There are two roads I want to take you down. The first is the road to a new future where we don’t use cars, but trains, boats and planes. This is a vision for a sustainable world where we’re all driving electric cars. The second road is a road to our old future where we’re still using cars but they’re not running on electricity.
What comes after cars?
This is a question I was asked many times while I was working on my latest book, “The Future of Transportation: Innovative Solutions for a Sustainable World.” I wanted to write the book to give my readers answers to some of the biggest questions we face today about how to create a better future.
Today, transportation is the largest sector of our economy and the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, transportation uses 30 percent of all fossil fuels. The global picture is equally grim, but I’m not going to talk about that today. Today I’m going to start with our present and where things seem to be headed. I hope by the end of this post you’ll know where the future is going.
Where Are We Going?
In the last fifty years, we went from a future where we couldn’t imagine life without a car to a future where most of us now have one. But where are we going from here? It seems that the more we drive, the more we pollute. We know that climate change is happening. What we don’t know is whether the amount of pollution we’re producing today will have any lasting effect on our environment or if we can get back to a sustainable level. We know there is a problem. We also know we need to make changes. The problem is that when it comes to transportation, the solutions seem too big to overcome our current inertia. Most people want to wait until we can afford solar panels for every home, to make electric cars affordable and to stop producing oil.
But in the meantime, we need to start moving toward a solution today.
Electric Vehicles (EVs)
We started down the EV road back in the 1990’s and quickly realized that we were making a major mistake. Our EV plan was based on the assumption that fossil fuel prices would continue to rise over the long term. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. By 2014, oil had fallen to $30 per barrel. And while the price of gas has risen again, it’s at the lowest level we’ve seen in years.
Unfortunately, we’ve come to the point where we have no choice but to abandon the EV plan and start looking at alternatives that don’t rely on fossil fuels. One of the solutions is called the Vehicle-to-Grid, or V2G. V2G allows a vehicle to act as a generator and store its excess energy into the grid. When you want to charge your EV, the