Climate 411

Donlen, GreenDriver and EDF Commit to Reducing 20% of Fleet Emissions by 2016

(Posted earlier today on our sister blog, EDF Innovation Exchange)

Today, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) joins with Donlen, a leading fleet management company, and GreenDriver™ in a commitment towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the commercial fleet sector by 20% over the next five years. This pledge is being made at the annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting, attended by Gary Rappeport, Donlen CEO; and Fred Krupp, President, EDF. We invite others to join this effort too, including commercial fleets, fleet management companies and environmental organizations. Together, we can make a difference.

Stabilizing the Earth’s climate is the critical environmental challenge of our time. Many effects of global warming are already being felt and will only grow worse with inaction. Vehicles in corporate fleets release 45 million metrics tons of emissions each year. Reducing the emissions from commercial fleet vehicles can be part of the solution to tackling this challenge.

Opportunities for reducing emissions are plentiful. Right-sizing vehicles to match the job at hand, reducing miles through improved routing, moving to more efficient models, adopting “fuel-smart” driving behaviors [PDF], cutting idling, and deploying advanced technology vehicles are a few of the tactics available. All of these offer significant payback on investment. A few require no upfront investment at all. Each of these tactics is delivering emissions reductions today.

Good emissions management is not unlike good business management. For any company to get the most out of these or other tactics, it needs a long-term vision and a strategic plan formulated for its unique needs and circumstances. Our joint commitment through the Clinton Global Initiative provides joining companies a vision: reduce emissions 20% between now and the end of 2016. Because it is performance-based, the commitment is agnostic on the pathway accompany uses to meet the goal. It remains incumbent on the company to undertake the planning process on how to meet the goal.

The goal is in reach for many companies already. Consider that 80 of the 300 companies with 1,000 or more vehicles have a publicly announced greenhouse gas emissions reduction target. Many companies have already achieved reductions of this magnitude in fleet emissions. The next five years will also see the availability of more efficient vehicles through increases CAFE standards, while electric and other advanced technology vehicles will become more widely available too. Together, the fleet industry can meet this challenge.

Of course, a few companies will face greater challenges given the specific requirements for their vehicles. We welcome these companies into the fold too. Every ton reduced matters.

During the past five years, the commercial fleet industry has created infrastructure to track emissions and developed a deep understanding of how to successfully deploy many emission reducing tactics. EDF believes that the industry is ready to take the next step and start to collectively act towards this aggressive, yet achievable emissions reduction goal.

We applaud Donlen and GreenDriver™ for taking a central role in coordinating this commitment. We look forward to working with both companies and the entire fleet industry to meet this challenge. Together, we can make a difference.

For information about how your company can join this effort, visit http://www.donlen.com/clinton-global-initiative.aspx.

Also posted in News / Comments are closed

From the blogosphere: new green jobs, a proposal on low carbon fuel standards, and VoteVets supports clean energy legislation

Treehugger and CleanTechnica both wrote on the new Council on Economic Advisors report finding that nearly 1 million new jobs were created by the stimulus bill, and “one of the areas where Recovery Act funds are stimulating the most private investment is the clean energy sector.”

In response to reports that senators are considering adding a low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) into the pending climate and energy bill, Michael Levi blogged about what impact this might have on the legislation, potential obstacles and opportunities. While he lauds the goal of reducing emissions, he recommends adding a price ceiling on the tradable permits refiners, blenders, and importers would be required to hold.

Grist posted the new ad from VoteVets, in which Brigadier Gen. Steven Anderson, “who served under Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, calls clean energy legislation not only a military priority, but an American mission.”

Also posted in Climate Change Legislation, Economics, News, Policy / Comments are closed

Personal Car Sharing: Save the Environment without Moving a Muscle

Personal car sharing, a better way to get to the mountains without buying a new car. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Arthaey.

Across the country, car sharing has taken off. Programs like Zipcar, PhillyCarShare, Car2Go in Austin, Texas, City CarShare in San Francisco, as well as big name rental companies like Hertz and Enterprise, are helping people get around without owning a car. For many people who don’t want the hassle of car ownership—insurance, trips to the DMV, high gas prices, and parking—this is an easy option for the times they need a car to get to the beach or reach a far flung place not accessible via transit or bike.

