ABSTRACT
From calculations of journey time, comfort, and cost to the defeatist “it’s too late to stop climate change”, changing mobilities is tied to changing our understanding and practices of time. This chapter examines mobile temporalities from deep time to the present urgency for action. Many current prognoses for limiting global warming talk in terms of timescales that are already used up. International agreements are set out to 2050, but these are artificial and political dates against which the consequences of different levels of action can be manipulated. Yet the business of time in the transportation industries, which sell mobility, is about the seconds, minutes, or hours that people can save by choosing one route or one form of transport over another. Reducing time spent travelling has been at the heart of planning for transport for a century or more. These are the same seconds, minutes, and hours that tick as we pass further into dangerous planetary conditions, yet also somehow fundamentally disconnected from that. In this chapter, we review the importance of time and, in particular, the urgency to act which, we suggest, were it to really be recognised, would trigger different responses to those we observe.
