Loco

Gabcast! Low carbon travel adventures #1

One of the things that really gets on my nerves when reading about climate change is the sombre tone of most people who write on the subject.

Worse than that, climate change activists often just sound like whining children perfectly willing to complain about what’s going wrong, but without focusing sufficiently on alternatives.

What this does psychologically to the reader of such writing is very important. It sucks the colour and cultural richness from any vision of the future: if we’re not going to be burning in a globally-warmed hell then we’re going to be wandering around shell-shocked at the pace at which we finally made the necessary changes. The people who took the longest to persuade will be covering their heads in shame and submitting to the ones who had been saying all along that we needed to act radically (who after years of bitterness will have finally become smug).

As someone who has been thinking about climate change and carbon for most of my teenage years and all of my adult life so far, it is very easy to fall into this category and start criticising people left, right and centre for not doing this or that. “Politicians are all bastards, why can’t they just do the very simple things needed to make things right? Creating a fully sustainable and equitable global economy is simple - damn their cynical power-hungry ways”.

The problem is that it’s not simple. The notion that the people in power are laughing to themselves behind the scenes at how closely they have followed their financial backers’ interests is ludicrous. There are huge challenges and huge opportunities as we face up to reducing carbon, but things would get a hell of a lot easier if we all talked about the things we could be doing, rather than bitching about the things we’re currently doing wrong. Apart from anything else, it will give us something to get excited about rather than simply depress us.

When we acknowledge the benefits of taking a humanist approach that allows us to pick out the positives and run with them like a relay team passing a baton then suddenly addressing our responsibilities gets a lot more interesting. We can see visions of change that supersede the insecurities of celebrity culture and quick-fix, debt-financed consumerism. Celebrating the local and sharing that celebration with others via the internet; an international perspective that freshens our senses and empowers us within our own communities.

“What the hell has this got to do with travel?” I hear you scoff.

The answer is that travel is all about that cultural exchange, and it’s by letting ideas evolve organically through a fun, and even relaxing process, that we’ll get somewhere else that isn’t the grey future painted (actually, sketched with charcoal) by some environmentalists. On that note, let us build a future of travel that safeguards the positives and does away with the negatives in the blink of an eye.

Someone sent me an IPCC report recently with the caveat “Not hugely exciting but outlines the technological advances that might bring down rail’s climate change impacts”. Not hugely exciting? Read this:

Although rail transport is one of the most energy efficient modes today, substantial opportunities for further efficiency improvements remain. Reduced aerodynamic drag, lower train weight, regenerative breaking and higher efficiency propulsion systems can make significant reductions in rail energy use.

Now, I concede that I am a massive geek, but that definitely gets me excited…

So after doing some further research into airships following my last post, I realised that I provided a link to a load of people who want to colonise space! Ha. Whilst colonising space may be an option given how royally we seem to be f**king this planet, I don’t know whether aligning myself with these people is such a great idea.

In case you were wondering, the people I’m talking about have plans for airships that involve decking them out with photovoltaic cells so that they don’t rely on fuel to propel them forward (so far so good), then putting a load of them in the upper atmosphere and beaming down really fast broadband signals (no odder than satellites), and then using them as a base to first of all colonise the moon and Mars, followed by the rest of our solar system (where we consciously and deliberately alter the climates of other planets to accommodate our darling race). OK, so it got weird.

You can find out about each step in full here (although no-one has written the wiki pages for ‘Avalon’ - “A program of extraterrestrial surface settlement concurrent to Asgard and starting with the Moon and Mars. Based on pressurized habitat development dominated by excavated subterranean structures of arcology scale” - and beyond. Hmm, I wonder why).

So after realising that I sound mad as a ruddy hatter banging on about the future of transport in such a fanciful fashion, I was glad to come across some slightly more realistic ‘futurists’, such as Jamais Cascio. Jamais is the co-founder of excellent site Worldchanging.com which I came across some time ago as a great resource for finding out what’s going on in terms of constructive efforts to do something about the challenges we face. Much as Americans can be mighty annoying with their full-of-sunshine-and-glitter accents, they certainly know how to phrase things in a way that make you feel engaged and empowered, unlike the often moany contingent of environmentalists on this side of the Atlantic.

