Breaking Down the Blueprint: Energy Efficiency and Energy Security
June 3, 2009By Andrew Bielak
| The T4 America Blueprint has six overarching national objectives to provide a new vision and guide our federal transportation policy. If our transportation system is in need of a clear purpose, these six objectives are like the rudder that will steer the ship. To ensure that we can meet these objectives and measure our progress, we created 10 performance targets — clear, quantifiable goals for the next 20 years that are tied directly to the six national objectives. |
In November 2008, President Obama described America’s dependence on oil as resembling a “shock and trance” cycle. Our growing demand for foreign oil, he said, creates skyrocketing energy prices, leading to dramatic calls for energy independence and sudden cutbacks in our consumption that quickly dissipate once the price of oil drops — beginning the cycle all over again.
Transportation for America believes that the push to make our country less dependent on oil begins with a smarter, cleaner transportation system, and for this reason we’ve made one our top national transportation objectives to promote energy efficiency and achieve energy security.
While we’ll talk later this week about the programs in our Blueprint that help us reduce our dependence on oil, we wanted to explain today why we have this national objective, why our transportation system has such deep effects on our country’s energy consumption, and what performance targets are linked to this goal. As you’ll recall from the previous posts in this series, our 10 performance targets are measurable goals that will help us ensure that we achieve our objectives. While nearly all of these performance targets are important to create a more energy-secure economy, we are including two here that are particularly critical as we look towards this goal:
The transportation sector is, simply put, a massive engine behind our addiction to oil.
Each second, our transportation sector burns through 6,300 gallons of oil and produces more CO2 emissions that any nation’s entire economy except China’s. A full two-thirds of the oil consumed in the United States is used for our transportation system, and 40 percent is used to fill up gasoline tanks in our personal vehicles. Our economy is responsible for nearly 25 percent of oil consumption globally, despite the fact that we have less than three percent of the world’s oil reserves.
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| Click to enlarge. Reducing how much we have to drive is a popular idea. |
The president made big news last week when he declared new federal fuel standards, mandating that new cars must have an average fuel economy of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. But as many experts have told us, creating a more fuel-efficient, energy secure country does not revolve only around cars that use less gasoline. Extensive research has shown that unless we actually reduce driving by shifting to more fuel-efficient modes of transportation and meeting the pent-up consumer demand for more accessible, walkable communities, we’ll completely wipe out any gains we see from driving more fuel efficient cars and continue on the exact same energy-dependent path.
While few of us spend a lot of time thinking about how our goods movement is tied to energy efficiency, this sector of our transportation system is a critical component in our push for energy security. Trucks currently use 27 gallons of fuel for each ton of freight moved from coast to coast; at the same time, bringing the same ton of freight buy rail only uses seven gallons of fuel. And as you may have seen in their commercials for freightrailworks.org, 1 gallon of gasoline can move a ton of freight 436 miles by rail. Transferring a mere 10 percent of freight currently moved by truck to our railways would save more than one billion gallons of fuel per year.
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| Click to enlarge. Where we live and its impact on the cost of transportation. |
As we’ve noted many times on this blog, reducing total miles traveled in automobiles is an essential part of this equation. Thanks to the automobile dependence required in many areas and the high cost of gasoline, families living in areas where the only option is to drive spend a full quarter of their income on transportation, nearly three times the percentage for people with good access to public transportation. (See graphic at right)
Americans are already changing their driving habits, supporting investment in rail, and expressing their desire to live in walkable, accessible neighborhoods. But in order to tap into these shifting preferences in our transportation policy, Transportation for America believes the federal government needs to make bold changes and targeted investments in the modern infrastructure that will make us more energy independent.
To get the details, come back later this week and see some of the specific policies and proposals included in our Blueprint that will help our transportation system achieve this goal.
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