Mar 14 2009
From josh:
Any help on the details to go to the usa from europe or middle east.
And from james:
What is the carbon footprint of shipping a 40ft container by freighter compared to shipping by truck. More specifically I am looking for the impact from HK to the West Coast of Canada by ship compared to Toronto to Vancouver by truck. My simpleton gut feeling it will be the same or the container shipping will be more efficient.
Mar 14 2009
The night train Hayabusa is (was) the only remaining night train out of a fleet of several that connected Tokyo with the southern Japanese island of Kyushu.
It travelled along the old Tokaido rail road, the Sanyo main line, and a bunch of other lines connecting up Tokyo, Shizoka, Hamamatsu, Nagoya, all the way to Fukuoka and Kumamoto every night for over 50 years.
The Hayabusa is steeped in Japanese railway history, established just 2 years after its forerunner Asakaze that ran a similar Tokyo-Fukuoka route, in 1958. Yesterday it had its last run, attracting crowds of thousands at Tokyo station, and similar welcoming at every station along the route. Applauded out of the station, with steam whistles, folk bands and mournful railway fans.
With the advent of fast cheap air travel and bargain bottom priced bus seats, the Hayabusa was steadily losing its competitive edge for years. After several scheduling mergers failed to make up the outgoings, the announcement came last autumn that the route would be discontinued, effective yesterday.
Reports that made national television news recorded generations of Japanese retelling stories of their honeymoons, childhood travels and teenage backpacking journeys.
This youtube video has a slow minute of timetable pictures before some great shots of the hayabusa, and a minute’s video of the last run at the end.
Yomiuri coverage (Japanese)
Railway fan’s Page (Japanese)
Japan Night Train Guide (japanguide.com)
Nov 04 2008
A few weeks ago I was contacted by Sophia Campbell about her flightless trip to India from the UK.
With complicated calculations, the distinction from a huge array of vehicles efficiencies in each category, and fine-tuned judgment necessary to even start to calculate accurately your carbon emissions on a complicated journey, its no wonder that you might be in need of some help. I asked a range of people to help me out on my own calculations last year, but, more often than not, the answers I received were a general figure that came nowhere near close to the actual engine model I was riding on. Well, the below calculations have been kindly researched by, again, my dad. He is an electronic engineer, with a background in physics. He often contributes to the oil drum website, and you can read more of what he’s written on other subjects here
Modern ships are a very efficient way of moving cargo. The best of the huge diesel engines they use convert over 50% of the energy in the fuel to propulsive energy fed to the propeller. The best of petrol car engines struggles get 12% to the wheels.
There has been some alarm recently about the emissions from cargo vessels. They total about twice that from aircraft but this is because they shift so much cargo. In 2007 it was something like 51 trillion tonne-kilometres by sea, about 300 times as much as by air. There are improvements that can be made to the emissions from ships but what the world needs to do most is to cut down on international transport, but what long distance cargo transport that is left is best done by sea. Continue Reading »
Oct 01 2008
My favourite thing in the world is riding the shinkansen, I have even come to be able to mimic the voice of the recorded Japanese announcer, I am that big a fan ‘kyou mo shinkansen wo goryou kudasaimashite, arigatou gozaimasu’ in a hypnotically rhythmic voice. Zooming through an alien landscape of mountains, rice paddies and temples; chewing on chocolate covered almonds. BUT, those priveleged days are all but a hazy memory from a time when I was 4′7″ and my parents were Continue Reading »
Nov 14 2007
Get my interactive journey maps
Big thanks to my Dad for helping me with these difficult calculations…
Today, November 14th 2007, marks the inauguration of the new British Eurostar station at Kings Cross St. Pancras, for the rail connection that links my home country with about two thirds of the rest of the world. Eurostar boasts that the actual carbon emissions of journeys taken on its trains are some 10% of the flight equivalent and with the company’s offsetting scheme, it advertises carbon free international travel.
Because, (or in spite) of my 3 week journey across a couple of continents, sans aeroplane, I have to confess: I’m a fan.
But what are the realities and practicalities of slow travel, and how does it stack up against planes?
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Clicking on this link will take you to my downloads page. Download the google earth file but be sure to check your computer hasn’t renamed it in the process! (Something it seems to do because it doesn’t understand what a .kmz file is.) Your computer will not have changed the actual file into something else, just the name to something it thinks it understands, but google earth can’t run it unless it says exactly this: bristoltotokyo.kmz
The file was made by me on a Mac, and put on my webserver – although I can’t promise you its virus free, I’m 99% sure that is the case.
OK! So open up and you can see my pink lines across the world. You can zoom in anywhere, you can even correct my map to a higher degree of accuracy and give it back to me if you so wish.
Downloading the spreadsheet you will see the breakdown of each part of the journey. Here is a graph detailing a summary of mileage versus carbon emissions from Bristol to Tokyo, (per passenger).
