Can you elaborate? This piece could conceivably be criticized from a few different directions, but your comment provides no indication of what specific issues you have with it.
So, there is no single silver bullet to the climate crisis. Canada needs to walk and chew gum, so to speak. And juggle while riding a unicycle. We do have some of the worst per capita carbon emissions on earth. That's a fact. And transportation accounts for a significant chunk of that. Yes, we need to make air travel more sustainable. More importantly, we need to fly less. And we really need to drive less.
In this country, the climate crisis is also the multimodal mobility crisis. That's why a consumer carbon tax can't work here as a behaviourial incentive the way it worked in countries like Sweden. Canadians are forced to drive. By design. There's no viable alternative to getting around. If they cycle, they get killed or at least threatened by entitled drivers. If they walk across a street, they get threatened. There's little to no regional passenger rail. What there is is slow, inefficient and over-priced.
Yes, HSR is a glamour project. Yes, Trudeau is notoriously attracted to glamour projects and has no follow-through. Yes, public-private-partnerships ALWAYS deliver cost over-runs and the ALTO deal is poorly structured. But Windsor-Quebec corridor accounts for almost 20 million people. It is PERFECT for HSR. The landscape is relatively flat. It couldn't be more perfect. The number of flights each and every week between Montreal Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport and Toronto Pearson is 541. 541! That is insane. No matter how efficient jet fuel becomes – that will NEVER be sustainable.
HSR only works as a backbone to a broader network of regional electric passenger rail. Canada is a growing country. Passenger rail shouldn't respond to the current mobility crisis – Toronto and Vancouver have some of the worst traffic in North America – they must also proactively shape where and how new, denser, less car-dependent communities are formed. Yes, this means the housing crisis is also the multimodal mobility crisis is also the climate crisis. They can it a polycrisis for a reason. More sustainable flying can never address unjust car-centric community planning the way passenger rail can. That much is obvious to all urbanists worth their salt.
Pitting HSR against more sustainable aviation fuel is a weak, bad faith, reductionist, and forced argument. It just makes no sense. From a seemingly smart urbanist, it's frankly shocking. So the issue becomes you. How did you arrive at such an absurd conclusion? The most likely answer is car-brain. You're not alone. Canadians regularly underestimate how damaging car-brain can be on the human psyche. You owe it to yourself to self-diagnose and find a path back from the abyss. Here's an article to get started on the path to recovery. Good luck!
Mobility as politics: the inequality of movement from transport to climate change.
Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day. We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and extreme challenges of urbanization. At the same time it is difficult to ignore the deaths of thousands of migrants at sea or in deserts, the xenophobic treatment of foreign-born populations, refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the persistence of racist violence and ethnic exclusions on our front doorstep. This, in turn, is connected to other kinds of uneven mobility: relations between people, access to transport, urban infrastructures and global resources such as food, water, and energy.
In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of mobility. She shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, connecting these scales of the body, street, city, nation, and planet into one overarching theory of mobility justice. This can be seen on a local level in the differential circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and 'the right to the city'. On the planetary scale, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other kinetic elites are able to roam freely, the military origins of global infrastructure, and the contested politics of migration and restricted borders.
Mobility Justice offers a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility of a world in which the mobility commons has been enclosed.
"How did you arrive at such an absurd conclusion? The most likely answer is car-brain. You're not alone. Canadians regularly underestimate how damaging car-brain can be on the human psyche. You owe it to yourself to self-diagnose and find a path back from the abyss. Here's an article to get started on the path to recovery. Good luck!"
Oh dear. You do know I have designed bus rapid-transit lines, don't you? I have spent my career trying to improve urban mobility.
The surest sign of an ideologue is that they believe those who disagree with them must be stupid, or crazy, or grifters... so I will do you the favour (which you have not extended to me) of assuming that you are reasoning from different principles than I am.
People who don't believe CO2 emissions need to be reduced at all will likely find all proposals like this to be ludicrously misguided. But let's leave them aside....
The difficulty with SAF is the truly prodigious amount of energy that needs to be put into CO2 to hydrogenate it and "reverse combust" it back to kerosene. This is one of many proposals for net zero that assume that vast supplies of very cheap non-emitting electricity will become available. (This is how an economist stranded on a desert island with nothing but a can of beans manages to survive: "Assume a can opener.")
