Benjamin Bailey

March 26, 2017

English Comp Essay 4

On The U.S.A. and Fossil Fuels

In 2017 we still need fossil fuels, but the world will constantly need to review its
consumption of fossil fuels and how to optimize their use. Burning fossil fuels is not some terrible
crime to be punished in the same way as corporate pollution, and the usage of fossil fuels is not
the main contributor to all of the worlds climate and environmental issues. When we start to
think about improving our so-called "carbon" footprint we may immediately focus on our cars,
but the problems that climate researchers and environmentalists have uncovered are not all
directly related to personal transportation. Fossil fuels are still being used all around the world in
a multitude of different sectors, and some of the areas fossil fuels are used in are not necessarily
the biggest polluters even though it may seem so. The gamut of different uses ranges from
industrial manufacturing, through commercial transport, to research activities and even to
seemingly harmless activities like aid and rescue works. There are areas that can be changed that
make a great impact but will be hard to motivate to change, and then there are sectors which
could very easily change to sustainable energy but whose impact is minimal from the outset.
When costs play a factor it can always be hard to justify the move to possibly more expensive
energy sources, and when companies are involved that have budgets to adhere to it can even
mean changing the way companies do business from within. A ground-up restructure of how we
conduct business, from being careless and money minded in the past, to the possible future of
being sustainable and reputation minded is possibly the only way to move forward if we are
wanting to change pollution levels and usage of fossil fuels. People are inherently lazy and prefer
their comfort zones, but in order to change the way the world functions we need to start changing
the way people think. To be sustainable we need the motivation and drive of those few people
working on improvement now to be a catalyst for the whole population of our planet. The rise of
air pollution can be greatly reduced by cutting back on the usage of fossil fuels in the U.S.A., a

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workable solution involves promoting sustainable public transport in metropolitan areas, breaking
the reliance on fossil fuels in the transport industry, and getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies.
Quality of life for a lot of people means being able to spend quality time with their families,
and with the cost of homes steadily rising it can be hard to live close to the place of work or a
community with sufficient schools and shopping. A long commute is a painful inconvenience that
millions of Americans put up with on a daily basis, and many of those commuters are not even
that far from the work of school, they just spend a lot of time sitting in traffic and metropolitan
congestion. The dream of having a 15 min commute is alive and well, and for the majority of
Americans that means living and working in a metropolitan area. City planners have not been
blind to the whole idea of bringing commercial, industrial and residential sectors closer together,
it is just difficult to arrange with the complex infrastructure necessary to support that kind of
economy. Metropolitan areas across the U.S.A. differ greatly in how they have tackled the
problem of infrastructure, one common sight is visible throughout though, the 4, 5, 6, or
sometimes even 8 lane highways leading right into the city centers. Encouraging workers to
commute by car is of course great for the auto industry, but for the city planners it creates a
multitude of problems; commuters on their own in separate cars take up a lot of space. The rush
hour time in the mornings and evenings are direct evidence of the Car problem, lots of people
trying to get either into town or out of town in a closely synchronized effort. Lets disregard the
traffic and congestion issue though for one moment, once these cars all get to the city where do
they go ?, the need for huge parking areas and literally parking skyscrapers is yet another issue
that the city planners are faced with. In Manhattan, for instance, 10% of the boroughs total area
is dedicated to parking (Shiftan & Attard, 2015), and wildly placing building parking structures
in a downtown area just creates a broken and fractured cityscape. The solution which many have
now seen and are directly inserting into their cities, is to create alternative transport routes and
methods for the public. Enabling the public to travel in smaller more modular methods such as
trams, trains, and bicycles directly equates to less cars and less congestion in inner cities. The
general public is open to alternative methods, the problem just being that many cities never
offered the alternatives. Bad bus service and hot sticky trams do not encourage people to use
public transport, and the lack of bicycle lanes means people are scared and feel unsafe cycling to
work. Once cities start providing better air conditioned trams, computer controlled efficient bus
services and safe illuminated bike paths the public has been proven to take advantage of these

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alternative transport methods. The onus is not just on the city and its planners though, there is
always a lot that companies themselves need to do as well in order to encourage their workers to
use these efficient alternatives. Companies that provide subsidized transport tickets, transport
pooling options, and changing rooms and showers for cyclists are often the places people are
happier to be working nowadays.
The commercial transport industry is a large consumer of fossil fuels, and the increase in
intensity of consumption alone may lead to more goods and freight being transported (Root,
2003). The ubiquity of new products and online ordering systems means goods need to be
transported more often and on more diverse routes to rapidly growing lists of destinations. For a
lot of companies owning a large fleet of trucks means they are able to respond quickly to
distribution needs and gives them flexibility. A lot of logistics companies use air travel to ship
large orders but those orders are not necessarily urgent and sometimes still sit for days or weeks at
source or destination. With the digitalization of manufacturing and distribution it has become
immensely easy to create trending reports, see stock levels across thousands of storage points, and
have shipping and ordering information at the fingertips of millions of different distributors in
real time. What this digital efficiency means is that there is no excuse for stockpiling, having
shortages and even delivery times are a thing of the past. A product can be delivered from
multiple sources in a matter of minutes in metropolitan areas. If we restructure the transport
business so that metropolitan areas are connected by perfectly direct freight train connections and
create dynamic break-out logistics and storage opportunities then we are able to allow companies
to ship across America with a far lower cost than road transport and by using a very much lower
amount of fossil fuels. The distribution within the metropolitan areas is then taken on by the new
emerging micro transport systems powered by electric vehicles and compressed natural gas, both
of which are zero-emissions. Already large logistics companies like DHL, USPS and FEDEX are
moving to these transport opportunities and also human powered transport like cargo bicycles for
delivering smaller deliveries. The benefits are immediately apparent, fewer trucks entering the
metropolis, an easement on traffic, and fewer emissions in the already smog heavy cities.
The last and probably most controversial method of saving our air quality is the reduction
of subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. Worldwide, nearly half a trillion dollars were spent on
fossil fuel subsidies in 2010 (Whitley, 2015). In the current global economy the focus has been on
smaller countries to try out reducing the fossil fuels subsidies, and there has been a lot of success

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in moving the capital spent into other sectors like universal healthcare. The reduction of fossil
fuel subsidies has also been met with a lot of protest in countries that have tried it out. If we can
shift the financing away from supporting the research and development of fossil fuel companies,
and allow renewable energy companies to thrive it will lead down a path that inevitably reduces
air pollution.
We have shown that the rise of air pollution can be greatly reduced by cutting back on the
usage of fossil fuels in the U.S.A., a workable solution involves promoting sustainable public
transport in metropolitan areas, breaking the reliance on fossil fuels in the transport industry, and
getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies. Without reducing our usage of fossil fuels we are going to run
into ever increasing pollution levels, and the use of fossil fuels is currently not declining. We need
to make the use of sustainable energy a common behavior in order to increase our air quality. By
showing the public how easy it is to switch to sustainable transport we can increase the usage in
metropolitan centers. The transport industry can do a lot to become more efficient and reduce
their costs altogether, and if governments lead the way by setting policies that reduce the
financing of old energy then the public will follow.

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 References
Shiftan, Y., & Attard, M. (2015). Sustainable Urban Transport. Bingley, U.K.: Emerald
Group Publishing Limited.
Root, A. (2003). Delivering Sustainable Transport : A Social Science Perspective. New
York: Pergamon Press.
Whitley, S. (2013). Time to Change the Game: Fossil Fuel Subsidies and Climate Change.
London: Overseas Development Institute. Retrieved from http://www.odi. org/sites/odi.org.uk/
files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/8669.pdf

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