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Topic: Sustainability

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[Episode #283] – Transportation Beyond Electrification

Sep 16 2026

Transportation continues to electrify, as a quarter of the world's new car market in 2025 was electric, both battery and plug-in hybrids. And this area of the energy transition is already showing up in metrics that matter for the climate. Recent data shows that running a battery electric car on Europe's grid cuts lifetime emissions by more than 70% against a comparable combustion car.

But even as progress on electrifying transportation continues, many other factors are holding back the deeper decarbonization we need. A switch to EVs won't remove traffic congestion on its own, or change how much of the street a passenger car consumes at the expense of smaller and lighter options. Vehicles turn over far faster than the streets they run on.

What can make our mobility system sustainable beyond the fuel? This is exactly the tension we were getting at in Episode #96. In this episode we return to our host Chris Nelder's 2019 conversation with Debbie Hopkins, now Professor of the Human Geographies of Mobility at the University of Oxford, who warned everyone working on the technology side. Swap the engine or change the fuel and you end up with the same unsustainable system.

When Chris and Debbie spoke, electric cars were about one in forty sold worldwide. Even though now it's one in four, that still won't get the job done as the energy transition's final answer. Transportation remains the single largest source of US greenhouse gas emissions, and it will take more than decisions about engines to tackle that.

Guest:

Debbie Hopkins is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Her position is split between the Sustainable Urban Development program, the Transport Studies Unit, and the School of Geography and the Environment. Debbie is a research affiliate of the Centre for Sustainability, University of Otago, New Zealand and Associate Editor of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism. Debbie has co-edited two books on transitions: Low Carbon Mobility Transitions (Goodfellow) in 2016, and Transitions in Energy Efficiency and Demand (Routledge) in 2018, both of which build upon her research interests across climate change, low-carbon futures and sociotechnical transitions. At Oxford, she leads research into expectations of automation in freight, everyday experiences of UK truckers, and novel methodologies for researching mobile work.

On Twitter: @debbiehopkins_
On the Web: Debbie Hopkins’ page at Google Scholar

Geek rating: 2

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[Episode #123] – Sustainable Energy Transitions

Jun 10 2020

Mini Episode

Addressing the threat of climate change means executing a successful energy transition. But as the transition proceeds, we are increasingly having to confront the impacts of transition technologies, and consider the trade-offs of choosing those technologies over the conventional technologies that they are displacing - because nothing we can do is without an impact of some kind, and everything we build requires the use of raw materials. So the question of what is truly sustainable is beginning to take a larger importance in the formation of policies designed to advance energy transition.

But energy is still being taught primarily as part of the engineering discipline, leaving students from non-engineering disciplines in need of ways to learn something about energy, in order to help them be more effective in their work. Fortunately, professor Dustin Mulvaney of San Jose State University in California has a new textbook designed to address this need, titled “Sustainable Energy Strategies: Socio-Ecological Dimensions of Decarbonization.” It’s a very ambitious effort to survey many of the complex topics that are critical for people involved in energy transition to understand. In this episode, we talk with Dustin about why he wrote it, and we take a walk through each chapter in the book to understand the complex questions around what “sustainability” really means in the context of energy transition.

Geek rating: 5

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[Episode #96] – Sustainable Mobility

May 29 2019

Mini Episode

Energy transition is happening quickly and disruptively in the transportation sector. But it is generally an open question whether the transition currently at hand is producing socially beneficial results. As we grapple with a sudden influx of new modes of mobility and business models, and contemplate the dawning of an entirely new mobility paradigm, are we just letting technology take us wherever it wants to go, or are we guiding technologies toward sustainable mobility? For that matter, what does sustainable mobility even mean? How can we weigh up all the pros and cons of new mobility modes—not just the social effects like safety and equity, but the environmental impacts, the total impact on the energy system, and the socioeconomic strategies we bring to our urban development and civic planning activities more generally? Can we hedge our bets against sudden and massive dislocations produced by autonomous vehicles? We explore all those questions and more in this episode with a researcher from Oxford University who has studied them deeply.

Geek rating: 2

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[Episode #82] – The Business Case for Renewable Energy

Nov 14 2018

Mini Episode

For large corporations, especially those in the industrial sector, buying renewable energy, reducing consumption and becoming more sustainable are surprisingly difficult things to do. Industries like manufacturing, mining, construction, and producing raw materials like cement are all extremely energy intensive, and in many cases, there simply are no good alternatives to using conventional processes based on fossil fuels.

But that doesn’t mean that businesses engaged in those industries can’t find ways to start reducing their own carbon footprints, investing in renewables, investing in research and development into ways of doing more with less, and sharing their knowledge with their peers, in order to accelerate the progress of entire industries. In this episode, we talk with a company that might at first glance seem like an unlikely one to be pursuing sustainability efforts, but which is establishing itself as a leader in corporate sustainability strategies: Ingersoll Rand, a mid-sized manufacturer operating in construction, mining, industrial and commercial markets. You may be surprised at how much they are able to do to become more sustainable and integrate more renewable energy into their operations.

Geek rating: 1

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