If you have nearly free electricity then yes you can make all the SAF you need. But I'm not so sure that Canada has inexhaustible hydroelectric power or will build enough windmills to accomplish this. The linked explainer said it would take all the electricity currently produced in the United States to make the world's aircraft run on SAF. (And then there are the military requirements to consider.) Most of these green dreams used to imagine that we would be building nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow but this just doesn't seem to be very likely anymore. And wind and solar aren't free. And there will be many, many other projects, like road transportation and green hydrogen for storage and CO2 capture for its own sake (beyond what will be added back to the atmosphere as SAF) that are also going to be calling on all this abundant electricity that doesn't exist yet.
More likely if countries are serious about getting to Net Zero ever -- and I really don't think any are, although the elites of Britain, Germany, and Canada seem to ready to inflict great pain on their inhabitants while they try -- they will just have to curtain aviation altogether except on official government business. And of course those private citizens who know the right apparatchiks to get the requisite stamps in their internal passports.
It seems to me to be more reasonable to imagine we will build sustainable energy production at scale, and use it to build e-SAF, than that we will reserve air travel in the way you describe. And if we believe that is so, then why not start now? But if we don't believe it is so, then we have larger problems than this
I wonder how well this scales up? Canada uses X litres of aviation fuel per day, replacing that entirely with SAF would require Y kWH of renewable energy and Z tons of biomass... how do those numbers fit with Canada's potential in those areas? And what is the global potential?
As Ben notes in his explainer, bio-SAF only makes sense for *waste* biomass. If you're growing plants to turn into bio-SAF, it's far better for the planet to instead use that patch of ground to build solar/wind farms for electricity to make e-SAF.
Bio-SAF is a stopgap measure while e-SAF gets going, and then is a secondary supplier of SAF (might as well use waste biomass for this, rather than simply disposing of it)
This post is so ludicrously misguided that it made the choice easy to unsubscribe. Thanks!
You're welcome!
You’re a real pundit now! 😜
You know you've made it as a writer when you get your first poorly-explained angry comment.
Can you elaborate? This piece could conceivably be criticized from a few different directions, but your comment provides no indication of what specific issues you have with it.
So, there is no single silver bullet to the climate crisis. Canada needs to walk and chew gum, so to speak. And juggle while riding a unicycle. We do have some of the worst per capita carbon emissions on earth. That's a fact. And transportation accounts for a significant chunk of that. Yes, we need to make air travel more sustainable. More importantly, we need to fly less. And we really need to drive less.
In this country, the climate crisis is also the multimodal mobility crisis. That's why a consumer carbon tax can't work here as a behaviourial incentive the way it worked in countries like Sweden. Canadians are forced to drive. By design. There's no viable alternative to getting around. If they cycle, they get killed or at least threatened by entitled drivers. If they walk across a street, they get threatened. There's little to no regional passenger rail. What there is is slow, inefficient and over-priced.
Yes, HSR is a glamour project. Yes, Trudeau is notoriously attracted to glamour projects and has no follow-through. Yes, public-private-partnerships ALWAYS deliver cost over-runs and the ALTO deal is poorly structured. But Windsor-Quebec corridor accounts for almost 20 million people. It is PERFECT for HSR. The landscape is relatively flat. It couldn't be more perfect. The number of flights each and every week between Montreal Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport and Toronto Pearson is 541. 541! That is insane. No matter how efficient jet fuel becomes – that will NEVER be sustainable.
HSR only works as a backbone to a broader network of regional electric passenger rail. Canada is a growing country. Passenger rail shouldn't respond to the current mobility crisis – Toronto and Vancouver have some of the worst traffic in North America – they must also proactively shape where and how new, denser, less car-dependent communities are formed. Yes, this means the housing crisis is also the multimodal mobility crisis is also the climate crisis. They can it a polycrisis for a reason. More sustainable flying can never address unjust car-centric community planning the way passenger rail can. That much is obvious to all urbanists worth their salt.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-is-finally-getting-high-speed-rail-its-time-for-the-countrys/
Pitting HSR against more sustainable aviation fuel is a weak, bad faith, reductionist, and forced argument. It just makes no sense. From a seemingly smart urbanist, it's frankly shocking. So the issue becomes you. How did you arrive at such an absurd conclusion? The most likely answer is car-brain. You're not alone. Canadians regularly underestimate how damaging car-brain can be on the human psyche. You owe it to yourself to self-diagnose and find a path back from the abyss. Here's an article to get started on the path to recovery. Good luck!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267
PS. As you clearly have not, please also read Mimi Sheller's landmark Mobility Justice:
The Politics of Movement in An Age of Extremes
https://www.versobooks.com/products/753-mobility-justice
From the dust jacket:
Mobility as politics: the inequality of movement from transport to climate change.
Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day. We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and extreme challenges of urbanization. At the same time it is difficult to ignore the deaths of thousands of migrants at sea or in deserts, the xenophobic treatment of foreign-born populations, refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the persistence of racist violence and ethnic exclusions on our front doorstep. This, in turn, is connected to other kinds of uneven mobility: relations between people, access to transport, urban infrastructures and global resources such as food, water, and energy.
In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of mobility. She shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, connecting these scales of the body, street, city, nation, and planet into one overarching theory of mobility justice. This can be seen on a local level in the differential circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and 'the right to the city'. On the planetary scale, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other kinetic elites are able to roam freely, the military origins of global infrastructure, and the contested politics of migration and restricted borders.
Mobility Justice offers a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility of a world in which the mobility commons has been enclosed.
"How did you arrive at such an absurd conclusion? The most likely answer is car-brain. You're not alone. Canadians regularly underestimate how damaging car-brain can be on the human psyche. You owe it to yourself to self-diagnose and find a path back from the abyss. Here's an article to get started on the path to recovery. Good luck!"
Oh dear. You do know I have designed bus rapid-transit lines, don't you? I have spent my career trying to improve urban mobility.
The surest sign of an ideologue is that they believe those who disagree with them must be stupid, or crazy, or grifters... so I will do you the favour (which you have not extended to me) of assuming that you are reasoning from different principles than I am.
What is frankly shocking is how seemingly smart people can stoop to personal insults on social media.
People who don't believe CO2 emissions need to be reduced at all will likely find all proposals like this to be ludicrously misguided. But let's leave them aside....
The difficulty with SAF is the truly prodigious amount of energy that needs to be put into CO2 to hydrogenate it and "reverse combust" it back to kerosene. This is one of many proposals for net zero that assume that vast supplies of very cheap non-emitting electricity will become available. (This is how an economist stranded on a desert island with nothing but a can of beans manages to survive: "Assume a can opener.")
If you have nearly free electricity then yes you can make all the SAF you need. But I'm not so sure that Canada has inexhaustible hydroelectric power or will build enough windmills to accomplish this. The linked explainer said it would take all the electricity currently produced in the United States to make the world's aircraft run on SAF. (And then there are the military requirements to consider.) Most of these green dreams used to imagine that we would be building nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow but this just doesn't seem to be very likely anymore. And wind and solar aren't free. And there will be many, many other projects, like road transportation and green hydrogen for storage and CO2 capture for its own sake (beyond what will be added back to the atmosphere as SAF) that are also going to be calling on all this abundant electricity that doesn't exist yet.
More likely if countries are serious about getting to Net Zero ever -- and I really don't think any are, although the elites of Britain, Germany, and Canada seem to ready to inflict great pain on their inhabitants while they try -- they will just have to curtain aviation altogether except on official government business. And of course those private citizens who know the right apparatchiks to get the requisite stamps in their internal passports.
It seems to me to be more reasonable to imagine we will build sustainable energy production at scale, and use it to build e-SAF, than that we will reserve air travel in the way you describe. And if we believe that is so, then why not start now? But if we don't believe it is so, then we have larger problems than this
I wonder how well this scales up? Canada uses X litres of aviation fuel per day, replacing that entirely with SAF would require Y kWH of renewable energy and Z tons of biomass... how do those numbers fit with Canada's potential in those areas? And what is the global potential?
As Ben notes in his explainer, bio-SAF only makes sense for *waste* biomass. If you're growing plants to turn into bio-SAF, it's far better for the planet to instead use that patch of ground to build solar/wind farms for electricity to make e-SAF.
Bio-SAF is a stopgap measure while e-SAF gets going, and then is a secondary supplier of SAF (might as well use waste biomass for this, rather than simply disposing of it)