Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret


We are a generation of great talkers.

  • Powerpoint Version of presentation (Warning: Very large, ca. 9 Mo. Go get some coffee.)
  • Zipped version (Large file, ca. 3 Mo.)
  • More on OECD est! program

    • What is this?

    I made this PowerPoint presentation in October 1996 to a working group of the OECD's Environmentally Sustainable Transportation's program (est!) with which I had and continue to have a collegial if occasionally bumpy long term advisory role since its inception more than a decade ago. At the time I saw this as a much needed call to a more thoughtful, more layered, and more technology-assisted approach to the challenges of sustainability in a frankly non-sustainable world -- a world of people, habits and political arrangements that to all appearances has no real intention to make the fundamental changes that are needed for the planet and in our daily lives.

    The call for more and smarter IT, and without undue delay, came at a time at which most of the government representatives on our task force and indeed elsewhere were not yet using email nor really the internet. And this a full decade and a half after this valuable tool set first came into use (including by us in our dialy work). It was my point that if we are not making full use of our tools, then we are part of the problem. Do you agree? This was hard for me to accept as a sort of bland status quo, as you will see in the presentation that follows. I regarded it then as our duty to use the best available technologies in order to improve our chances of winning this war. And I still do today.

    The full presentation is available here in our Library as a PowerPoint presentation. The presentation is not short and will take the better part of a half hour to get through. And even today it still looks pretty good (though the presentation is a bit dated with all those early bells and whistles, but after all it was a quicly done one-man show and that from someone less than an expert.) My hope is that the ideas and overall quality of perspective merit this expedndature of time on your part. But let me leave it to you to decide that for yourself. (Note the PowerPoint version for direct viewing here is a very large file of ca. 9 Mo., while the zipped file is ca. 3 Mo. It requires a sound card.)

    From the October 1996 intro . . .

    • "Presentation made in Paris on 11th October 1996 to the OECD’s Environment Policy Committee, Task Force on Transport.
    • In it I try to encourage our group to take advantage of the same communications techniques which are at present being used to such good advantage by private sector groups.
    • While I feel strongly that there is no reason that public sector undertakings as important as the EST program should continue to operate on the basis on fifty year old technologies and organisational approaches, I am also aware that we need a good place to start.

    "Check out the leading edge of the research, the many related Web sites and all the conferences on global warming, carbon dioxide build-up, ozone depletion, and the rest, and one comes to a pretty simple, pretty solid conclusion. From an unbiased eco-perspective we are misbehaving very badly indeed. And what is worse yet is that, rhetoric aside, there is little out there on the radar screen that promises much better. Indeed the numbers all suggest that things are going from bad to worse. Emissions targets are being timidly set, after a huge amount of hemming and hawing. And then flagrantly missed.

    "That, in our words, is Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret. Worse yet, the sad truth is it does appear to be not just a transient anomaly but rather a sign of our times, of our generation, of our egregious (un)willingness to organize ourselves and get around to doing (a lot) better. (For more on this you might usefully begin by turning to the OECD's program on Environmentally Sustainable Transport .

    For more on the OECD est! program

    For further information on the est! program, please contact:
    Dr. Peter Wiederkehr
    OECD Environment Directorate
    2 rue André-Pascal
    75775 Paris CEDEX 16 France
    Tel +33 (01) 45 24 78 92

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