On 20th December, I’m going to engage in a ‘Webinar’ (words like this are another example of the bad sides of Americanism) where Jamais is speaking, along with people from Natural Logic. The cynical British part of me (I’m an internationalist so there’s parts of every nation in me, honest) thinks that there will be a lot of excitement about how great they are doing, whilst in actuality their approach will be more geared towards corporate interest than to carbon literacy, but I’m willing to give it a chance. If it’s crap, I can always revert to the Mars-colonisers.

In case you’re not aware, airships are potentially much cleaner than flying in planes (potentially 80-90% less CO2) and could provide the best viable alternative for Atlantic crossings . This Forum for the Future post gives a rough idea of what this future travel technology could be like but there’s plenty more work to be done to work out how viable it really is. Also, what with western governments ploughing ahead with short-sighted airport expansion it’s not exactly crystal clear where airships would take off from (could existing airports be modified?).

But before we tackle the issue of airport expansion head on (which is what the people at Plane Stupid are great at) let’s try and work out the carbon issues and how far this could feasibly scale up before it’s still unsustainable.

I’ve come across some people in California who are actively campaigning to get an airship off the ground in the San Francisco bay area in Autumn (or ‘Fall’ to them) 2008. Airship Ventures seem like a jolly bunch, and they are clearly serious about it - seeking investment with an impressive list of individuals involved. However, they don’t seem to be attacking the venture from an environmental perspective (something they aren’t really in a position to do as - somewhat predictably - a lot of the people involved enjoy flying private jets). The closest they get is mentioning biofuels in a blog post but as the more informed of you out there will be aware, biofuels are a far from straightforward win in terms of climate change. George Monbiot and many others have gone as far as to say biofuels are worse than fossil fuels.

Let me say at this stage that I was rather confused to find a post about biofuels at all, as I had thought that the environmental rationale behind airships was that they run on helium, not on the combustion of conventional liquid fuel. Then my incredibly non-physics-oriented brain realised that they need to use a combination: the helium keeps the thing in the air (like the balloons you used to inhale from to make your voice silly as a 14 year-old at Pizza Hut) whilst the fuel (be it biofuel or otherwise) propels it along.

Given that Airship Ventures seem to be the most advanced company looking feasibly at the renaissance of airships, I thought I would investigate their claims a bit further.

So given that they need to burn liquid fuel as part of the process, does this spell the end of airships as a viable low carbon alternative to conventional aeroplanes? It’s not yet clear. The Zeppelin that will be used for the Airship Ventures project runs on Avgas and it’s mentioned on the site that it uses 50kg/hour (”low” compared to aircraft and helicopters). However, the wikipedia Avgas article says “environmental and cost considerations have led to increasing numbers of aircraft being fitted with highly fuel-efficient diesel engines; these … run on jet fuel [as opposed to Avgas].”

So if we assume that Airship Ventures’ comparison is with other aircraft that run on Avgas, it’s still unclear how the Zeppelin compares to conventional aircraft (e.g. a Boeing 747) on a kg of CO2 per passenger mile (kg CO2 ppm) basis. Then of course there are the implicit assumptions in the Forum for the Future article: “They are fitted with efficient solar cells and the latest in battery technology for propulsion, and for buoyancy rely on a combination of helium and propellers.” I previously worked for a company commercialising related technologies and I’m far from convinced that the photovoltaic cells plus energy storage solution will become technically feasible. Even without the new advances, it should be possible to get a comparable figure per passenger kilometre for the current state of the art.

Notwithstanding the lack of this figure, there is still the problem of how much helium the world has left (i.e. not much). Assuming that some people with more scientific knowledge than me can turn their thoughts to to the technical challenges of increasing renewables, and overcoming the lack of helium (if it doesn’t get burnt we surely don’t need a never-ending supply like we do with kerosene?), then I reckon this is worth continuing to look into. I’ll leave you with a picture of a ludicrously decadent conceptual design for the future of eco-travel.