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Journal of Cleaner Production 16 (2008) 1717e1726 www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro

The prospects for global green car mobility
Patrick Moriarty a,*, Damon Honnery b a Department of Mechanical Engineering, Monash University, P.O. Box 197, Caulfield East, 3145 Victoria, Australia b Department of Mechanical Engineering, Monash University, P.O. Box 31, 3800 Victoria, Australia Received 21 March 2007; received in revised form 11 October 2007; accepted 19 October 2007 Available online 28 November 2007

Abstract The quest for green car mobility faces two major challenges: air pollution from exhaust emissions and global climate change from greenhouse gas emissions. Vehicle air pollution emissions are being successfully tackled in many countries by technical solutions such as low-sulphur fuels, unleaded petrol and three-way catalytic converters. Many researchers advocate a similar approach for overcoming transport’s climate change impacts. This study argues that finding a technical solution for this problem is not possible. Instead, the world will have to move to an alternative surface transport system involving far lower levels of motorised travel. Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Green mobility; Fuel efficiency; Alternative fuels; Global climate change; Air pollution

1. Introduction Provision of environmentally sustainable (or green) private transport throughout the world faces two main challenges. The first is urban and even regional air pollution, particularly in the rapidly growing cities of the industrialising world [1]. The second is global climate change, caused mainly by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere. These two barriers to green car mobility differ in several important ways. First, road traffic air pollution problems are more localised, because of the short atmospheric lifetimes of most vehicle pollutants [1,2]. Thus regional solutions are often not only

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