Category: Travel

My actual travels, those I aspire to, and those of others

Two Toronto discoveries

My weekend in Toronto yielded knowledge of two new interesting places:

The first is a Louisiana Cajun restaurant called Southern Accent. It is located at 595 Markham Street, near the Honest Ed discount store. Their serving staff are very friendly and accommodating, the decor is pleasantly unusual, and the food is novel and tasty.

The second is an excellent used book store called A Good Read. It is located at 341 Roncesvalles Avenue. It is a boutique-style shop, rather than an encyclopaedic warehouse like Chapters, and it seems to be stocked almost exclusively with the kind of books you would feel lucky to find in a normal used book shop. I picked up a massive tome on the history of cryptography that I mean to work through over the course of many lunch hours.

Hurricanes and climate change action

Bike beside the Rideau Canal in spring

At several points in the past, I have mentioned the possibility that the majority of people will not be willing to accept serious action on climate change until at least one big, unambiguously climate related disaster has taken place. The same point is made in Joseph Romm’s book but, whereas I have speculated that it could be vanishing icecaps or large-scale climate induced human migration in Asia, he seems to think that Atlantic hurricanes striking the United States may make the difference.

There is good reason to find this plausible. The strength and frequency of hurricanes both have a lot to do with sea surface temperature (SST). While it isn’t feasible to attribute the occurrence or harmfulness of a particular storm to climate change, it is relatively easy to show a correlation between rising global temperature, rising SST, and more severe hurricanes. Simulations conducted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory led to them concluding that “the strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth’s climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” Within decades, rising SSTs could make the kind of extraordinary hurricane seasons that have proliferated since 2000 the low end of the new scale.

This matters partly because a hurricane-climate change connection would affect Americans directly and very visibly. Insurance prices would rise further, at the same time as more areas became uninsurable and serious questions arose about whether to rebuild at all in some places. The cost trade-offs between insurance, protective measures like higher levees, and storm risk would be thrown into sharp relief. The perceived damages associated with climate change would also shift from being associated with people outside of North America at some distant point in the future to being both physically and temporally immediate.

Obviously, it would be better if serious measures to combat climate change (eliminating non-CCS coal, pushing hard on energy efficiency, building dramatically more renewable capacity, etc) could come about simply as the result of a reasoned assessment of the IPCC’s scientific conclusions and projected associated costs. If, however, it is going to take disasters before people and politicians are ready to embrace real change, we should hope that they will come early, carry a relatively small cost in human lives, and not exacerbate the problem of climate change in and of themselves, as fires and ice loss do.

Air travel and looting

In some ways, engaging with the ongoing debate about air travel and greenhouse gas emissions feels like being among a crowd of looting rioters. People are happily smashing windows, grabbing cameras and iPods. There you stand, wondering what ought to be done.

The easy option is to loot. Your small contribution to the total level of theft and damage will not be recognizable after the fact. Immediate benefits can be secured for yourself, with costs being born by some unknown other person at some point in the future. In choosing to refuse, you accomplish nothing noticeable. Furthermore, you risk cursing yourself in the future for having missed out: for having not gotten ‘while the getting was good.’

The people around you want you to loot. Having a non-looter around is uncomfortable. It draws attention to the way in which the choice to loot is a moral choice, and how it is made on an individual basis. It forces people who are looting to justify their choice somehow – both publicly and in the confines of their own thinking.

The comparison above risks infuriating people and generating accusations of hypocrisy. How can anyone who has flown before say such a thing? It is true that past misconduct damages a person’s credibility. At the same time, it has no bearing on the fundamental rightness of wrongness of the position being adopted. As individuals, we need to consider whether the environmental harm associated with flying is somehow akin to being one tiny node in a million-person mob. If so, we need to question whether it is something we can continue to do.

Israel’s electric vehicles

Fuel research lab

Shai Agassi has a bold plan to transform personal transportation in Israel: electric cars built by Renault and Nissan using lithium-ion batteries from NEC. The crucial difference between this plan and those simply intended to encourage customers to buy individual electric vehicles is that Agassi’s company plans to provide battery infrastructure, in the form of recharging outlets and battery swap stations. Each battery is initially expected to provide 124 miles (200 km) per charge, with recharging happening both at parking-meter type stations and at centres where depleted batteries can be swapped immediately for charged ones. The batteries are expected to last 1,500 charges, or 150,000 miles (240,000 km).

