Electrifying transportation: Devil is in the details
The technologies needed to begin seriously weaning the U.S. transportation system away from petroleum and toward alternatives such as hybrid and pure electric vehicles have made great progress, but harnessing them on a scale that would significantly lower greenhouse-gas emissions or oil imports is complicated by issues of choosing the right policies and of implementing needed infrastructure improvements.This was a clear message from a high-level panel of experts who met last year at MIT to discuss the issues in a one-day symposium, whose conclusions were released as a report on Jan. 13 by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).The impetus for moving transportation systems away from petroleum is twofold, as MITEI Director Ernest Moniz explained in introducing the report: to reduce the nation’s dependence on oil imports, and to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to global climate change.MIT Institute Professor John Deutch, who with Moniz was co-chairman of the symposium,...