Cycling in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

It stands to reason that using fewer fossil fuel-burning vehicles will reduce the demand for fossil fuels. I'm sure there's plenty of evidence for that.

But given that our fossil fuel consumption is 0.0001% of the global total (or something like that), reducing gasoline consumption in Waterloo Region really won't have any perceptible impact on the demand for oil sands-sourced oil.  We need to reduce transportation patterns globally (or at least continentally) to have an impact on a specific oil-producing region.

Regulation, on the other hand, can effectively (and in parallel) reduce the environmental impact of the oil sands.

Sure, I'm not saying don't do regulation.  But don't discount the effect of acting locally.  Yes, we represent only 0.00001% (or whatever sufficiently small number we pick at random) of GHG emissions in transportation, but so does every city.  Not only should we not use that as an excuse to do nothing and absolve ourselves of responsibility (and I'm not necessarily saying this is what you are saying, but it is a very common response), we should do it to be a leader to others, provide evidence into the effectiveness of changing our transportation patterns.  In this, we are hardly a leader word-wide, but possibly we could be in North American mid sized cities.