible,
despite the many problems we have,
or perhaps because of them.
The lockdowns of 2020 have been tough,
but they also give us a glimpse of life
without the usual noise,
congestion and pollution,
confronting us with questions
about the way we live.
The tailpipe is a symbol
of our worst habits –
habits that we have
normalized for too long:
the burning of 100 million
barrels of oil every 24 hours
and the extraction behind that oil,
the fumes choking our cities,
the greenhouse gases
going up in the atmosphere
and overheating our planet.
None of that is normal,
nor is air pollution,
which can shorten life expectancy
by up to 10 years,
depending on where you live.
This is also a matter
of environmental justice
because air pollution hurts everyone,
but it hurts the poor
and minorities disproportionately.
The good news is that things are changing.
Take cities.
First, people around the world
are demanding clean air
and cities are responding
by banning petrol and diesel cars,
mostly by 2030 and 2040;
over 30 cities and regions
are already doing this.
Second, the city space
is going through an overhaul.
Too much space was given to cars,
and cities are reversing this
by blocking traffic from certain streets,
by giving the streets back to pedestrians,
by making the streets greener and safer,
especially for children.
And third, cities are also
prioritizing active mobility,
such as biking and walking.
And the pandemic accelerated
many of these decisions.
From Barcelona to Bogotá,
cities are opening spaces
for bike lanes, for commuters.
Sales of bikes and e-bikes
are booming in many places.
Paris is pioneering the 15-minute city
to put essentials
within a walk or a bike ride,
all within 15 minutes.
I live in Amsterdam, where a profound
transformation is underway.
Amsterdam already promotes
biking, public transit, walking.
So you might be surprised
to hear that even in Amsterdam
there is a problem with air pollution
because of road transportation.
That is why the city
of Amsterdam has a plan
to go emissions-free by 2030.
And the plan builds on the idea
of an expanding zero-emission zone
going from the center
outwards in three phases.
By 2022, all buses and coaches circulating
in the city center must be emissions-free.
By 2025, the zone expands
and all public and commercial traffic
must be emissions-free.
Public buses, coaches, taxis, vans,
small, medium and large trucks.
That also includes
mopeds, ferries and boats.
By 2030, the zone expands further,
and by then all transportation
must be emissions-free,
including personal cars and motorcycles.
No more tailpipes.
And that is just nine years away.
Living here and witnessing firsthand
how Amsterdam becomes
a front-runner of electric mobility
is a powerful reminder
that the big societal imperative
of halving carbon emissions
by 2030
goes beyond nudging people
away from personal cars.
The systemic change we need
requires that all modes
of transportation go emissions-free
powered by renewables,
and we have to achieve
that while making sure
that our needs are met
as citizens and as business.
And to do this, we need to
electrify pretty much everything.
Cities cannot do this alone,
so we need national governments
to play a fundamental role too.
The European Union, for example,
has CO2 emission standards
for vehicle manufacturers,
and over a dozen of European
countries have set up plans
to phase out petrol and diesel cars –
France by 2040,
the United Kingdom by 2035.
China and California have mandates
to accelerate the manufacturing
of zero-emission models.
California just passed a rule
that requires that 50 percent
of the sales of trucks in the state
are zero-emissions by 2035
and all of them must be
zero-emission by 2045.
This is a game changer
for the trucking industry.
Vehicle manufacturing
is shifting towards electrification.
Look at some of the milestones,
which were unthinkable a few years back.
Volkswagen has converted
a traditional plant
into one that will produce
only electric vehicles.
Daimler is halting all the development
of internal combustion engines.
And Tesla is more valuable
today than ExxonMobil.
This year, public charging plugs
hit the one million mark
around the world.
Fleet owners are shifting
towards zero-emission models.
Amazon alone has ordered
100,000 electric delivery vans
and nearly 90 global
companies have joined EV100,
an international initiative
to electrify fleets by 2030 starting now.
These are still small steps
compared to the scale
of our oil addiction,
but they signal a new direction of travel.
What’s really exciting
is that the technologies we need
for this transformation are here today,
commercially available,
getting cheaper and getting better.
Look at batteries.
Their cost went down
90 percent in 10 years,
and there are new opportunities
to repurpose these batteries
for energy storage
or to recycle them once they wear down.
The race to zero needs capital.
So we need more urgency
and directionality
in the financial industry
because it is heavily
invested in fossil fuels.
To reach scale and speed,
we will need clever combinations
of finance and policy.
Look at what’s going on
with electric buses.
China has a fleet
of 420,000 electric buses
compared to 600
in the entire United States.
To put that into perspective,
Santiago de Chile alone
has 455 electric buses, and growing,
thanks to an ingenious
financial arrangement.
Africa now has its first
manufacturing plant of electric buses.
And P4G, a global initiative,
is working with emerging economies
that want to scale up
the electrification of buses.
Colombia is first in line,
designing a fund of 2.2 billion dollars
to electrify 6,000 buses over time.
There is, and there will be,
resistance to change.
There is even an inability
to imagine that change is possible.
In reality, change happens exponentially.
Look at what happened to solar energy.
Exponential change can bring turmoil
if the decline of old
industries is not managed.
It can bring economic
dislocation and job disruption.
So wouldn’t it be wiser to prepare
and design just transitions
now rather than later?
Here’s the bottom line.
The end of internal combustion
engine is within sight.
The question is no longer
whether this will happen,
but when.
Ten years?
Twenty years?
It depends on us and the choices
that we make this decade.
So now is the time to go bigger and faster
towards a future without a tailpipe,
a future where we can meet
our transportation needs
and have people-friendly streets,
a future with a thriving
economy and clean air,
a future we choose
for the climate and for our health.
Thank you.