From WSJ Article: A Big Sum of Small Differences

According to the Wall Street Journal, new analysis from McKinsey & Co. suggests that U.S. consumers have more control over U.S. greenhouse gas emissions than conventionally believed.

Through what and how they eat, drive, and consume, Americans are directly and indirectly responsible for over 65% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This goes up against the belief by some that GHG reductions are primarily the responsibility of industry. According to McKinsey’s numbers, 17% of U.S. GHG emissions come from driving passenger cars while an equivalent amount came from residential buildings appliances.

While this demonstrates that individual consumers need to make moves to reduce their GHG emissions, it is also important to recognize that often they are constrained by the options they have available to them, which is one critical area where industry needs to take action.

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CO2 and air pollutant emissions can be greatly reduced by improving cities’ transportation systems, but accurately measuring these reductions can be a challenge.

Maria Cordeiro is Environmental Projects Manager at EMBARQ - the WRI Center for Sustainable Transport, and the author (along with several other colleagues) of a recent report entitled “Measuring the Invisible: Quantifying Emissions Reductions from Transport Solutions“.

As transportation demand continues to rise at unprecedented rates, the need to compare alternative transport policies and their impacts on both CO2 emissions and local air pollution is becoming more and more critical. However, the challenge of quantifying these impacts has often hindered transparent and well-informed decision making.

To help address this barrier, EMBARQ/WRI has just released a new publication entitled “Measuring the Invisible: Quantifying Emissions Reductions from Transport Solutions”. The new report is composed of a series of case studies that examine how three developing country cities (Queretaro, Mexico, Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Hanoi, Vietnam) can quantify emissions reductions from transport interventions. Importantly, we found that in each case, there is a large potential to reduce transport-related CO2 and air pollutant emissions at the city level through implementation of smarter transportation policy.

We hope that this research contributes to efforts to develop reliable and cost-effective approaches for estimating greenhouse gas and criteria pollutant emissions from various transport interventions.

Click on the links below to read the full reports:
- Queretaro case study
- Porto Alegre case study
- Hanoi case study

Below, you can also watch a video of a presentation that I gave on this project at last year’s Transportation Research Board annual meeting.

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