By sharing rather than owning, car share participants cut their average vehicle use, which means a cut in gasoline consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and smog-forming pollution. A UC Berkeley study done for San Francisco’s City CarShare, found that 30% of City CarShare households sold one or more of their cars after joining the program and automobile travel among members dropped 47%. The study concluded that City CarShare members save 720 gallons of gas or 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions on a daily basis.

A new state bill, AB 1871, will be coming up for a vote on the Assembly floor next week. Introduced by California Assemblyman Dave Jones (D-Sacramento), AB 1871 would take car sharing one step further by removing some important barriers to car sharing. This has great potential for a range of arrangements that would ultimately lead to a reduction of vehicles in a given neighborhood.

Suppose, for instance, you’d  like to buy an SUV because you anticipate going skiing, or maybe you might want to buy a light-duty truck because every year you need it to haul your grandma’s jams to the farmer’s market. If you knew you could easily share a neighbor’s SUV or truck located just a block or two from your home, you might not feel compelled to buy the gas guzzler, and instead, opt for a smaller car for daily use.

In exchange for sharing his or her vehicle, under AB 1871, your neighbor with the truck would be reimbursed for the costs of operation by the car sharing company. This would help defray some of the truck’s fixed expenses, such as parking costs, though AB 1871 caps the reimbursement so the vehicle doesn’t become a commercial enterprise for the owner.

While this makes sense on paper, what happens when someone scratches the handle or gets into a more serious accident while driving your car? The basic gist of AB 1871 is this insurance piece, which is a tricky one. Currently, if an individual opts to put his or her own car into a car sharing program, a typical insurance company would consider the vehicle to be a commercial vehicle and would invalidate the individual’s personal insurance.

AB 1871 addresses this by clearly demarcating  liability. When a person’s personal vehicle is in the car sharing program, the program assumes all liabilities, and when it is in the owner’s possession, it goes back to being a personal vehicle covered by the owner’s own insurance.  This clear demarcation is helped through technology that records when the car is and isn’t under the car sharing program’s control.

These insurance fixes widen the scope of existing car sharing companies without putting more cars on the road. Carsharing programs are tough to get started in lower density areas as demand just isn’t high enough, and the capital costs of purchasing new fleets often isn’t worth it. With personal car sharing, these programs can begin to move out of urban areas, expanding transportation choices for more people.

The personal vehicle sharing company behind this legislation, Spride, is a Silicon Valley company started up by venture capitalist Sunil Paul. If AB 1871 is enacted, Spride aims to link up with San Francisco’s CityCarshare to run a pilot program, using the web and social networking to pair people with cars, with pricing based on make and model.

Car share aficionados in other states—especially Massachusetts where RelayRides is working– are watching what happens with the California legislation. Personal car sharing presents an innovative transportation choice that is financially smart, reduces greenhouse gases, and improves air quality. People want a variety of mobility options, and personal car sharing is a really creative way to solve these needs.

Posted in Cars and Pollution / Comments are closed

Hail to the Chief, Indeed: President’s truck order will bring fuel-saving technologies to scale

This was originally posted on the Innovation Exchange blog.

There is no question that tools exists today to significantly reduce fuel consumption by medium and heavy-duty trucks. The recent National Academy of Sciences’ report on reducing emissions from these vehicles explored this in-depth as did another recent report from NESCAUM. The key question is: can we deploy these tools at an acceptable cost?

The answer is closer to “yes” than ever before, thanks in part to President Obama’s statement last week instructing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop rules to reduce emissions from medium and heavy-duty trucks – which consume over a quarter of the nation’s liquid fuels.

The most advanced of our fuel-saving tools, such as the hybrid system for medium-duty trucks, face a significant upfront cost barrier. While these systems can payback over the lifetime of the vehicle, the ROI timeline is too extended for most businesses to justify the cost without external incentives. Other, more incremental strategies such as single-wide tires face cultural and cost barriers as well. The resulting upfront capital cost versus long-term operating savings conundrum slows the adoption of these tools and delays emission reductions.

