Thingomy.co.uk

Small rant about environmental issues — please disregard if you so desire.

I have thought long and hard on the question of why boats and trains are better than plains and cars, and I have come up with the following.

Currently we have only 2 forms of energy that are even remotely sustainable, neither of which is perfect:

Wind/tide/wave/solar/river renewable stuff — these are perfectly decent secondary sources, but aren’t really suitable as a main power source for the worlds energy needs, there needs to be another energy source that acts as a primary when the weather isn’t right etc. So it’s awesome, but only solves part of the problem.

Nuclear — if managed properly it can be clean, reasonably safe, and only has one real issue: waist — it’s a bugger to get rid of safely, and is dangerous for hundreds of years.

I’m confident that at some point in the future another form of energy is going to be discovered, and it’s going to be clean, cheap, and usable, with no real side effects — I’m holding out for fusion, but it could be anything.

There is one thing that is very likely — this new clean form of energy is going to be big, clumsy, not very portable and produce bulk power from a static site. The most efficient forms of power currently have these characteristics also gas and oil power stations can be cleaner that mobile counterparts as they have nothing outside economics to stop them installing filters to remove soot and CO2. It’s much simpler to build an efficient machine if you don’t also have to worry about making it small, light, and portable.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that power stations *do* produce less pollution per unit than a car engine — I’m saying they *could* produce less pollution.

The upshot of all this is that I believe the bast way to organise power production and usage is to centralise it and transport the power to where it’s used. This allows of efficient inclusion of secondary sources like renewables; it allows use of power from efficient power stations; it also allows any newly developed bulk power production systems to be included easily.

There are many modes of transport in use today, I would like to draw comparisons between 4 of them: car; train; plane and boat.

Cars can currently be powered by hydrogen or battery, neither of these solutions as of yet have reached critical mass, and so are not yes usable by the general public, but tey will be good once they get there, they should be used whereever posible. Otherwise cars are very ineffiecient — they haul large amounts of metal and around and have high inefficient drag, regularly to transport only 1 person. Cars are the only reasonable way to move around in certain situations, like in rural areas and when moving goods etc, so should not be made extinct but were possible their use should be reduced dramatically.

Trains on the other hand have been shown to be feasible to directly electrify — the UK east coast mainline of over 600km in length was electrified in 1990, this proves that electrification works, at least on high traffic lines (where it’s most important). They also shift huge numbers of people with much less energy than cars (not to mention the safety improvements introduced by only using properly trained drivers)

Planes (at least short haul planes) are ridicules articles of excess and illustrate the impatience of modern culture, there is simply no way (at least until some huge leaps in technology come round) to make them efficient and clean. Due to their critical issues with weight and size, they are very tricky things to build power sources for, especially given that virtually all modern aircraft are powered by jet engines, which directly turn petroleum products into forward thrust; running it off hydrogen (assuming that someone manages to find a way to store the stuff) may be doable, but I can’t see it happening soon; regardless it’s a huge redesign. If someone tries to run a jet engine off something that produces electricity, they will become unstuck very quickly.

Boats, are exceedingly dirty at the moment, a cargo ship is said to produce about as much pollution as a whole city’s power stations even while idling in port. This may well be, but if designing a ship, adding a few hundred tons, and adding more space for a new propulsion system is a slight inconvenience, but little more. This is of little help in the short term, but it may be in the long term. Planes are much nicer things than ships for long haul, it’s no longer worth sitting around on a boat for sever weeks to get somewhere, the concept would be laughed at, so planes are here to stay for anything intercontinental.

None of this says anything very interesting until we look at were we are going next — in a hypothetical world (which could well turn out to be this one) where we discover usable clean fusion power in the next few years, but it turns out to be a colossal warehouse sized article covered in lead, and borderline financially infeasible, we need to get as much of our energy usage connected to it as possible to make it financially feasible. If a high proportion of our intercity transport is electric train, we are already there on the transport front — trams would help inside cities where there is enough individuals to justify it. in this scenario, if we don’t move to electric trains wholesale now, we would fail to move over to fusion power.

As for boats, they still aren’t very useful, until fusion is miniaturised to the point that it will fit on a ship, in which case we are good to go. This concept has already been proven by the implementation of nuclear warships. I don’t see a fusion reactor fitting inside a plane any time soon however.

Sustainable energy is a jigsaw puzzle, the whole jigsaw has to be built in order to be fully sustainable, currently we don’t have all the pieces, but we can’t wait until we have all the pieces, we need put real effort into building now. If we don’t show a willingness to build, we may never find all of the peices as there may not be enough demand for them until the rest of the puzzle is finished. A part finished puzzle is better than none at all, we already have wind farms providing some of the worlds power, the more of this we get the better.

using a car instead of a train (all else being equal) with the excuse “it’s oil that’s being burned anyway” is wrong on every level.

How I believe people should act, and how I personally try to act, is to walk or use trains where possible, falling back on buses otherwise, with cars being a last resort. I try to use ferries instead of planes, and only use planes where no real alternative exists.

What I believe governments should do:

Implement charges on routes where there are good alternatives (congestion charges on commuter roads, taxes on flights); this money should be channeled into improvements to alternative transport: like park and ride systems, train infrastructure, sensible tram systems, fare subsidies etc. The congestion charges should be set at a level where it is genuinely more effective for commuters or holiday makers etc to use a train/bus/walk etc than it is to use a car.

Otherwise incentivize and encourage people to do the right thing where possible. This should include improving the reliability of public transport.

Never should we get into a situation where we are incentivizing the government to slow down development because they are making money off taxes or disincentive schemes (as they have done with smoking taxes) — all revenue made should be immediately ring-fenced, and carefully directed to ensure there are no disincentives to development. This should include immediate ring-fencing of all fuel duty.

Reduce influence of stakeholders other than those with good intent — this would include very carefully and radical treatment of oil companies etc to ensure that they will not benefit from the hold up of any development of clean energy they have any influence over (including through political presure).

Do as much as is feasible to develop good energy production, close down dirty coal stations and move toward renewables where possible, backed up by the cleanest non renewable sources available, like nuclear or well managed oil.

Genuinely cooperate with each other to make sure that the entire planet is doing what it can on these fronts