Full Title: Toward a Green New Deal for Transportation: Establishing New Federal Investment Priorities to Build Just and Sustainable Communities
Author(s): Yonah Freemark, Billy Fleming, Caitlin McCoy, Rennie Myers, Thea Riofrancos, Xan Lillehei, and Daniel Aldana Cohen
Publisher(s): Climate and Community Project (CCP)
Publication Date: February 1, 2022
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
The transportation system is the connective tissue that transforms pockets of communities into a networked society. It links home, school, work, and play. It drives economic growth, social mobility, and employment opportunities.
The transportation sector currently emits more carbon pollution than any other sector in the US economy. Automobiles, trucks, trains, ships that deliver goods, airline flights, and other transportation activities account for about 28 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. The passage of President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is replete with new funding for state and local highway expansion, and seems likely to further exacerbate the sector’s emissions. More than 120 years after electric vehicles briefly achieved popularity in the 1900s, petroleum products still power over 91 percent of today’s transportation system. Americans collectively drive more than three trillion vehicle miles per year, most of those as a single driver in an automobile. Life in the United States is organized around personal automobiles powered by petroleum. For a Green New Deal in transportation to be possible, that has to change. A climate-safe future requires a swift and just decarbonization of the transportation sector, a major expansion of public and active transportation, and the parallel decarbonization of the electricity sector.