Professor Jim Watson, University College London: How we travel

Speaker 1: So welcome back, including to those online who I think are with us now I really hope you enjoyed lunch. So at the topic that we are going to be considering as a group today and tomorrow is the topic of how we travel. So don't worry if this wasn't the topic you most wanted to be part of because you will get the chance to hear about the other topics and feed into the other topics as well. Also, like I said earlier, I'm a little bit including this one are genuinely, really interesting. So I've been really enjoying reading through the slides that you're going to see from our speakers later, and the thing about transport is that it's all something we all use. It's all something that we have personal experience of and you'll see how this topic relates to that as we go through. So you're going to be with me for the rest of this weekend on this topic, and you're also going to be with, for most of the time two specialists in the area.

So one of them is Jim Watson, are you there? Yes, you're behind flip chart. Yes, Jim Watson, who you met earlier from University College London. He's one of the Assembly's expert leads, and we also have a new face for you so that Jillian Anable, if you want to stand up and say hello. So Jillian is from the University of Leeds. She's a member of the academic advisory panel for this topic for the Assembly rather, and she's been helping Jim put together these sessions on how we travel for you. So in a minute I'm going to give you a chance to talk about at your table is about how you use transport now, and that's before we hear from most of our speakers. But before we do that, I'm gonna hand over to Jim. He's just gonna explain a bit more about this topic on what it's going to cover. .

Jim Watson: Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. So um yeah, Sarah said this is a really important topic, partly because transport of various forms is something most of us using our daily lives but the other really important reason why is that transport accounts for 1/3rd of the greenhouse gas emissions that the UK emits right now each year, so it's a really big chunk of our emissions that we need to do something about, so that's the other really good reason to be in this group for the rest of today and tomorrow. So I'm just gonna introduce a bit about what we're going to cover through today and tomorrow morning in the personal transport topic. And we've basically split it into two areas this surface transport which we're going to cover today, this afternoon.

So that includes all kinds of things which are pictured there, car transport, railways, buses, cycling, and walking. So that's going to be emphasised as well by sort of our speakers. And then tomorrow morning, we're going to talk about air travel. Now the reason I've got pictures of a ship and a train there for air travel is one when we're talking talking about air travel, but how we might reduce emissions from air travel and part of that discussion is about what other forms of transport you could use for the journeys that currently are you used a via air travel. So we're really emphasising alternatives in both of those sessions. Now as I emphasised in my energy supply talk earlier on this morning at the moment transport is very much supplied by oil, so we use oil in various forms for just about all of the transport we use. So as it says here, 97% of the energy we use to transport is oil-based. Oil is converted into petrol, to diesel to jet fuel to all sorts of other alternatives. But they're basically oil-based, and that really has to change if we're going to meet net-zero. And as I said, 1/3 of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transport. Now it's important just to point out that statistic includes the international emissions from international travel in aviation and shipping. So what that means is, when we take a foreign in flight from the UK to another country, the emissions from that flight are included in that statistic. Or if we take a ferry from, say, the UK to France, that's the emissions from that are also included in that statistic. That's really important to bear in mind.

So how does that third of our emissions breakdown, and you will notice this, says 2017 rather than 2018 and that's because there's a bigger time-lag in getting some of the data, the official data on international aviation, air travel and shipping for that. So you can see here the biggest chunk of the pie for 2017 is cars. And then, if you look the other areas of the pie that quite significant, our vans and lorries then air travel as well. So if you add up all of the cars, vans, lorries, that's about 2/3 of the emissions, but there's quite a big chunk as it shows there, but for air travel, which has grown rapidly in the last two decades and for shipping as well. So it gives an idea about how that breaks down. And we're going to go through most of the parts of that pie in a lot of more detail, but with an emphasis on the personal options for travel on land and, aviation, air travel, and shipping. The important point here is the greenhouse gas emissions for transport are very stubborn for lots of different reasons, and we'll go into that as we go through the other speakers. So actually, amount of emissions now is very similar to the amount of emissions from transport were 20 years ago. In the year 2000 the shares of different modes of transport they're slightly different, but the amount is very similar, so that clearly is quite a challenge. We need to change it.

