An Overview
Global warming is a problem. The international scientific community, practically all the scientific agencies of the United States government, and a growing number of multinational corporations now acknowledge that human activities are affecting the earth's climate.
While scientists have come to acknowledge global warming, they still remain divided on the best practical response.
Since the United States is unlikely to accept the mandatory greenhouse gas reductions called for in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, local actors have taken the initiative for solving this global problem. TravelMatters is a tool designed to help such individuals or interested groups take local action against the global problem of climate change.
Focusing on transportation, TravelMatters provides users with information and tools to evaluate the impact of their daily transportation choices on global atmospheric processes.
Whether calculating the greenhouse gas contribution of a journey-to-work in a personal automobile, or the combined emissions of a transit fleet using natural gas instead of diesel fuel, the emissions calculator at TravelMatters helps to link the abstract trends of climate change to concrete decisions made in daily life.
TravelMatters is also an educational resource. As a supplement to the emissions calculators, TravelMatters offers informative content for those who may want to learn more about the science behind climate change, the evolving local, national, and international policy response, or promising alternative fuels and technologies that might help reduce future emissions.
- For more information…
- Transit and Climate Change
- Transit and VMT Reduction
- Climate Change Science