100 years from now - cars won't be your problem

Engineering on the job

The different fields of engineering are not well understood by the general public but they are expected to make things work, provide essential services, grow the economy. All of the unsustainable activities we enjoy are actually well engineered systems, they work and they are doing what they were meant to do.  We seem to be stuck in a conundrum loop. 

Transition Engineering is a pretty simple idea – there is a methodology that all engineers will learn and use to develop and carry out the transition projects in every engineered system.  This is the same thing that happened 100 years ago when a simple, but heretical idea emerged in the engineering fields of the time – safety engineering.  Most people may not even be aware of the rater straight-forward methodologies of safety engineering that were set out in 1911. But – nobody wants to be in the future where safety engineering did not emerge and become a professional norm in all engineering fields. Of course, more immediate hazards to individuals are the focus of safety engineering, and we are now talking about more global and longer term system failures… but the key idea is that a livable future depends on near term transition. The essential elements of the energy transition are (1) engineering profession-wide attention to the requirements set out at COP21 and other science-based factors of un-sustainability, (2) engineering profession-wide responsibility for change of existing products and systems, and (3) an engineering profession-wide simple methodology for transition engineering. 

• •       Provide honest and fact-based information to employers, policy makers and the public
• •       Work on systems within your technical expertise
• •       Prevent what is preventable
• •       Use the Transition Engineering Methodology to develop feasible, viable and relevant shift projects in your area of knowledge and experience, and carry them out.

Just delivering what the market wants

For the past 30 years I have watched engineering research and development essentially be distracted away from transition by “green growth” and green technology. It is like an optical illusion. Once you get under the hood (so to speak) of each of the string of “new technologies that could solve our problems”  you find out they could not and they won’t because we don’t even have the problem definition right.  Let me see if I can get them in the right order:

•  Compact cars (fuel efficiency in response to the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. Yes, a good thing, but here we are at less than 20% of market)

•  Lower speed limit (Yes, a good thing, but really only works on highways, and the highways and cars are capable of higher speed, so here we are)

•  Carpooling (Yes, higher utilization of an existing investment in materials and infrastructure is a good thing, but it was the least used energy saving option during the height of the OPEC oil embargo)

•  Electric vehicles (who killed the electric car, or were batteries just not good enough yet?)

•  Hydrogen vehicles (if batteries are your problem, then how about a never ending source of energy?)

•  Biofuels (if fossil fuels are your problem, then renewable fuels must be the answer? Maybe, but using food to make liquid fuel for cars, and cutting down old growth jungle to make palm plantations… can be done, but isn’t turning out the way we envisioned)

•  Hypercars (made of carbon fiber composites and other space age materials and so efficient they spew fuel back out at you, and they had a high priest of cheap, abundant energy giving TED talks about them…)

•  Hybrid vehicles (Yes, lower fuel use and pollution in stop-and-go traffic, but never moved above 3-5% of market)

•  Biofuels again (ok, this time we will use wood and grass cellulose – 4th generation, give it a better name)

•  Electric vehicles again (Li-ion batteries like in our cell phones are much lighter and more energy dense than lead acid, and we have a high wizard of electric cars to sell us on the idea)

•  Uber cars (isn’t that just a car that made 2 extra trips to come get you then go somewhere else?)

•  Self-driving cars (um, we aren’t even sure what problem it was that the self driving car is the answer to, but it is exciting, and it has the word “google” associated so it we believe)

•  Pool Cars/ Car Sharing (Yes, indeed fewer cars overall is actually going in the right direction)

   Click-Bait Cars:

• •       Cars that fold up
• •       Cars powered by compressed air
• •       Cars powered by fly-wheels
• •       Cars that hop on a monorail and shoot off to your destination
• •       Cars powered by wind whirligigs mounted on them
• •       Cars that fly
• •       Cars Cars Cars – here we are, and where were we going? 

What have been the real problems of unsustainable harm with cars that actually have had engineering transitions?  

Human survival in vehicle impact – yes, seat belts and other restraints and engineering of the frame have transitioned personal vehicles away from assured death in just about any impact. 

Air pollution – yes, combustion science in the injection, cylinders etc, oxygen sensor and controls, and catalytic converters… The emissions from a new EPA compliant and EU compliant vehicle are 400 times lower than in the 1960’s. 

Recycling – yes to some degree the materials mined and processed to make vehicles are being recovered more now certainly more than in the 1970’s

Fun Facts

However, 99% of the actual vehicles actually manufactured and actually in reality driven, regardless of the platform technology, require at least 300 barrels of oil energy equivalent to produce, and will only ever consume liquid petroleum fossil fuel. That is the reality of the car.

The fact is that the PROBLEM is cars. Personal cars require high use of materials and energy, but produce nothing, and provide no essential services (e.g. Food, Water, Shelter, Social Interaction). Accessing an essential service is not the same as the service.  An economy can only sustain this kind of consumption, and in particular sustain the spending on infrastructure to facilitate the consumption, as long as there is sufficient surplus from all of the productive sectors. Economic surplus peaked about 1974 and is running down pretty rapidly, even as the maintenance bill for the 1970-1980’s car infrastructure grows. And we aren’t even talking about climate change yet. 

By 100 years from now, the world will have figured this out. The old 20th century infrastructure and private property will have been re-developed, and “cars” won’t be the problem. 

So – what happens between now and 100 years from now?  A Transition.

There isn’t another planet to mine to finance the transition projects of re-developing our car mobility world into the accessibility world. The only place to get the surplus from for the transition is from reduced purchases of oil, metal, rubber, plastics, pavement, concrete for non-productive and non-essential purposes. 

We do understand the kinds of changes that need to take place. But in the same way we understand that a bridge is needed to get over a river. That understanding does not get the analysis, financing, site investigations, geotechnical engineering, hydrogeology, design and construction done for any particular bridge for any particular purpose on any particular river. What if all your civil engineers were too busy to deal with bridges because they were all getting public funding to design and build rollercoasters?  What if the companies that build rollercoasters and run fun-parks had gotten huge and politically powerful? And what if the university programs had shifted away from teaching about old-fashioned bridges and most students now studied only rollercoasters?  You might find that you are stuck in an economic nonsense loop.  If some professors at the university finally were honest with the public and policymakers that rollercoasters were really chewing up too much resources and more and more rollercoasters were not really sustainable, especially because most bridges were at risk of falling down… And if a few of the professors stopped taking research funding to develop hydrogen powered rollercoasters and solar powered rollercoasters…. Then maybe the change of perspective needed for the work of transition would start within the education system.   But because the economy had been built up around rollercoasters, the students would need to learn a methodology to develop bridge projects again, within the context of the rollercoaster economy.