The role of social change in the US transport sector for climate change mitigation

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The role of social change in the US transport sector for climate change mitigation Sudhir Chella Rajan Tellus Institute, 11 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116, USA E-mail: [email protected]

Since 2001, the United States government has blithely avoided developing a coherent climate change policy, even though the US economy is responsible for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, I examine passenger transport, an important source of these emissions, and point out major barriers to achieving deep reductions that are necessary from this sector. Interventions would have to be based on an understanding of social psychology, whereby vehicle users are provided incentives and reasons for changing behaviour and attitudes. These appear to be essential to bring about both the technology policy and behavioural changes needed to meet emission reduction goals. 1. Introduction In 2001, the US administration defected from the Kyoto Protocol, just around the time when the global scientific consensus on climate change was secured, and new threats such as abrupt climate change and regional problems began to be discovered [Zahn, 2003; Alley et al., 2003]. While there has been strong local interest in taking significant action, with several states and city governments developing their own climate change action plans[1], these measures appear too fragmented, too little and perhaps too late to bring total US emissions anywhere close to the stabilization path that was envisioned for the end of the first commitment period (2008-2012) in Kyoto [Bailie et al., 2001]. All this is especially unfortunate, given the significant responsibility of the US for climate change risks. Its annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions constitute one-fifth of the global burden and are equivalent to the combined emissions of the next two highest emitting countries, namely, China and the Russian Federation; its transport sector alone accounts for roughly three-quarters of the total emissions of China, the second largest contributor; and on a per capita basis, its emissions are lower only than Australia’s (after discounting anomalous small oil-producing states such as Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE). Seen from various perspectives, climate change mitigation rests pivotally on committed and principal participation by the US in global emission reduction efforts. In the course of the many fruitless efforts to persuade the US to adopt genuine commitments to reduce emissions, it is now becoming apparent that its non-cooperation in the international climate regime is unlikely to be resolved quickly unless serious changes take place within its own domestic political and cultural landscape. A combination of factors appears to account for the difficulty in getting the US to take coherent and significant steps towards climate change mitigation: an aggressive anti-mitiEnergy for Sustainable Development

gation lobby composed mainly of producers and marketers of energy-intensive goods and services [Darmstadter, 1997; McFarland, 1984]; a dominant social paradigm that reposes faith in material abundance, technology solutions and future prosperity [Dunlap and Liere, 1984]; a relatively weak and divided polity whose policies are buffeted by short-term priorities [Skocpol, 1993]; and a fragmented electorate that remains largely misinformed about global environmental security, national interests and the economic impact of climate change mitigation activities [McCright and Dunlap, 2003]. It is estimated that global annual GHG emissions should drop to roughly one-half of today’s levels by about 2050, and about 90 % by 2100, to provide some margin of safety for stabilizing atmospheric CO2 concentrations at around 450 ppm by the end of the century. Since emissions from developing countries would optimally be at the peak of their own expansion during this timeframe, the US would need to reduce its own emissions by about 75 % relative to current levels as early as 2050. In the absence of serious climate change mitigation policies, however, US emissions are expected to rise by about 50 % in the next half century. The biggest component of the rise will come from transport, whose energy use is expected to grow at the fastest rate (apart from the commercial sector). In 2003, (personal and freight) transport GHG emissions already accounted for about 40 % of total emissions in the US. Passenger transport was responsible for about three-fourths of the total energy consumed in the sector, and private road vehicles (dominated by personal cars and light trucks) contributed, again, to threefourths of the energy consumption for passenger transport[2]. The US Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Reference scenario shows that passenger vehicle kilometres will continue to grow because of income effects in the face of nearly constant driving costs. The fuel economy

