An updated and expanded edition of Laurent Castaignède’s earlier Airvore ou la face obscure des transports [Airvore, or the Dark Side of Transportation][1] (Montreal: Écosociété, 2018), this book aims to dispel the myth — currently in vogue in this age of incentivization to switch to electric cars — that there could be such a thing as clean vehicles.
The first part details the history of motorized transport, from Denis Papin’s seventeenth-century steam digester to the auto boom in the second half of the twentieth century. Between 1950 and 1970, the total share of air pollution from transportation emissions rose from one-half to three-quarters. Regulations caused the main pollutant emissions (in wealthy countries) to decrease between 1980 and 2000, but nitrogen oxide (NOx) and particulate matter (PM) pollution has persisted in Europe, due to its continued dependence on diesel. Human responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions harmful to the climate was also established during this period, starting with the 1990 publication of the First Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But global mobility continues to increase, with the number of vehicles on the road doubling worldwide between 2000 and 2020, primarily in developing countries for that period. It seems inevitable that mobility will have to be reimagined in light of all the premature deaths caused by pollution, traffi...
