“Business As Usual, Electrified” is an awful way to reduce auto emissions

First published by Steady State Herald. Also published on Resilience.

Auto industry voices in Canada have made headlines recently by urging a longer timeline for the transition to electric cars. We should hope that Prime Minister Mark Carney does not give in to this demand.

Yet even if Canada’s federal government sticks to the current policy, and Canadian new car sales are 100 percent zero-emission by 2035, carbon emissions will decline much more slowly than the world needs. That is due to the auto industry’s particularly pernicious strategy for continued growth.

The industry can’t keep boosting unit sales in a country where almost everyone who can drive, does drive. But they can boost revenue by selling bigger, heavier, more expensive vehicles when consumers need to swap their old vehicles for new ones.

With that strategy, Canada’s auto industry has done its part in maintaining the growth of gross domestic product (GDP). But the GDP isn’t all that’s growing. Pedestrian deaths and injuries are growing, tire particulate emissions are growing, traffic congestion is growing, and consumer debt (due to auto loans) is growing.

CO2 emissions from cars are holding steady and should start trending down over the next five years. However, a “Business As Usual, Electrified” transition will reduce emissions far too slowly to meet the climate-crisis challenge.

If you can’t sell more, sell bigger. (GM trucks at former GM Canada headquarters in Oshawa, Ontario, 2022. Photo by Bart Hawkins Kreps.)

Car Bloat in Canada

Statistics Canada figures show that unit sales of passenger vehicles grew just over 20 percent between 2010 and 2024, while population grew 21 percent. Auto sales revenue, however, grew by over 100 percent.

Price tags have soared because the mix of new cars has changed drastically. Most new passenger vehicles are categorized as “light trucks”—SUVs and many models of pick-up trucks. But “light trucks” is a euphemism we should translate as “huge cars.” Most of them are used almost entirely to haul around one or two persons, just like small cars do.

In 2010, the huge-car segment was 54 percent of the Canadian market. By 2024, huge cars made up 87 percent of new passenger vehicles. This trend of “autobesity” or “car bloat” has significant implications for Canada’s strategy to reduce carbon emissions by electrifying vehicles.

First, if the auto industry maintains Business As Usual, the vast majority of internal combustion cars sold between now and 2035 will be huge. They will have correspondingly high tailpipe emissions well after 2035. These emissions are often termed “tank-to-wheel” emissions.

A second emissions category is termed “well-to-tank” emissions. Gasoline or diesel fuel goes from oil wells or mines through an extraction-refining-distribution chain. This adds significant emissions for every liter of fuel burned.

An analogous category—“well-to-grid” let’s call it—exists for electric vehicles (EVs) when electricity is produced by coal- or gas-fired generators. Canada’s grid is powered predominantly by hydro or nuclear power, though, so well-to-grid is not a major category of EV-fleet emissions. (That could change if Canada adopts the “all the above” approach to energy taken by the United States, for example.)

There are also substantial carbon emissions in the manufacture of cars. These emissions are higher for larger cars, and ironically, higher for electric cars than for gas- or diesel-powered cars. If most new cars continue rolling off the assembly lines huge, carbon emissions from auto manufacturing will go up between now and 2035. That will remain true until the carbon-intensive industrial processes in the manufacturing chain are also electrified.

Finally, if Canadians continue to buy as many cars as they do now and drive them as far each year, the fleet of huge cars will continue to take up more roadway surface. Road construction is itself a significant source of carbon emissions.

Beyond the Tailpipe

What will it really take for Canada’s auto industry to reach zero emissions by 2035?  To answer this question, I projected six scenarios using a carbon-emissions calculator developed by the International Energy Agency. I estimated tank-to-wheel, well-to-tank, and auto manufacturing emissions in each of the six scenarios.

I incorporated road construction into my projections, using a Statistics Canada emissions-intensity per dollar estimate, multiplied by total road-construction expenditures for 2024. Passenger cars account for 91 percent of total vehicle kilometers driven, while heavy trucks and buses account for 9 percent. However, trucks and buses individually take more road space than cars. Therefore, I assigned 70 percent of road-construction emissions to the car fleet. (I did not find adequate data to estimate carbon emissions from road maintenance, which would make the analysis closer to complete.)