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of new petrol-powered light-duty vehicles (LDVs) will improve very modestly till 2025, but the share of sales of alternatively-fuelled vehicles will grow from about 4 to 17 % [EIA, 2003]. The net impact is that petrol use by LDVs will increase by about 56 % during this period. The Reference scenario can be extended beyond 2025 simply by extrapolating trends in fuel share and energy intensity in the latter years of the scenario out to 2050, which gives the result of a near-doubling in LDV petrol use (from about 17 to 27 EJ between 2003 and 2050). The analysis includes modest improvements in fuel economy and carbon intensities as a result of technological evolution and some fuel-switching towards ethanol, but these are more than compensated by growth in travel. Previous analysis on technology options suggests that the fleet average fuel economy will have to more than double by 2050 to maintain highway GHGs at or slightly below 2000 levels [Bernow et al., 2001; DOE, 2004]. More dramatic emission reductions could be expected with the introduction of currently exotic technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells with carbon sequestration to reduce upstream emissions associated with hydrogen conversion, but these are based on as-yet questionable assumptions relating to technical feasibility, commercialization and scale [Keith and Farrell, 2003]. As demonstrated in this paper, however, substantial reductions in travel through land-use and behavioural change will also produce very significant emission reductions, while also paving the way, politically, for other policies such as taxes and technology standards. I argue, therefore, that choosing to stay focussed solely on technocratically-developed policies oriented towards meeting emission targets is a somewhat futile strategy, given significant technological, social and political barriers. Positive changes in public attitudes concerning global responsibilities together with a social aspiration towards less automobile-dependent lifestyles will, however, provide opportunities for adopting new behaviour patterns relating to travel, land use and technology choice, which will in turn lead to substantial emission reductions.

In many countries in the North, and increasingly in the South, governments have provided massive subsidies to promote personal motorised vehicles, primarily through the development of under-priced highway, fuelling and parking infrastructure and services. The logic behind their support has been that passenger transport is of major importance for economic development; moreover, mobility provides people with the freedom to realise their individual and collective purposes effectively. Indeed, while transport growth has been an important driver of economic expansion in many countries, there is also a strong link between income and car use [Goodwin, 1992]. In the US, the proliferation of automobile culture has meant the construction of massive motorways designed for local travel in increasingly expansive metropolitan regions, subsidized parking, and tax policies that charged highway use far lower than its social costs and provided

subsidies for low-density living. An average of 600,000 ha of farmland was lost each year since 1960 to strip malls, highways, roads, parking-lots, resorts, service stations, single-family homes, and the like, while the average number of cars in use grew nearly five times and the average vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) per American increased by nearly half. The negative consequences of these changes are well known: sprawl, loss of open public spaces, congestion, injuries and fatalities due to accidents, inefficient transit performance, loss of mobility and access for the poor, the elderly and the disabled, and local and global environmental pollution [Cervero, 1986; Ewing, 1994; NAP, 1998]. The ironic outcome of the proliferation of cars is that it has become very difficult to regulate the entire complex of ‘‘automobility’’, comprising the mammoth enterprise of manufacturing and marketing cars, the creation of a built environment to support them, and social attitudes towards cars. Each is supported by the others, so that policy-makers have tended to be quite cautious about setting policies that appear to be unpalatable to the multitude of individual drivers. Thus, while establishing local air pollution regulations, environmental agencies have been reluctant to set even mild policies that would affect private vehicle-owners, preferring instead to set fairly stringent regulations on manufacturers [Ostrov, 1984; Rajan, 2004]. The two main policy levers for regulating fuel use and carbon emissions are technology-forcing standards on new vehicles and petrol taxes. Since 1975, the federal government has been more comfortable with the former approach, when it set Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for cars with the ultimate goal of doubling fuel economy within a decade. By 1990, the average standard for cars had indeed doubled to about 11.5 km/l (27.5 miles per (US) gallon, mpg) (compared to the average 1975 level of 5.9 km/l). For light trucks, the US Congress then mandated no increase from the 1996 value of 8.7 km/l (20.7 mpg) from the 1998 to 2003 model years, a rule that was repealed in 2001. As shown in Figure 1, the combined fuel economy of the new LDV fleet actually began to decline in the 1990s because of the increased penetration of light trucks. Several economists have argued that the CAFE strategy encouraged customers to switch purchases to light trucks because they had lower standards, and hence lower costs for the same level of service, but it has turned out that manufacturers have even been having trouble meeting the standards for light trucks [Lave and Lave, 1999]. The bigger political question relates to how effective outside political pressure has been to keep Congress from mandating a tougher fuel economy standard, even as several analyses have shown that consumers would benefit from fuel savings that more than offset the additional costs of fuel economy improvements [DeCicco et al., 2001; EEA, 2001]. A standard policy argument is that Pigouvian, or appropriate externality, taxes are more efficient than commandand-control style regulation for reducing the undesirable impacts of externalities. Petrol taxes, it has been argued,