The pricing model is also interesting. While it is still evolving, it will probably take the form of a monthly fee based on expected mileage. The company selling the battery exchange plans will subsidize the purchase of the cars, to some extent, increasing the rate at which people switch over from gasoline vehicles. The Israeli government has pledged $200 million to help get the scheme running. Given the incentives for clean vehicles that the government has promised to maintain until at least 2015, company officials suggest that their electric cars will cost half as much to buy and operate as gasoline ones would.

Israel does have unique characteristics that arguably make this approach especially suitable. Foremost among those may be its small size. One of Agassi’s batteries would be sufficient to drive across it from east to west, with two or three being required to go from north to south. That said, if this model proves successful, one could certainly imagine it working in other relatively confined high-density areas, from Manhattan to Shanghai.

Air travel and carbon capture

If carbon capture and storage technology does prove effective and economically viable, it might finally offer a decent answer to the problem of air travel emissions – at least for relatively affluent travelers willing to pay. The trouble with standard offsets is whether emitting X tonnes of carbon and then paying someone who would otherwise have emitted the same amount not to do so really represents equivalence.

CCS offers a more bulletproof answer: grow biomass, burn it in a power plant, bury the carbon dioxide in a saline aquifer or salt dome, and use the energy. Air travelers could pay to have X tonnes worth of carbon literally removed from the air by plants, and for that carbon to subsequently be stored indefinitely.

Other emitting activities – whatever their nature – could be similarly offset given sufficient infrastructure and funding.

The popularity of trains

According to the American Public Transit Association (APTA), ridership in 2007 was the highest for 50 years. Use rose 2.1% above 2006 levels and 32% above 1995 levels – a rate of increase twice that of the population as a whole. It also reflects a higher rate of increase than there was for vehicle miles travelled on highways.

The biggest gains were in rail ridership, with significantly lower increases in bus use, except in relatively small communities. This might reflect the transit choices made by planners, or the preference many people have for trains rather than buses.

Lots of statistics can be accessed through the APTA webpage. Some Canadian data is also available. Calgary and Edmonton both saw use of all kinds of transit increase by more than 10% between 2006 and 2007.

97-day West Antarctic expedition

Fire escape and red bricks

Not content with data from satellites, a group of British researchers made the trek to the remote Pine Island Glacier in order to gauge whether climate change is accelerating its flow into the sea. The team is only the second group of humans to ever visit the area, following a brief visit by American scientists in 1961.

The Pine Island Glacier comprises about 10% of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet which, along with Greenland, represents the largest plausible contributor to sea level rise. The total melting of this one glacier would raise global sea levels by 25cm. The melting of the entire region of West Antarctica where it is located would contribute 1.5m.

Experiments performed included an examination of the ice structure using towed RADAR and the use of small explosions and geophones to identify soft sediments that might be lubricating the flow of the glacier. GPS receivers have been left behind to perform additional precise tracking. Their central conclusion is a significant acceleration of the glacial flow, compared with the 1% flow rate that satellite measurements tracked during the 1990s:

“The measurements from last season seem to show an incredible acceleration, a rate of up to 7%. That is far greater than the accelerations they were getting excited about in the 1990s.”

Since air temperatures in Antarctica have not risen significantly (as predicted by all General Circulation Models), it is plausible that the acceleration is the result of warmer sea currents.

Some component of the melting could be the result of geothermal activity. If so, it would continue to some extent even after global greenhouse gas concentrations were stabilized and their full consequences have been manifest through the climate system. Of course, the lower that concentration, the greater the chance that West Antarctica’s glaciers will be able to endure.

Westjet v. The Canadian

For those pondering lower carbon options for traversing Canada, Via Rail has a Toronto-Vancouver train called The Canadian that makes the trip in a little over three days each way. Unfortunately, the tickets are ridiculously expensive. Even in a shared sleeper car, it costs about $1,700 round trip, compared with $500 – $600 for a much faster journey with Westjet.

The round-trip flight generates about 1,700kg of carbon dioxide equivalent, while the train produces about 727kg. It seems a bit crazy to spend three times the money and twelve times the time in order to avoid emitting as much carbon as the average Canadian does in sixteen days.

Exploratory flowchart

Milan Ilnyckyj’s travels

This graphic summarizes the travel I have done since 2000, with blue arrowed lines for one way trips and black lines for return journeys. Lines with no mode of travel indicated are flights. The chart is not completely comprehensive (it excludes relatively minor trips) and it is somewhat simplified, but it gives a good overall sense.

I hope I am lucky enough to see a similar amount during the next eight years, in spite of air travel guilt.