I estimated passenger-car fleet direct tailpipe emissions at about 72 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 in 2024. This is slightly less than Environment Canada’s estimate of 74 Mt in pre-pandemic 2019. However, when I added the car fleet’s share of emissions from the extraction-refining-distribution chain, from auto manufacturing, and from road construction, car-sector emissions came to over 115 Mt. That’s a 60 percent increase over the tailpipe emissions alone.

 

How will this change over the next 15 years? My “Business As Usual, Electrified” (BAU Electrified) projection through 2040 includes two somewhat optimistic assumptions. First, that electrification proceeds on schedule—20 percent of new cars being EV by 2026, 60 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2035. Second, that car bloat gets no worse (but also no better) through the coming years. The car/light-truck mix of new vehicles, and the vehicle sizes within these categories, remain exactly as in 2024. Importantly, however, this would mean that the average size of vehicles on the road would continue to increase. This is because the smaller sedans bought ten years ago would be replaced by large SUVs and pickup trucks.

If Canada’s goal of 100 percent EV sales by 2035 is met, total car-fleet emissions will still drop only 41 percent by 2040.

Based on these assumptions, I projected that Canada’s car-fleet emissions would be 41 percent lower in 2040 than in 2024

A 41 percent drop may sound impressive. But climate experts have warned for years that we must reduce global warming emissions by at least 43 percent by 2030. So, a 41 percent drop by 2040 is dangerously inadequate.

Departures from Business As Usual

Making even modest changes to passenger-transportation rules could reduce these emissions significantly faster. I projected five additional scenarios, the best of which shows total car-fleet emissions dropping by 71 percent by 2040.

Modest changes to a “Business As Usual, Electrified” scenario would bring down car-fleet emissions by 71 percent by 2040.

Scenario 2 is only slightly different from BAU Electrified (Scenario 1). It assumes a 98 percent zero-emission electric grid compared to Canada’s current national average of approximately 84 percent zero-emission.

In Scenario 3, the sedan/light-truck mix is dialed back to 2010 levels between 2026 and 2030. In Scenario 4, the sedan/light-truck mix is dialed back to 1979 levels between 2026 and 2030.

Scenario 5 builds on Scenario 4, except that vehicles within the sedan and light-truck categories drop modestly in size. In addition, I projected new-vehicle sales and average kilometers driven as dropping by 3.5 percent per year starting in 2030.

Finally, in Scenario 6 the annual vehicle-kilometer figure begins dropping by 3.5 percent per year in 2026. In Scenario 6, not only have CO2 emissions dropped by 71 percent by 2040, but the drop begins much sooner. The result is that cumulative emissions over the whole period are much lower.

Rising Demand for Electricity

Car bloat is likely to pose one more serious challenge in the effort to shrink overall CO2 emissions. A fleet of huge electric cars will add greatly to demand for electricity, at a time when we are also working to electrify other important sectors, such as home heating. We won’t have enough renewably generated electricity to meet all these demands for many years. Therefore, a rational policy would conduce moderate levels of new electricity demand.

I calculated that a Canada-wide EV fleet matching the BAU Electrified scenario would require 68 TeraWatts (TW) per year. A fleet of mostly small EVs driving about 60 percent as many kilometers a year (close to Scenario 6) would require only 32 TW per year. Either way, this is an almost entirely new source of demand, as we scramble to convert other carbon-intensive sectors simultaneously. But it would be much less challenging to build out a grid capable of providing 32 TW rather than 68 TW. A smaller grid build-out will likewise require less environmentally destructive mining for critical metals.

Business As Usual Is Killing Us

There are many reasons besides carbon emissions to conclude that a “Business As Usual, Electrified” strategy is a bad route. The huge passenger vehicles now dominating the roads compound the danger to pedestrians, cyclists, and anyone driving a smaller car.

Huge passenger EVs need huge batteries—and thus demand a rapid, reckless increase in critical-mineral extraction.

Huge EVs, since they are heavier than corresponding internal-combustion vehicles, create more dangerous particulate emissions from tire wear.

A fleet of huge cars takes up more road space, increasing traffic congestion.

And, huge cars chew up the roads faster, entailing more road construction and repair.