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2. The problem of regulating passenger transport

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Figure 1. US trends of population, vehicle kilometres travelled, and estimated average fuel economy for new cars and light trucks. (The unit of fuel economy used on the y-axis on the right is miles per (US) gallon, mpg. 1 mpg = about 0.42 km/l.) Sources: US Census; Davis and Diegel, 2003

would encourage people to car-pool, take public transport, or live closer to work, and would help cut GHG emissions. Studies find that, depending on how income is computed (lifetime, annual, or consumption expenditure) and whether or not non-owners of vehicles are included, usage taxes can be either regressive or progressive [Poterba, 1991; Walls and Hanson, 1999; West, 2004]. The main barrier in the US, however, is that fuel taxes remain a politically highly sensitive issue. In several European countries, petrol taxes are more than eight to ten times the levels in the US where, in real terms, state and federal taxes have actually declined steadily since 1962. Part of the reason for the decline is public resistance to taxes, under the false perception that petrol taxes are more ‘‘painful’’ than taxes on any capital goods, including vehicles. For instance, in one recent survey, when asked to choose hypothetically between a 3 % tax on new vehicles and a 25 ¢/gallon (= 6.6 ¢/l) tax on petrol to address global warming, 70 % chose the former but only 17 % preferred the latter, even though the total expenditure in present-value terms would have been around the same[3]. Moreover, average petrol expenditures in the US amount to less than about 2 % of median household income, and even a tripling in petrol prices would actually cause little or no dent in non-petrol household consumption patterns. Public attitudes to petrol taxes obviously constitute a major barrier to using them as a policy tool, and better communication about their impact is clearly an important task to address existing misconceptions. At the same time, the short- as well as long-term price elasticities of petrol appear to be relatively low [Agras and Chapman, 1999], Energy for Sustainable Development

suggesting that taxes may not be sufficient to induce changes in driving behaviour; furthermore, vehicle purchase decisions tend to be far too complex for petrol tax policies alone to play a decisive role [Greene, 1998]. Plotkin and Greene [1997] and Agras and Chapman [1999] have argued that an appropriate technology standard in combination with a tax will perhaps be most effective in reducing emissions. Nevertheless, there is no getting around the fact that the political history of the past two decades has not been encouraging. A doubling in the fuel economy of new cars in the next 25 years will require an average improvement of about 3 % per year, which is a more aggressive and steady rate than we have seen for fuel economy during the past 25 years or so (as opposed to local air pollutant emissions, which have indeed reduced significantly in this period). The paradox is that while polls indicate support for fuel economy improvements [Greene, 1998], the public also displays a preference for larger, more powerful vehicles and a distaste for petrol taxes. Moreover, policy-makers’ attempts to set stronger fuel economy standards have remained hemmed in by strong lobbies at the federal level and, increasingly, at the state level. In other words, while regulation and petrol taxes are both theoretically viable policy options, there appears to be no straightforward means to remove the political and institutional roadblocks along the way. 3. Social change requirements and prospects The major planning strategies that would reduce the need for driving through life-style changes include integrated land-use and transport planning and life-cycle l

