How Autonomous Vehicles Can Help Fight Climate Change
By: Dave Olsen
Tags: Economics, Climate Change, Environment, Transportation, Autonomous Cars

How Autonomous Vehicles Can Help Fight Climate Change

It’s important that we pursue a car-free future. Autonomous vehicles can help to bridge the gap to that future in a sustainable way.

In 2019, transport was the sector with the highest levels of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK, with a 34% share of the UK’s total emissions. That’s more than even energy supply, which stood at 25% of the UK’s emitted CO2. It’s clear that, if we’re going to make any kind of progress towards the net-zero emissions target, then how we travel will have to be radically re-thought over the coming years.

Energy supply has already largely been diversified in the UK, with coal being virtually entirely phased out. Nuclear and renewables accounted for 54% of the UK’s energy supply last year, explaining some of the big drop in energy emissions over the last few years. More efficient technology is constantly being developed too, reducing the need for energy and electricity, and while we should be looking to rapidly quicken the pace, energy emissions are declining promisingly.

As mentioned, nuclear energy has been a big part of that emerging trend. It accounts for roughly 18% of the UK’s energy, helping to reduce emissions. It is not often argued that nuclear is a long-term solution, both because people are acutely aware of the many risks involved concerning meltdown and the storage of waste, and because nuclear fission uses uranium and plutonium, which we only have a finite amount of. Nuclear energy is very efficient, of course, but even with that, it is predicted that uranium supplies will run out in 200 years if we continue using it at the current rate — i.e. if we became dependent on it, it would run out within a couple of generations.

Nuclear fission, therefore, is a bridge fuel: not the end solution, and likely to be fully phased out before long (indeed, Germany is already phasing out all its nuclear reactors in the next few years, following in the footsteps of Italy, and France plans to cut its dependence on it, though not entirely). It is helpful because it allows us to cut high-emissions sources of energy like oil, gas, and coal in the short-term while we improve technological efficiency and our renewable capabilities.

Just as the energy sector has bridge fuels, so too does the transportation sector have bridge transport.

The ultimate aim of policymakers, innovators, and society in general is to bring about a world in which the transportation sector contributes zero net emissions. We are, as the emissions breakdown shows, very significantly far from that world.

Where progress with energy has been more rapid, with the coal mines being forced to shut and many renewable forms of energy proving better value even considering the carbon externality which puts them at a disadvantage, progress with transport has not been particularly quick. And, as I wrote recently in this piece, the pandemic may have semi-permanently changed behaviour, with people preferring private vehicles to undistanced public transport. Given that public transport is usually far better for the environment, this is a worrying trend.

Policymakers have, thus far, failed in their duty to revolutionise the transport sector. A new £27bn package for road-building was recently announced, and even if we decide to let the government off on this count due to the impact of the pandemic on transport habits, there has never been a concerted effort to build infrastructure for electric cars, significantly boost public transport to allow it to replace cars, and equalise the market by introducing carbon pricing.

The aforementioned electric cars are one type of bridge transport: they are not ideal, primarily due to storage issues for the lithium-ion battery waste, but they will help to plug gaps over the coming decades and reduce emissions while satisfying demand. Electrifying planes may also prove possible in the next decade, which will massively reduce emissions from the most polluting mode of transport there is.

But autonomous vehicles are perhaps the best transport innovation we have in to bridge the gap between the status quo and the future we should be aiming for.

In this piece, I set out a more-than-slightly ambitious vision for the future of autonomous cars, as an interconnected network of vehicles which could replace most private transportation, and also replace traditional public transport in some places, operating as a government-owned (or, probably more unpopularly, franchised) network.

The big advantage which autonomous vehicles can offer us in reducing transport emissions is their efficiency. Because they can be connected in a network and communicate with each other and tracking systems in real time, autonomous vehicles will be able to keep fuel efficiency to a maximum and pick the best routes for avoiding congestion, which is particularly damaging to the environment.

Moreover, the sheer number of vehicles which have to be manufactured could be reduced if a network of autonomous vehicles largely replaces private cars, as private cars tend to lay dormant on driveways and roadsides, and in garages, for the vast majority of the day. By contrast, an autonomous network would enable every car to be used for longer each day, leading to a small, but not insignificant, reduction in demand for vehicles, in turn reducing emissions.

We won’t solve all our climate woes by developing a network of autonomous, electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles. But we can bridge the gaps in demand in the short-term, improve efficiency, and pave the way to a future where cars play a minimal role in transportation.

We’ll need a huge effort to revolutionise not just intranational, but also international transport, both for passenger and freight travel. There are no easy solutions, but by developing ways of bridging the status quo to the future, we’ll buy time to find, fund, and implement long-term solutions.