So, we should support the Canadian government’s plan for new-vehicle electrification by 2035. However, we should also demand that new vehicles be smaller, that the number of cars on the road gradually drops, and that vehicles drive fewer kilometers annually. There is a wide range of policies designed to achieve these goals. CASSE’s Sustainable Transportation Act, for example, includes provisions to get passenger vehicles and freight trucks off the road. It also discourages the purchase and use of the largest passenger cars and trucks.

The sooner such policies are implemented, the better—for drivers, non-drivers, our cities, our roads, our waters, our atmosphere, our future.

Electrification is an important and necessary step for a sustainable, healthy future, but growth-driven Business As Usual—even Electrified—is killing us.

This article is based on research presented at the International Society for Ecological Economics/Degrowth conference in Oslo, Norway in June 2025.

Photo at top of page: On Lakeshore Boulevard East, Toronto, Ontario, October 2015. Photo by Lisa Gallant, released under CC0 Public Domain license, accessed via Public Domain Pictures.

The infinite growth of highways

Also published on Resilience.

In the first few pages of his new book Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction, Erick Guerra lays out several essential points. 

First, while the originally planned Interstate expressway system was completed in 1992, the pace of highway construction spending since then has not slowed.

Second, though President Dwight Eisenhower intended the Interstate system – officially initiated by legislation in 1956 – to be rural, most of the construction funding went to urban and suburban sections, and nearly two-thirds of vehicle travel miles in the system also occur in urban and suburban areas.  

Third, though the length of highways may not be increasing, “There are nearly twice as many lane miles of urban interstate” today as in 1990. (All quotes in this article are from Overbuilt, by Erick Guerra.)

But has 70 years of ceaseless highway construction met the stated goals of relieving traffic congestion and making drivers safer?

On the contrary, “The average time spent in traffic per car commuter increased from twenty-nine hours in 1991 to fifty-four hours in 2019.” Meanwhile, “The US traffic fatality rate is two to four times higher than in Canada or wealthy European countries and has improved much more slowly over time than in peer countries.”

From a political economic point of view, it’s easy to understand one reason the highway system continues to grow: construction companies and their investors expect steadily growing revenues and profits, and successfully prevail on politicians to keep the government funds flowing.

Guerra, an urban planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provides another reason: the highway lobby has insisted for nearly a century that more highway lanes were needed to relieve congestion. But since more roadway has always induced more traffic, the battle against congestions is never won.

The only thing to do, then, is to keep on adding more highway lane miles. Just as the US economic system demands infinite growth of GDP, its transportation system demands infinite growth of highways.

This fondness for highways seems to match the view of Premier Doug Ford in my current home – Ontario, Canada. Guerra’s book, however, is US-focused and makes only occasional comparative references to other countries. Yet the lessons that emerge from Overbuilt are valuable for any country or city struggling with car dependency.

“Dan Ryan Expressway bridges over 24th Place in Chicago, seen from Archer.” Photo by Eric Allix Rogers, August 2008, accessed via flickr, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0.

A history of contestation

Guerra looks back to the early years of the 20th century to trace the growth of the highway lobby, but most of Overbuilt discusses the period since 1956. In that year President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act into law, and a massive, decades-long construction program shifted into high gear.

Though the legislation was associated with the Interstate expressways (or “freeways” as they were often termed), Guerra makes clear that the commitment of funding was far wider. Indeed, it had to be. As controlled access roadways, expressways don’t provide direct access to any homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, or parks. The expressway system requires an even more elaborate system of feeder highways, service roads and arterials to connect the motoring public with their actual destinations.

Many of these roads cross state lines, and are referred to as (lower-case) interstate highways. The 1956 legislation funded both Interstate and interstate highways at a rate of 90% federal funding to 10% state funding.

The program also funded the acquisition of land for new or expanded highways.

In urban areas, that land was occupied by homes and businesses. By the late 1950s, “New interstates were displacing nearly one hundred thousand families per year but providing no relocation support.” Disproportionately, highways were directed through Black, Brown and poor neighbourhoods. (See Justice and the Interstates for a close look at the ongoing struggle to rebuild these neighbourhoods and provide recompense for families that lost their homes or businesses.)

The highway program was criticized on other grounds as well. For one thing, the phenomenon of induced demand was evident even seventy years ago. Guerra writes that “As noted by early observers such as [US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and [philosopher of technology] Lewis Mumford, increased traffic was generally the largest and most substantial effect of new highway investments.”