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Originally, I was kindly sent some figures for average carbon emissions for general classifications of transport by the Centre for Alternate Technology in Wales. However, figures for individual trains, boats, cars etc. can be very different from the average, depending on a number of factors – how full the train is (or how full it is on average per year/month etc.) determines how many people you can divide the total carbon emissions by, and this varies country to country, train line to train line. What kind of engine the car runs determines how much carbon dioxide it emits and so on and so on. We’ve made slightly more representative calculations where we could obtain better figures, but there are still many areas where accuracy could be improved.
Aside from the electric trains, we used figures for the 2 taxi rides based on a 1.5L car from the Vehicle Certification Agency (VCA), Diesel trains based on information obtained from the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) . Though there may be some variation in the models of diesel train, we used these figures for The Great Western line in Britain, The Germany-St. Petersburg train and the Mongolia to Beijing stretch of the Trans-siberian. Moreover, the report is dated this year, and at 74g of CO2 per passenger kilometer (p.3) it was the worst efficiency rating of the figures I looked through for diesel trains so showing a ‘worse-case’ figure. The metro in London, St. Petersburg and Tokyo was based on figures from the Campaign for Better Transport (formerly Transport 2000, -somebody please show me somewhere I can petition against the silly name change!!), printed in the Times newspaper. The figures were adjusted from their original context of the London Underground to suit the electricity mix in Russia and Japan. The boat from Shanghai proved an interesting calculation. I’m afraid I still don’t understand it but figures were obtained from the other ferry company operating that route on the basis of them having an English website. For a full understanding of this calculation, please see the spreadsheet
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I will now run through the method of collection for carbon-emission data for the electric trains I took (Eurostar, Deutschebahn, Trans-Sib as far as Naushki, Beijing to Shanghai Z class trains, Shinkansen) as they required some extra thought.
As I mentioned in a post somewhere near Germany, how much (or little) energy you expend on an electric train is determined by whether the country gets electricity from renewables, nuclear or fossil fuel.
Other methods of transport running on liquid fuels can skip this step to figure out the power needed to pull the train, multiply by time spent running and divide by average occupancy.
Eurostar actually comissioned a report, that looked in detail at the energy mix of all the countries passed through, the energy required per kilometer etc. so those figures were lifted directly.
With Deutschebahn, Trans-sib as far as the Mongolian border, and Beijing to Shanghai trains, the information was not exactly forthcoming so we used the information detailed for the British Virgin Pendolino train, assuming a similiar efficiency. We assumed a 60% occupancy, and then adjusted the CO2 based on the energy mix (as shown by the pie charts below). The Shinkansen was referenced directly from an American website, again Japan’s electricity mix was factored in.
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Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, China, Japan
(In Poland, Belarus and Mongolia I only used diesel trains)
Our estimates were: Coal = 920g CO2 per kWh; Gas = 520g CO2 per kWh; Nuclear = 10g CO2 per kWh; other = ?
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In order to compare the emissions of my surface journey with an equivalent air journey, I am using data compiled by physicist Dietrich Brockhagen, Managing Director of atmosfair in Germany, from a flight simulation program of the German research association for space and air transport in an article written about a Frankfurt-Tokyo Journey. Assuming the climb out and approach, and the taxi fuel consumption are the same, I adjusted the cruise distance to a lenient ‘grand circle’ distance (the shortest and most direct distance). This results in the CO2 emissions of 1.223 tonnes per passenger journey. CO2 however, is just the start of it. As detailed on Brockhagen’s page, the emissions of Ozone from Nitrous oxides, condensation trails, water vapour and sulphate aerosols all play a part in multiplying the effect. Using his table, I am multiplying my total carbon dioxide figure from Bristol to Tokyo by 1.1, and the flight detailed here by 3 to achieve the total carbon dioxide equivalent, or the total ‘climate changing emissions’. The resulting figures are 0.6142 for surface and 3.6687 for air. Further, I am adding the Bristol to London train emissions to the air total as you’ve got to get to the airport first. The final air total is 3.6847
To add some perspective, the neat little calculator on atmosfair’s website (that came up with a very similiar reading with only minimum data input) says that my refridgerator generates 100kg / year. The average Indian citizen expends 900kg / year, and 3000kg of CO2 a year is the sustainable target (Great, I’ll be back for christmas then!!)
Every environmentally aware person I’ve met has an Eureka! moment to share about the day they suddenly felt acutely aware of our environmental vulnerability, mine was early last year – 2006, when I began having misgivings about the impacts of aviation on our planet, during the very empty schedule of my university exchange programme to Tokyo. Day to day E-newspaper surfing led me to investigate further when 2 fundamental, and alarming points kept recurring:
1. Oil is a finite resource – it will inevitably run out. Further, lots of very clever people think the half way point of discovery is going to arrive very soon.
2. The burning of fossil fuels to excess is setting in motion devastating climatic events that will affect me in my life time, and likely those of my parents’ generation, as well as millions in countries ill-equipped to deal with large scale disasters.