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cost accounting of the environmental impacts of alternative options. The most cost-effective options, from the standpoint of sustainable development, may involve • the development of dense urban growth corridors that are matched with corridors for mass transport development plans; • infrastructure improvements to encourage multi-modalism within and between urban centres so that people would have easy connections among different modes (e.g., walking, bicycling, and riding trains); • travel-demand management and demand-reduction strategies such as the subsidisation of mass transit use and car/van pooling; • the enhancement of communications infrastructure to reduce the need for vehicle trips; • the creation of safe pedestrian walkways and bicycle paths in combination with strict motor vehicle parking regulations in urban core regions, to make walking and bicycling the preferred alternatives to driving. While the shift to more efficient personal vehicles producing lower levels of GHGs is far less encouraging than the technical potential for such change might suggest, developments in transit and land-use planning have been even less successful in getting people out of cars to walk, ride bicycles or take a bus or train on a regular basis [Pucher and Renne, 2003]. This is not very surprising, since prior land-use and transport planning decisions have caused many communities to be locked into travel patterns that are almost entirely dependent on automobiles [Boarnet and Crane, 2001; Cervero, 1986]. Many ‘‘personal travel decisions’’ are thus not quite personal, but are strongly, if not irrevocably, influenced by the prevailing urban form. Similarly, many contextual factors, including price, the quality of schools and other public services, proximity to jobs and social activities, and the influence of government policies, influence where individuals live. If effective, however, the changes listed above could have a beneficial effect on GHG emissions over the medium term, by fostering relatively high-density communities with mixed land use where people could walk to the station, with short drives and cycling providing additional alternatives to walking. Within the typical sprawl-oriented communities that make up the North American landscape, on the other hand, even a substantial mode shift from cars to transit may not produce any emission benefits if transit routes are inefficient or if they run with poor load factors [Delucchi, 2000]. There are several emerging attractive and transit-efficient communities in the United States, not just in populous cities such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, but also in smaller cities and towns such as Arlington, VA, Belmont, NC, Middleton, WI, and Portland, OR [NGA, 2001]. These experiences indicate that there are important cultural and social psychological processes that may explain why behavioural change around transport and land-use choices is more likely in certain societal contexts rather than others, and that there are lessons for interventions elsewhere. Unfortunately, this remains a very poorly researched subject in the US, notwithstanding a rich set of experiences around the country.

To a large degree, most individuals and households have some room to alter their behaviour in ways that may reduce car use through altered mode choice or trip lengths, by better coordination of their daily activities, or by adjusting their housing location. In the medium to long term, of course, they may also have the opportunity to remove some of these constraints by engaging in public advocacy to influence decision-makers. The evidence from the UK and several Scandinavian countries (where the built environment and government policies provide far greater encouragement than in the US for multi-modal transport) is that personal attitudes and habits play important roles in mediating travel behaviour [Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 2000; Verplanken et al., 1994]. People’s willingness to transform their behaviour towards environment-friendly choices may, as Stern [2000] suggests, hinge on different types of factors, including contextual ones such as availability of alternative modes, personal capabilities or skills and knowledge, and attitudinal ones such as beliefs and values, and habits or routines. These are not necessarily independent aspects, and may indeed reinforce one another. For instance, if the waiting-time for a bus is lengthy (context), a new transit-user who usually travels by car (habit) and has not mastered the bus schedule (personal capability), may develop a strong negative attitude toward transit, especially if he/she finds no social or environmental value in public transport. To the extent that attitudes and habits do mediate travel behaviour, it is likely that shifting them in favour of transit and non-motorized vehicles will have a positive impact on actual behaviour, as long as they are complemented by a change in the physical and social context to make such behavioural change possible. Altering the existing patterns of car dependence and sprawl therefore depends critically on initiatives to improve human capacity, a shift in the social context at the local level and changes in individual attitudes and habits. Steg and Tertoolen [1999] propose several strategies to influence individual preference about mode choice and residential location, classified as structural ones (involving ‘‘push’’ or ‘‘pull’’ measures that provide behavioural incentives away from car use) and cognitive-motivational ones (attempting to change people’s understanding). Structural strategies include ones we have seen: financial/economic measures; the provision of physical alternatives/changes (car-pooling, transit, traffic control); technological innovations; legal regulation and enforcement measures; and organizational change (where new choices are provided in a group setting in the hope that new habits and attitudes will take root and flourish). Cognitive-motivational strategies are of at least two types, information provision and social modelling and support. The first entails improving people’s knowledge of transport/land-use choices and increasing their environmental awareness with the intention of changing their attitudes. This turns out to be a much more difficult proposition than one might imagine, since there first need to be viable alternatives to solo driving in place and, even with the right incentives, people tend to filter out important information or stick to habits that require fewer

