What’s wrong?

We have two red-hot crises, Climate Emergency and Traffic Congestion, plaguing our present and putting our future under threat, linked by a common main culprit: TRANSPORTATION. We also have yearly conferences where science-based mitigating strategies are issued, and governments/local authorities are trying hard to implement them. They are so focused on the stepping stones (trying to incentivise people to give up their cars and embrace active travel or buses, installing renewable power plants, grids, energy storages and charging facilities, incentivising the transition from ICE vehicles to EVs, reporting minor and local successes, and exaggerating their importance) that they lose sight of the main issues: emissions are still rising, fossil fuels use is still increasing, as well as our time spent in traffic.

Crises mitigation requires strategies, efforts, funds allocation, goodwill, perseverance, optimistic reports and speeches. But if they diverge us from the goals, they must be revised and improved. Climate change, however, doesn’t care about any of those efforts, promises, excuses, or local successes gained by shifting the problem “outside our back yard”. It only cares whether we managed to stop warming the planet or not. That is the only relevant reference.

We only have one atmosphere where we dump our GHGs, and only one planetary ocean to absorb the excess heat. We’ve been trying those strategies for over 30 years and there’s no improvement whatsoever. Climate tipping points are around the corner, we might not have another 30 years left to see whether they start delivering the projected outcomes. Once we pass those tipping points there’s no way back, and I guess our children deserve a better chance.

I don’t mean we should give up on current strategies. They might put us on track, eventually. But we should at least consider different approaches or solutions to preserve the fragile balance on our beautiful and unique planet.

The problem, however, is far broader and more complex. Other crises are swirling around us, all of them intimately intertwined with one another. Mitigating Climate Change with the current strategies is done at the expense of aggravating all of them, risking to turn their status from “emerging” to “critical”. Transportation along its Supply Chain has a significant impact on each of them. At their heart is a common root cause that’s overlooked, ignored, and unaddressed so far, (fossil fuels pale in comparison to it), jeopardising all our mitigating efforts. Addressing it properly will not just alleviate but solve all problems much faster and at a fifth of the financial, social, and environmental cost.

Nymbel is built around this root cause, based on the most prevalent and successful traffic trend today –single occupancy, and having the current and future generations’ needs at heart. To understand the straightforwardness of our approach, compared to that of the current strategies in mitigating transportation-related crises, I will make an analogy with a simple-and-easy-to-understand scenario:

Say we have a bathtub that overspills because the flow from the faucet exceeds that absorbed by the drain. Our policymakers have identified the culprit – the water that damages the floor and hinders people’s activities in the area, developed science-based best practices and technologies for mopping the floor and evacuating the overspilled water, and are working hard to implement them. Now “mopping” and “evacuating” have become prosperous businesses, benefiting from subsidies and environmental credits. Ironically, the more water overspills the more money they get. So, why would they want it to stop?

Nymbel’s approach is to reduce the flow from the tap so the drain can keep up, and all the downstream damages, challenges, and expenses cease to exist, and it manages to do so while enabling people to better meet their needs and enhance their quality of life.