About Mattie
Mattie is the Coordinator of the Ohio Student Environmental Coalition, based in Columbus. He founded OSEC at Power Shift 07, and is proud to support a growing statewide network of student groups working for a clean, safe, and just future for all. Mattie originally got involved as a Syracuse University student who saw a pressing need for climate action, later as an Energy Justice Network intern who began to realize the human impacts of coal, and finally as an OSEC organizer committed to building an economy and climate worth fighting for. He also has a degree in women's studies and sociology, is a founding member of the Mountain Justice Spring Break Planning Collective and an intentional community in Columbus, and is the convener of the Energy Action Coalition's Dismantling Oppression working group.
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IPCC reported that 85% or so of energy use is in driving, not production.
Don’t the hybrid batteries get recycled?
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg3/100.htm
I’ve got a source that I’ve been sitting on for a while that makes this conversation irrelevant:
“an embodied energy factor of 1.50, or 150% direct fuel use is required to build and operate a car (cell G90). Fifteen percent is additional energy to build the car, and 35 % is the indirect energy consumed to build the physical infrastructure needed for automobile use (highways, bridges, etc.).”
http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/projects/cases/footprint/calculations%20transportation.html
In English, it’s saying that about 1/3 of our transportation sector energy consumption is spent just building and maintaining infrastructure. If this source is correct, this means that even if we completely stopped driving and building new vehicles today, we would only cut transportation energy consumption by 2/3.
Any informed thoughts on whether this is accurate?
If we stopped driving today, we would have hardly any infrastructure costs. I just heard on the radio that costs of infrastructure maintenance have already gone as a result of higher gas prices and people driving less this summer. That is to say, some projects people thought would need started on by the end of summer haven’t been started, because the road wear wasn’t as bad as anticipated.
I’m equating costs to energy consumption here, hope that makes sense.
Those emissions associated with creating asphalt, etc are probably not normally counted under the transportation sector- more of an industrial issue. You could cap cement and asphalt makers under cap and trade and make them pay for their carbon and find alternatives.