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cognitive resources for decision-making. At any rate, the huge advertising budgets of the automobile industry spent on transmitting the opposite message (e.g., that driving is ‘‘fun’’ and therefore inherently a good thing) make it virtually impossible for even the most sustained communication campaigns to be able to influence large numbers of people effectively to change their behaviour. Furthermore, ‘‘cognitive dissonance’’, or an almost reactive inconsistency between attitudes and behaviour, is not an uncommon result of such campaigns [Tertoolen et al., 1998]. Similarly, attitudes tend to harden on the basis of existing behaviour, so that commuters who already use public transport are more likely to support policies aimed at reducing GHGs than solo drivers are [Golob and Hensher, 1998]. Perhaps most importantly, knowledge may be necessary but is certainly insufficient to prompt significant behavioural change. But in spite of these difficulties, social education will likely have long-term benefits in terms of raising public support for direct policy measures relating to car use. Social modelling is a second cognitive-motivational strategy that seeks to exploit the fact that strong public role models and social comparison processes relating to seeking status and power can have a powerful influence on people’s attitudes, preferences and habits. To the extent that such behaviour is visible and of a sufficiently high profile, e.g., when a celebrity emphasizes his or her decision to shift travel choice and residential location, citing the associated impact on the environment, significant numbers of admirers may feel motivated to emulate these actions. Modelling itself is only one of a number of ways to deploy social situations to change behaviour, including conformity pressures, authority influences, reciprocal concessions and social learning techniques involving incentives, disincentives and feedback. The evidence from social psychology seems to be that behavioural change is influenced by several complex factors, but that at a societal level it could take place on a sufficiently large scale given the right circumstances. Indeed, human history is replete with examples of major shifts in societal attitudes and behaviour around such perceived collective goods as the environment, national security and multicultural harmony. In the transport sector, such a large-scale shift in attitudes will likely change the focus towards building communities in which walking and public transport once again become prevalent (which is essentially the goal of New Urbanism; see, for instance, [Calthorpe and Fulton, 2001]). Interventions to try to shift behaviour will have to take two complementary forms. At the level of civil society, social influence and learning could provide important reasons for people to change attitudes and habits relating to driving and residential location. But institutional change also needs to occur within regulatory agencies; for instance, policy-makers should alter their own practices by creating the institutional and jurisdictional basis for a regional, transit-oriented planning authority that accommodates interactions with civil society and sets the tone for innovation through structural strategies as well as cogniEnergy for Sustainable Development

tive-motivational ones. The latter would entail programmes of communication, education and incentives aimed at influencing the transport behaviour of the public in the direction of sustainability. For instance, it could be emphasised that sustainable transport and land-use strategies need not lead to life-style compromises even for the affluent. Rather, they would likely enhance the quality of life for all, by improving the environment, reducing congestion, reducing the need to use personal vehicles, creating open public spaces and encouraging walking within sustainable communities. 4. Scenarios To what extent will pure technology-based strategies be successful in bringing about deep reductions in emissions? Significantly, it turns out, if most of the assumptions concerning policies, research and development are borne out. Figure 2 shows carbon emissions from passenger transport (including other modes than LDVs) under three scenarios, a business-as-usual or Reference case, a policy reform case involving a portfolio of advanced vehicle technologies (Technology), and a case involving both technology and behavioural change (Technology + Behaviour). All three scenarios represent quantitatively rich ‘‘stories’’ of how technology, travel patterns and the corresponding emissions might evolve with the same starting-point but with different circumstances determining their paths. Further details of the scenario approach used here can be found in Bernow et al. [2001]. The Reference scenario is simply an extension of the EIA Reference case beyond 2025 (based on [EIA, 2003]), with modest improvements in fuel economy (about 15 % by 2050 from 2000 levels) that are driven simply by market forces and ongoing innovation, with no new policies influencing the outcome. Modal shares across vehicle types and classes are expected to evolve beyond 2025 on the basis of trends in the EIA forecast. The Technology scenario has the following policies: regulations set to achieve a doubling or so of fuel economy for new petrol cars and light trucks by 2025; modest penetration of ethanol, and electric and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles by 2025, reaching 20 %, for each category, of new LDV shares by 2050; improvements amounting to more than a doubling in fuel economy of other modes by 2050, including rail, bus, and air; the introduction of high-speed rail covering more than a fifth of all rail; and a quarter of bus and rail fleets using hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles by 2050. No policies related to mode-shifting or travel demand reduction are included in this pure technology scenario. Carbon emissions from passenger transport are reduced by 35 % over half a century as a result of these changes. How much more of an impact could behavioural change involving land-use and mode choice have on GHG emissions? The Technology + Behaviour case suggests that the inclusion of ‘‘behaviour’’ in the mix reduces emissions more dramatically, at 63 % down from 2000 emissions. Apart from the technologies present in the Technology case, several changes are expected to take place in the way people ‘‘consume’’ automobile culture. These changes l

