"I'm very optimistic," Daniel Sperling says of technological solutions in development to curb the environmental impact of transportation. "It's a matter of accelerating innovation that is already starting to happen. The vehicle part is the easiest, the fuels are more difficult and the most difficult of all is changing behavior and land use." (Photo courtesy of the University of California, Davis)

Today, more than one billion vehicles travel the world. By 2020, that number is expected to double. Can the planet sustain two billion cars? Not with the polluting gas-guzzlers of today, says Daniel Sperling, author of the new book

Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability.

Sperling, a member of the powerful California Air Resources Board and director of Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California-Davis, spoke on Jan. 15 at UVM about how we might get off the highway of catastrophe.

Recent economic events, including the bailout of U.S. automakers, have made Sperling's perspective urgently relevant to the national discourse.

The event, part of UVM's Burack Lecture Series, is free and open to the public.

UVM Today spoke with Daniel Sperling to learn more about the perils of the ongoing global explosion in conventional cars — and the potential for a clean, smart, new era in transportation.

UVM TODAY: What is the basic difference between the world today, with a billion cars, and the world in a decade that is forecast to have two billion cars?

DANIEL SPERLING: If we allow things to just go on the way they are now, with two billion conventional vehicles, we will be consuming two times as much oil, emitting two times as much greenhouse gases. That would probably be catastrophic.

Do you think we're already in a slow-motion catastrophe, as some more pessimistic observers believe — or are we just approaching the brink?

There is a risk that catastrophes are ahead of us — and that is because it is very difficult to redirect this ocean liner that is already moving forward. Worldwide, it's probably going to take many years to make substantial reductions in oil use and greenhouse gases.

It seems transportation is stuck in the past at many levels. I was amazed to read recently that today's cars on average get the same gas mileage as Ford's Model T.

In many ways our transportation system is unchanged over the last 80 years. The road systems are basically the same, the vehicles are functionally the same. We use our roads the same way. The internal combustion engine and the fuels are the same. Each little piece has been improved, but as a system it's barely changed.

And yet, as your book describes, there are signs of hope and more profound change. When you look at the US transportation system, what are some of the important technological and policy developments you see?

New federal CAFE (corporate average fuel efficiency) standards were adopted last December. In California, new greenhouse gas standards were adopted — but blocked by the Bush administration. If those two policies go into effect, that will assure progress in the near-term to reduce greenhouse gases and oil use.

On the vehicle technology side, I think we are heading in the right direction toward hybrid vehicles, battery electric vehicles, plug-in vehicles and fuel-cell vehicles.

It would also be great if we adopted "feebates" — that's the idea that you apply a fee to cars that are gas guzzlers and high emitters and provide a rebate to those that are clean and low emitting. If we did that in addition to the fuel standards — and accompany it with programs to accelerate advanced technologies — we'd be making good progress.

In California, we have a zero emission vehicle requirement and we're going to be modifying and strengthening it next year. Something like that would be desirable on the national level.

How optimistic are you about technological solutions to our transportation woes?

I'm very optimistic. It's a matter of accelerating innovation that is already starting to happen. The vehicle part is the easiest, the fuels are more difficult and the most difficult of all is changing behavior and land use.

The automotive industry is putting a lot of R&D money into it so it's not like you need a lot of new government funding or new capabilities.

Fuels are more difficult because we are almost completely reliant on oil, and the only alternative is not a very good alternative: corn ethanol. There we do need a tremendous amount of new innovation. We need to develop new ways of converting biomass into fuels, new ways of converting material into hydrogen, and storing hydrogen. The oil companies have been reluctant investors, and they're the ones with the most resources.

I'm interested that you feel auto manufacturers are poised to make dramatic changes. We've certainly heard that before from government and from Detroit, but we're still driving the same old cars. Why do you believe we're going to see dramatic change in how cars are made?

We are going to see dramatic change because those changes are already under way. It's a change toward electric-drive technology and that can take many different forms. The hybrid vehicles, like the Prius, are the first step toward electric propulsion. The next step is plug-in hybrids and then pure battery-electric vehicles and then fuel-cell electric vehicles.

The problem has been that we haven't had the support of policy to encourage the companies to make those investments. The reason there hasn't been faster progress is because the CAFE standards weren't increased in any substantial way for 20 years. They were opposed by the Detroit car companies and that was probably the single largest factor in why the change hasn't happened faster.

You wrote an op-ed for The New York Times a few weeks ago that advocated for a $3.50 per gallon pricing floor for gasoline. Why?

If oil prices weren't allowed to drop below $80 a barrel — this is the price floor idea — most of these advances would happen more quickly. The higher the price of gas, the greater the demand for fuel-efficient cars. A price floor for gasoline could pay for the auto industry bailout and underwrite the costs of better transportation policies.

What about public transportation? Environmentalists have been making the pitch for public transportation for decades — and have been continuously frustrated. What do you see as the role of public transit in this "car-centric" world?

In the U.S., which pioneered car-centric living in Los Angeles, cars have largely vanquished public transit. Public transit accounts for three percent of passenger miles traveled in the U.S. now; the only place it's significant is in downtowns of some of the more dense cities. Forty percent of all U.S. public transit is in New York City!

We need to create a new vision for transportation by applying information technologies. Create smart jitneys that provide door-to-door service in a real-time basis; smart car-sharing, smart car-pooling. A lot of people could share a ride to and from the University of Vermont — they're all going to the same place — if there was more information available.

Information technologies have invaded and pervaded many areas of our lives, but barely touched transportation. I have a teenage daughter. Teenagers now do everything in a real-time way. They don't plan anything ahead; they all just have their cell phones and they just make plans on the fly and organize themselves. I think we're going to see an embrace of that kind of information in transportation of the future.