Even without adequate payment for expropriation of urban lands, urban highway building is exorbitantly expensive. Guerra writes that about $2.5 trillion (in inflation-adjusted dollars) have been doled out by the federal Highway Trust Fund since 1956 – with most of that funding going to urban highway projects. The spending continues today. Although the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) has been widely praised for supporting renewable energy and urban public transit, Guerra writes that the Act will also put “hundreds of billions of dollars into building, rebuilding, widening, and maintaining an already overbuilt roadway system.”

This 1973 photo shows “Heavy traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago Illinois. It is the busiest in the United States with 254,700 vehicles daily, according to figures released in March, 1975, by the Federal Department of Transportation. The Kennedy Expressway in Chicago is the second busiest (not shown) with 234,100 vehicles per day.” Photo by John H. White, October 1973. in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

 

Meeting peak demand

Going back nearly a century, the nascent field of traffic engineering developed a method that is still used today to provide a rationale for highway expansions.

That method was to peer into the future and guesstimate what the future car and truck traffic demand will be – not to find ways to reduce that demand, but always to provide enough highway space to meet that demand. And not just “meet the demand” but “meet the peak demand”. And not just meet “peak demand” but “demand in the thirtieth busiest hour projected during the next twenty years.”

Why the thirtiest busiest hour, instead of the twentieth or fortieth or one-hundredth busiest hour? Guerra says the choice was arbitrary, but was codified as a standard nevertheless. But the choice to plan and build highways to meet demand in the 99.98th percentile busiest hour has kept highway builders busy, and made the US ever more car-dependent, ever since. Due to induced demand, however, the new or expanded highways quickly fill up and even the demand during routine weekday “rush hour” stays ahead of roadway supply.

Guerra shows how gas-tax revenues from less-than-peak hours are used to subsidize traffic at the most congested times – the reverse of congestion pricing. Accordingly, he cites congestion pricing as one of the most significant ways to reverse the pattern of overbuilding.

But surely all these roadway “improvements” have led to greater public safety? Many highway engineers will claim success on that front, pointing to a drop in deaths per Vehicle Mile Travelled (VMT). Guerra responds:

“From 1955 to 1980, the fatality rate per vehicle mile had halved. To put it succinctly, Americans were driving nearly twice as much, thanks to wider and higher-capacity roadways, and killing about the same number of people after adjusting for population growth.”

In agreement with engineering professor and author Wes Marshall (Killed by a Traffic Engineer), Guerra believes we should discuss traffic risk primarily on a per capita basis as is done with most other public health hazards. Judged on this basis, the expanding highway system looks like a very bad safety investment:

“The places with the most highways have the most arterials, the most local roads, the most driving, and the most traffic fatalities. Across urban counties, each 10 percent increase in roadway per capita corresponds with about a 4 percent increase in traffic fatalities per capita.”

A looming fiscal crisis

Of course the highway system can’t keep on expanding forever, given the finiteness of land and resources. Guerra writes that “the current transportation finance model is unsustainable and fast approaching a fiscal crisis.”

Thus the first step to ending the pattern of overbuilding is to stop funding new highways, and stop maintaining, and even dismantle, some of the highways now in existence. A second step, as mentioned previously, is congestion pricing.

Better funding for public transit might help too, but Guerra cautions that in most areas of the United States, public transit is nowhere near competitive with cars in terms of travel times and convenience; increased funding may convince very few drivers to switch to transit. Such is the legacy of 70 years of induced car dependency.

He also draws on the distinction between accessibility and mobility to advocate another change:

“Measuring accessibility – people’s ease of getting to the places they are trying to go – instead of mobility – traffic speeds, traffic volumes, and highway capacity – is perhaps the single most important shift that needs to take place to begin to evaluate and assess the impacts of transportation investments properly. Movement and traffic are quite simply the wrong way to measure the transportation system.” p 162

Guerra has done a great job of describing the recipe for overbuilding. But the recipe for converting an overbuilt network into a safe, sustainable transportation system is still being worked out in countries and cities around the world.

Photo at top of page: “Passing over the Dan Ryan Expressway, with a good view of the skyline in the background.” By The West End, August 2008, accessed via flickr, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0.