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Figure 2. Carbon emissions from passenger transport in 3 scenarios.

include the following: shares of light trucks do not increase as predicted by EIA, but rather stagnate at 2000 levels (comprising about 33 % of the LDV fleet); 10 % of passenger kilometres travelled (PKT) is shifted to transit from cars and light trucks by 2025, increasing to 25 % in 2050; 2 % of air travel shifts to rail by 2025, increasing to 5 % in 2050; and all modes reduce PKT by 5 % by 2025, and a further 20 % by 2050. The changes are admittedly aggressive in later years, but reflect a combination of modal shift to more efficient modes (such as transit, which have correspondingly higher load factors) and an aggregate reduction in motorized travel that is consistent with the objectives of smart growth policies. A summary of the different scenario assumptions is shown in Table 1.

The scenario exercise described in this paper is merely illustrative and does not represent predictions of how actual emissions will change over the next half-century or so. In the absence of a careful sensitivity analysis, it is

difficult to repose sufficient confidence in the percentage emission reductions that the scenarios indicate. Still, the trends derived are fairly strong, which implies that they should be robust even with modest changes in the input parameters. If the directionality suggested here is valid, an important revelation is that technology policies alone are not sufficient to meet the deep reductions in emissions that are necessary. Significantly, not only do the Technology emission reductions fall far short of the target emissions (a 75 % reduction from 2000 levels by 2050) that we had tentatively assumed would be necessary for the US, but it is also probably rife with risks, given the strong assumptions of technology policies leading the way. Given the prevailing political reluctance to set tough policies at the federal level to induce the manufacture and purchase of more efficient vehicles, it seems hard to imagine that policy-makers would change course dramatically without there being significant pressure from domestic constituencies. The Technology + Behaviour scenario, in comparison, ends up at a point much closer to the target reductions, largely because of travel reductions that go

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5. Conclusions

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Table 1. Key scenario assumptions Reference

Technology

Technology + Behaviour

2025

2050

2025

2050

2025

2050

Cars

146.16

165.61

146.16

165.61

177.69

169.63

SUVs

52.92

59.96

52.92

59.96

37.20

19.94

Minivans/buses

73.10

82.83

73.10

82.83

51.39

59.49

10,579

15,374

10,579

15,374

7,734

5,110

36

39

36

39

902

1,629

Vehicle population (millions)

Passenger kilometres travelled (billions) All light-duty vehicles Transit buses Intercity buses

55

59

55

59

398

683

School buses

139

150

139

150

299

428

Passenger rail

61

78

61

78

487

927

1,842

2,562

1,842

2,562

1,597

1,688

Air

Energy efficiency for sample modes/fuels (MJ/km) Petrol cars

3.5

3.3

1.8

1.3

1.8

1.3

Diesel transit bus

2.1

1.9

1.4

1.0

1.4

1.0

267.3

243.7

230.2

128.6

230.2

128.6

Jet fuel air

hand in hand with efficiency improvements. The suggestion here is that it is not possible to reach the aggressive targets needed to meet US climate mitigation obligations except through a series of programmes that induce advanced technology commercialisation and social change, involving efficiency in vehicles, modes and land-use, the last two implying a reduced reliance on personal vehicles. Perhaps the most important lesson of this exercise in the context of adverse political sentiment on climate change policy is that it is unrealistic to expect that the US will ever be able to meet its international obligations unless considerable social, political and cultural change takes place in the near term. The emphasis of current climate change R&D should therefore be at least as much on social and cultural factors as on technology. At the same time, sweeping policies that entail both a dramatic infusion of new technology and vastly altered everyday attitudes towards personal transport and land use cannot be implemented in a vacuum. A large part of the effort needed to bring the US into conformity with climate stabilization goals will require paying attention to processes that influence such a transformation. There is some evidence that small changes in this direction are already taking place in the New Urbanism movement, where larger numbers of people across the US are opting to live in compact and walkable cities having mixed-use zoning and multiple choices for transport rather than in the dispersed suburbs that encouraged sprawl throughout the latter half of the 20th century. But these changes can be most importantly mobilized at the local level through some combination of learning and organizational change, particularly through demonstration of the personal, environmental and societal benefits of altered land uses, technologies and lifestyles. Broad changes on the policy and Energy for Sustainable Development