What was most unsettling was that politicians worldwide, old enough to have actually instigated the policies responsible for the exponential growth in fossil fuel use were unaware, or uninterested in the dual problems faced by a decline in oil discovery and production, and runaway climate change left for my generation to deal with. The haunting words of E. F. Schumacher:
‘The fateful propensity that rejoices in the fact that what were luxuries to our fathers have become necessities for us’
Written over 30 years ago, has fallen on deaf ears.
I left Japan with a heavy heart fearing international travel presented a paradox in Western morality. Hidden by the indirectness of its consequences and masked by a façade of cheap prices and convenience, it was taking me and the rest of the world a long time to admit the damage air travel was responsible for. I ummed and ahhed over this question, joined a few advocacy groups, looked nervously at the floor when people mentioned air travel, until one day in the middle of a conversation with my family about how inconvenient climate change was being in the face of my desire to go travel my Dad interjected jokingly ‘there’s always the trans-siberian railway’
And there it was, I was sold on the idea.
After much research, I discovered practically everywhere on earth normal people would think to go with a plane, could be accessed by normal people without planes. In light of this perhaps simplistic realisation, I quit flying. My calculations show that land transport can have some future in a sustainable world, while atmosfair’s comparison of the average Indian citizen’s annual carbon emissions being almost 4 times less than a single flight from London to Tokyo, show what an out-of-kilter method of transportation air travel really is.
I’ve stopped flying because I don’t want to continue contributing so unnecessarily to what I feel is an enormous problem, but moreover I want to raise other people’s awareness that other options are available to them that don’t have to compromise their freedom. That could, in fact, increase their enjoyment of travel. Long distance travel (by which I mean intercontinental) inevitably involves a longer period of time spent travelling (though less than everyone seems to expect) but many destinations across Europe popular for tourism are reachable in less than half a day, and destinations as far away as Morocco and Russia can be reached within less than 48 hours actual travelling time. We can not (continue to) deny that making responsible choices about how we treat our planet in the interests of long-term sustainability will require a change in our behaviour but we can take enormous comfort in the realisation that ‘slow travel’ does not mean ‘no travel’, it means more thoughtful travel. Only when we stop taking our great luxury of travel for granted will we start to appreciate why we desire to do it in the first place.
Oct 15 2007
I’m itching to complete my post about the first leg of my journey as far as Berlin, and I’m close to finishing the calculations (with lots of help) but its really difficult to get an accurate idea because there is lots of conflicting information that is hard to discern between. The Centre for Alternate Technology in Wales have given me the figures from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and from a study by Godfrey Boyle – an OU professor and researcher in this area. Continue Reading »
Sep 29 2007
^^ Land Ho! first sight of Japan
Well I didn’t get lost in the ocean in case you were wondering.
I was pretty tired by the time I got to Shanghai, and was glad to be boarding my last vessel on non-Japanese soil the next day (day 22) I guess I now have a few tips to advise others with on such a journey, but forefront among them all might be, don’t take a ferry 2 days after a super-typhoon hits the sea you are travelling on… Continue Reading »
Sep 20 2007
I walked from my hotel through Beihai park to reach the Forbidden City this morning. Past a lady doing tai chi, a group of women practising tap dancing, a tutored group of people doing tricks with circus diablos and finally past an intensive training group of 5 people playing happy-sac in a tight ring holding each other at the shoulders and rotating with every keepie-uppy. It seems like everyone is in training for the Olympics… Continue Reading »
Sep 18 2007
more photos…
The approach to Beijing was at first characterised by slightly greener scrub with the first real trees for a long time. All the houses were a pale terracotta colour with the same colour tiled roofs. They were not an identifiably Chinese style in my mind, but they were all crammed together with only pedestrian alleyways, not roads between the higgledy-piggledy terraces. The fields are filled with wheat – the more common staple in Northern China. Many of the fields were being attended to by donkey-drawn carts.
The visibility is terrible. Continue Reading »
Sep 18 2007
more photos…
UB guesthouse half emptied at 7am this morning. With fast international trains running only 2 or 3 times a week, the days it did run saw tourists bundle out of Ulan Bataar in herds.
Sara and Daniel, the Swedish couple who’d been mirroring my journey since Moscow, were in my ‘vagon’, as were the couple from England I’d met at the border town of Naushki between Russia and Mongolia.
Leaving Mongolia through the Gobi, I was coming to understand just how far I’d come from London. Gers and camels dotted a sparse, lifeless-looking plain that stretched infinitely in every direction. The flat yellow brown steppe with a patchy, poor covering of dusty green coloured plants was a landscape entirely foreign to me.
These felt dwellings and cattle herdsmen were the last outposts of Mongolia and around 8.30pm we reached the frontier.
Formalities ate up a couple of hours before we drew into the border town of Erlian, where an enormous neon sign announced: Erlian CHINA.
Before anyone could get off, the train pulled into the bogey changing shed where carriages full of passengers were hoisted 10 foot in the air while Russian/Mongolian wheels were removed and new Chinese gauges slotted in. Sometime after 1am we finally left the border into the penultimate country on my journey.
