Customer Reviews

Transportation in a Climate-Constrained World

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This very well-researched and technically replete book outlines the options for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector, primarily vehicles (cars and light trucks) and aircraft.

In this, it does an excellent job and is invaluable; but I'm not sure it really takes the "climate-constrained" qualifier in its title as seriously as it should. Emblematic of this is the fact that in the final chapter, one scenario for future transportation-related GHG emissions assumes an atmospheric CO2 target level of 550 ppm by volume. We are already at 380 today; many climate scientists think that if we reach 550, we will already be risking environmental Armageddon.

Thus this tome is invaluable for evaluating policy options and promising transportation-related technologies if one eschews full-crisis mode. But those of us convinced that the climate crisis really IS a crisis, requiring fundamental changes in behavior that cannot be easily extrapolated from historical data, will probably not be satisfied to stop at the authors' conclusions.

This book provides an interesting, very thoroughly researched, and highly insightful review of the growth of transportation, its climate impact, and the policy approaches designed to mitigate it. It gives a clear picture of the problems faced, and the best ways to deal with them. It takes climate-change seriously, but is also realistic about the potential effectiveness of different options available to deal with it, in transportation. Importantly, I feel that the book is objective, and not overly optimistic or pessimistic.

The book is also easy to read, but dense, so whilst it is interesting for general readers, it is also very useful for researchers and policy makers, and should be a bench mark for transportation policy analysis. I would strongly recommend this book.