political landscape are indeed more likely to occur only if sufficient numbers of individuals and groups within a society reorient their cultural frame to think about their consumption behaviour and technology choices within the context of sustainable futures. Notes 1. In 2002, California signed the country’s first law for reducing car and truck emissions of greenhouse gases, while Massachusetts and New Hampshire acted to curb such emissions from power plants. Governors from North-Eastern states have pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 20% by 2020. Texas has promoted a renewable energy portfolio standard for electricity purchase and several Western and Mid-Western states are investigating carbon sequestration. 2. These assumptions are rough and are based on extrapolations of the US Energy Information Administration forecasts to 2025 and the 450 ppm constraint, which appears to be increasingly important considering that even the associated 2ºC rise in temperature by the end of the century could have disastrous consequences. See, for instance, Thomas [2004]. 3. Opinion Research Corp. for NREL phone survey 2/98, cited in http://www.ott.doe.gov/ pdfs/patterson.pdf References Aarts, H., and Dijksterhuis, A., 2000. ‘‘The automatic activation of goal-directed behaviour: the case of travel habit’’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20, pp. 75-82. Agras, J., and Chapman. D., 1999. ‘‘The Kyoto protocol, cafe standards, and gasoline taxes’’, Contemporary Economic Issues, 17 (3), pp. 296-308. Alley, R.B., Marotzke, J., Nordhaus, W.D., Overpeck, J.T., Peteet, D.M., Pielke, R.A., Jr., Pierrehumbert, R.T., Rhines, P.B., Stocker, T.F., Talley, L.D., and Wallace, J.M., 2003. ‘‘Abrupt climate change’’, Science 299 (5615), pp. 2005-2010. Bailie, A., Bernow, S., Dougherty, W., Lazarus, M., and Kartha, S., 2001. The American Way to the Kyoto Protocol: an Economic Analysis to Reduce Carbon Pollution, Tellus Institute, Boston, MA. Bernow, S., Cleetus, R., and Rajan, S.C., 2001. Environmental Futures for the United States: Early Warnings and Alternative Paths, Report to USEPA, Tellus Institute, Boston, MA. Boarnet, M., and Crane, R., 2001. ‘‘The influence of land use on travel behavior: empirical strategies’’, Transportation Research Policy Practice, 35, pp. 823-945. Calthorpe, P., and Fulton, W.B., 2001. The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl, Island Press. Washington, DC. Cervero, R., 1986. Suburban Gridlock, Rutgers University Press. Darmstadter, J., 1997. Some Perspectives on U.S. Energy Policy, Resources for the Future,

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filling another American Dream, National Governors’ Association, Washington DC.

Davis, S.C., and S.W. Diegel. 2003. Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 23, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN.

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Contributions invited Energy for Sustainable Development welcomes contributions from its readers. Energy for Sustainable Development, now thirty-five issues old, is a venture in the field of journals on energy with a special focus on the problems of developing countries. It attempts a balanced treatment of renewable sources of energy, improvements in the efficiency of energy production and consumption, and energy planning, including the hardware and software (policy) required to translate interesting and useful new developments into action. With such a multi-disciplinary approach, Energy for Sustainable Development addresses itself to both specialist workers in energy and related fields, and decision-makers. It endeavours to maintain high academic standards without losing sight of the relevance of its content to the problems of developing countries and to practical programmes of action. It tries to provide a forum for the exchange of information,

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including practical experience. Material for publication as articles, letters, or reviews may be sent to the Editor: Prof. K. Krishna Prasad, University of Technology, Faculty of Electrotechnical Engineering, EEG-Building 2.20, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Tel: +31 40 2473168 Fax: +31 40 2464151 E-mail: [email protected] All other categories of material may be sent to the Executive Editor: Svati Bhogle, 25/5, Borebank Road, Benson Town, Bangalore - 560 046, India. Tel: +91 80 23536563 Fax: +91 80 23538426 E-mail: [email protected] For guidelines to authors on the preparation of the text and other material, see Page 2.

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June 2004