Just to give you a sense of how the different options compare. And again, we're going to go into this in much more detail with the other speakers we have in this session and in the morning. So this chart is basically showing you how much carbon, how many kilograms it should say on the bottom will get that corrected, how many kilograms of carbon get emitted per passenger per kilometre travelled for the different types of transport. So right at the top you have the Eurostar. So that's the train that goes from, well, at the moment from London to Paris or London to Brussels. So that's the lowest for carbon form. The reason for that is it's powered by electricity, and most of that electricity is low carbon because it uses French nuclear electricity as well as low carbon UK electricity. That's very low. And then you got ferry, coach some of the other rail options as well. Then you start getting some of the car options. So you noticed diesel and petrol cars are in the middle of that chart there. The reason they're in the middle rather than the bottom, is that there are three people assumed to be in each car. So because this chart is about per person, if people share a car, the emissions per person gonna be lower if you have just one person in a car. And that's the reason the one person in the car options are right at the bottom, they're even worse per kilometre than all of the flying options which are towards the bottom. So short-haul means a short distance, you know say, from the UK to, I don't know, Spain, or somewhere like that long haul is more flying from the UK to the United States or Japan or something like that. So it shows you a sort of overview, which you can refer back to as we go through the other talks.

So the final thing I'm going to talk to you about before I go through what you're going to hear in the two panels this afternoon and tomorrow morning is just what one view and again, this is from the Committee on Climate Change of what how surface transport and air transport emissions may need to change to meet net-zero. So this is a chart with greenhouse gas emissions up the side on the vertical axis. So that's the size of the bars. 2017 is the emissions from the different areas I showed you on the pie chart earlier. So road transport is altogether so that your cars, lorries, your vans, aviation aircraft, shipping in the purple and rail you can hardly see, but it's that very small red band there. So the reason rail causes some emissions is that some trains use diesel fuel, a form of oil. Others use electricity.

Now, as you see the Committee on Climate Change thinks to meet net-zero, most of those emissions are going to disappear by 2050. The exception is, and we'll talk more about this tomorrow and we have a whole panel on it, is air travel because that's thought to be particularly challenging to reduce emissions, partly for technical reasons and partly for other reasons. So most of those emissions need to go to zero. Certainly, for all of the cars and vans and lorries and, also for the ships too, we're going to talk about that through the two panels that we have so that hopefully gives you a sense of the scale of the challenge of what needs to be done.

So then, just finally is on the two panels. So this afternoon we're talking about surface transport, so we're going to have six speakers in groups of three. They're going to cover these topics. So first we will have an introduction. Slightly more detail from Jillian Anable on service transport. We have three more informant talks giving you further information and evidence, looking at reducing emissions from cars. What alternatives there are two car travel for surface transport, but also fairness. How fair are some of those options? And what of the fairness issues we need to take into account when thinking about reducing emissions? And then the last two talks are a bit different. They're advocate talks. So their talks from people who are giving you a particular view on how we might reduce emissions from transport so they're arguing a particular case. They're two contrasting views there about how to make change happen. So we've got two views on that to finish off, and they'll be plenty of time to think about and ask questions to those panels on the speakers. And then tomorrow morning, we're going to and will remind you of this tomorrow morning as well. Air travel is going to be the real focus, the structure of the presentations, again, the six is very similar. So we got similar sorts of talks happening.

First, an introduction, which I'm going to do. Three talks following that on technical options for reducing emissions from air travel, thinking about alternative ways of powering planes or making them more efficient. Alternatives to air travel. So that covers the other ways you could get on those journeys, whether it be rail or ship. And also fairness that will get into some of the issues about who flies, how much did they fly and how fair are some of the changes that we need to be making? And then again, those are all informants so there again, giving you evidence in an unbiased away as we can. The final two talks, thank you, are advocates. So again they're giving you two different views about how those emissions might be reduced. What methods we could use to do that, what strategies government could follow to do that, so that's two views right at the end. And that takes us to the end of the evidence that you're going to hear from all the experts. So I think that's me. Thank you.

Speaker 1: So we're not gonna take questions from Jim now, essentially, because you're going to hear all of this in more detail from the other speakers, and we'll take questions at that point.