January 23, 2023
•News
In the next five episodes, we’ll take a deep dive into decarbonizing the entire transportation sector — everything from bulldozers and planes to ships and trains.
In this episode we start with cars. How do we switch the world’s over 1 billion fossil-fuel-powered cars to zero-carbon alternatives, and fast?
Dr. Melissa Lott explores the most promising pathway — electrification — with Dr. Sonia Yeh of Chalmers University. What kind of infrastructure and technology do we need to scale up electric cars? And why aren’t there more electric vehicles on the roads right now?
We’ll also tell the story of Tim Treuer, who put his EV to the test on 7,600-mile road trip, risking jail time in the process.
Guests: Tim Treuer, a biologist, journalist and cross-country EV adventurer. Dr. Sonia Yeh is Professor in Transport and Energy Systems in the Department of Space, Earth and Environment at Chalmer University in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The Big Switch is produced by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy in partnership with Post Script Media. This episode was produced by Daniel Woldorff and Alexandria Herr. Theme music and mixing by Sean Marquand. A special thanks to Natalie Volk, Kirsten Smith and Kyu Lee. Our executive editor was Stephen Lacey.
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The transportation sector is responsible for more than half of global oil demand, with passenger vehicles and trucks making up by far the largest fraction.
There is a strong and growing consensus that a simultaneously growing and decarbonizing electricity sector is necessary to meet declining greenhouse gas emissions targets.
A new pressure point has been added to Europe’s existing climate mitigation imperative to decarbonize: an energy security driver to ensure that those cuts start with fossil fuel imports from Russia.
This commentary represents the research and views of the author. It does not necessarily represent...