Fuel-saving components need to be produced at a large enough scale to spread out the fixed costs over time while simultaneously bringing the dollar cost down. By creating a nationwide standard for greenhouse gas emissions, the President has put us on a path to finally reach this scale. Imagine that instead of spreading the fix costs of developing and producing medium-duty hybrid powertrains, or single wide tires over a few hundred vehicles a year, these costs are spread over tens of thousands of trucks annually. The ROI for any one unit will instantly be much more attractive. This is what can happen with a strong federal rule.

How will this impact the business community? Consumers, shippers and carriers will be better off with more efficient, cleaner trucks. Operating costs will be lower and less exposed to fuel price volatility. The increased capital costs should be manageable with the advantages of scaled economies. Some of the increased upfront cost will likely be recouped through hire residual values too.

Of course, technological improvements alone aren’t sufficient. There remain many opportunities to reduce emissions through better operational practices, particularly for freight. From reducing empty backhauls, cutting idling, dropping curb weight, decreasing packaging and improving trucking loading, every truck trip can get more done. Some trips can be avoided all together or simply moved to more efficient modes of transportation.

Medium-and-heavy duty trucks will continue to play a vital role as we transition into a carbon constrained world. These trucks are needed to deliver food and beverages to restaurants and stores, drop off packages at homes and offices, and move goods across the nation. However, they will use less fuel for each of these actions. That’s a good thing for the environment, our pocketbooks and energy security.

Also posted in Climate Change Legislation, News, Science / Comments are closed

Mapping the Transit Funding Crisis

Transit cuts from coast to coast.

Today Transportation for America (T4) released an updated map of widespread transit cuts, layoffs, fare increases and service cuts across the U.S.

At Way2Go, we’ve written frequently about this transit funding crisis, as it is harming our mobility at a time when getting to work cleanly, reliably and inexpensively is very important. We’ve focused on how these cuts have affected communities throughout the country—rural, suburban, urban neighborhoods—and who it affects–students, less affluent citizens, and seniors.

And Americans do not want to see these cuts. T4’s most recent poll numbers, which we blogged about a few weeks ago, show that Americans want improved and better public transportation, and those polled would be willing to almost double current federal spending for public transportation, which is now at 18 cents to every dollar, to 37 cents to every dollar.

T4’s map is extensive, but needs your input. With public transportation ridership at record highs from coast to coast, these funding cuts are felt by many. Check out T4’s map to see if your town or city has been properly accounted for, so that T4 can articulate the true extent of this funding crisis.

Posted in Cars and Pollution / Comments are closed

Traffic-Related Air Pollution Linked to Higher Miscarriage Rates

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The dangerous link between transportation and public health.

It is well-documented that traffic-related air pollution can lead to increased respiratory problems such as asthma. Several recent studies have also shown that emissions from cars, trucks, buses, and other vehicles can damage health in other ways, too. These include decreased brain function, increased heart attack risk, higher premature death rates, increased childhood allergies [PDF] — and now, higher miscarriage rates.

Specifically, nonsmokers and African American women living near busy roads are statistically more likely to miscarry within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, according to a new study, “Residential Exposure to Traffic and Spontaneous Abortion,” published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The study was produced by a team of scientists at the California Environmental Protection Agency, the California Department of Public Health, and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.

The authors examined data collected from women in California and found that pregnant African-American women who lived within 50 meters of heavy traffic were three times more likely to miscarry than African-American women who live in low-traffic areas. Nonsmokers living near busy roads were about 50 percent more likely to miscarry.

Though further studies with larger sample sizes are needed to confirm the findings, this study contributes to the mounting evidence on the harmful effects of traffic-related air pollution. It provides one more among a list of reasons to create a transportation system that pollutes much less than today’s system. Federal, state and local transportation policy needs to provide incentives to clean up dirty diesel engines, reduce traffic congestion, offer cleaner transportation choices, and generally create a more efficient and less polluting transportation system for people and freight.

Posted in Cars and Pollution / Comments are closed