At the turn of the 20th century a seductive new mode of transport was introduced — the horseless carriage or, as we know it today, the CAR. We soon fell in love with it — who wouldn’t? Unlike travel by rail, the motor car gave us true freedom of movement, as long as there was a road, we could hop into this new machine and head off to our destination. We did not plan our travel according to a train schedule, what’s more, we did not even have to get to the train station, no, this contraption sat outside our own front door, and better yet, delivered us to the front door of wherever it was we were going to.
North America, being the last frontier, did not have much of an infrastructure in place. Soon, instead of building railways, the governments were building highways to accommodate this new form of transport. The car was powered by a motor and ran on fuel derived from oil. The car was affordable and fuel was cheap. What was even better, it was home grown. Life was good. Yes, there was exhaust, the fumes were poisonous, but earth’s lungs – you remember the plants, the forests and the jungles — filtered the air so that there was little if any harm to our health or that of the planet.
Time, prosperity, technical growth, need, affluence, desire for freedom and flexibility — enter the 21st century and a different scenario exists altogether. The car has become the people mover of choice throughout the world and is the single factor most attributed to a growing environmental issue: air. The earth’s lungs are exhausted, indeed even depleted. The remaining plants, forests and jungles are no match for the exhausts being spewed from our beloved car. The air quality in major cities such as Mexico City, Shanghai, and Mumbai is frequently so poor that warnings are frequently issued to keep young children and the elderly indoors where the air is deemed to be less toxic. The main cause of this poor air quality is the car and its cousin, the truck.
Trucks were a natural evolution from cars. Quick pickup and drop off of goods – from the lumber yard, the appliance store or fisherman’s wharf, it was convenient and just made good sense. It may be argued that trucks became a major factor in promoting mobility – no longer a major obstacle, household possessions could now be shipped easily, from one end of town to another, or, indeed, clear across the continent. Eventually the truck took on a more important and sophisticated role — hauling of goods across the country. Today’s truck is as likely to haul groceries from the local produce store, as container loads of fresh produce from farm to grocery store. Powerful, eighteen wheelers cruise up and down the nations’ freeways delivering tomatoes, widgets and yes, even cars.
The last of the eco friendly ships were the tall ships, powered by wind and sail. There are still a few of them around but they sail around the world more as a marine carnival to showcase what ships looked like back in the days of pirates and her majesty’s navy. Indeed some navies still train on tall ships. It is an honor and only a select few get to be part of this elite group.
The images are romantic, flamboyant, ripped with adventure and daring do. These were the ships that carried on commerce between continents and across oceans and seas. The journeys were long and fraught with danger. Impressive though they may be as they sail into a harbor today, what is more impressive is that such tiny vessels housed a goodly number of crew, crossed oceans and weathered storms of no small magnitude. Well some did not. The ocean floor secrets many a cache of treasures hidden in the holds of ships that sunk. In those days if one traveled as a passenger it certainly was not for pleasure.
Today ships are more like floating cities – both the cargo and the passenger alike. Container ships look more like football fields laden with carefully stashed boxes full of goods to be unloaded dockside and transported to their final destination by those eighteen wheeler trucks. The passenger ships no longer serve as transport but rather as luxury resorts and indeed look more like floating high rises on the open seas. These ships are high powered, efficient and fast. They can cross the Atlantic in 4 days and a storm at sea is a minor inconvenience at most. They guzzle a lot of oil and of course the residue of that is carbon emissions.
The last century was a great one for all kinds of inventions. The airplane was perhaps one of the most exciting and life changing inventions. Ironically the beginnings of the airplane are not far behind that of the car. As early as 1902 the Wright brothers were already experimenting with gliders and had a machine on the drawing board that would be lifted off the ground with a propelled motor. On December 14, 1903 at Kitty Hawk, Wilbur Wright successfully flew “The Flyer” for a grand total of three and a half seconds for a distance of 105 feet or about a mile a minute!
Who would have thought that in less than half a century airplanes would traverse the world, flying for hours at speeds of 500 miles and more. Today at any given time, tens of thousands of airplanes fill the highways of the skies. These flying machines too rely on oil to fuel their flights. So it is the car, the ship and airplane that form the unholy alliance of top carbon emission polluters.
Long before Al Gore got his Nobel Peace Prize for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Dr. Helen Caldicott had been speaking at universities, corporate luncheon seminars, on TV as well as hosting a radio show, If You Love This Planet. Hers perhaps is a more chilling and compelling message unfolding as it does years of scientific research and evidence that we treat our planet rather poorly and that it will fight back, if we do not mend our ways soon. Dr. David Suzuki, an award winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster produces and hosts The Nature of Things, a cutting edge documentary series on the environment.
They all toll the same bell: carbon emissions and their effect on global warming.
Carbon emissions can be tamed, but it requires will, resolution and nerves of steel to revolutionize the way we think, the way we manufacture products and the way we live. The idea is not to return to the “good old days” but to encourage and fund cutting edge technology, technology that will not compromise advancements of the human race to date. Already technology has developed car engines that can run on water, solar system that harness the rays of the sun to heat our homes in the winter and air condition them in the summer, ironically rail transport is once again in greater demand, both as an economical alternative to rising fuel costs and as a smaller carbon footprint on the face of planet earth.
We can and we will have fresh clean air again. The plants the trees the forests the jungles will be able to do their job.