At the end of this series of blogs, I would like to first thank all my readers for following these small pieces of text. Suffering from great procrastination, I cannot put as much content as I want into each post, but I have been trying to be concise as ever possible to make sure as much is said as possible. You will (may have already) find that each post is complete in its posing of questions, answering, and some external source of support.

By briefly introducing you to the world of externalities, I sincerely would like your takeaway to be: Be mindful of intangible impacts of what you do as you can. Are electric cars really so much greener than gasoline cars? Would air travel be as polluting as it has been? Asking such questions does not harm much when you make transportation choices, but it may, indeed, help saving our environment.

To summarize the points that I have attempted to make in every post, the transportation sector as a whole suffers from significant negative externalities, not only on human well-being and socio-economic fields, but on the environment side as well. From the most tangible exhaust from road vehicles to contrail-cirrus clouds from aviation, the transportation sector has been contributing significantly to global green house gas emission (Shankaranarayanan & Amaldas, 2011). In many specific cases technological solutions do exist, but the cost to exact these solutions may not be affordable; or the political will to act remains thin. In other cases further studies are essential to finding the right cure for internalizing the externalities, or to get rid of the externalities at all. In fact, transport sector has perhaps the greatest potential to reduce green house gas emissions from daily activities. While pure electric passenger planes and entirely green infrastructure may still be miles away from today, choosing public transportation and retiring sub-standard internal combustion engines can be done immediately. Yet we do have to act now.

References

Shankaranarayanan, A., & Amaldas, C. (2011). Climatic Impacts of Green House Emissions A Case Study on the Public and Private Transportation Sectors of the Asia Pacific (Vol. 4). Retrieved from https://ucl-new-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com