Solar panels with no up-front costs. Win-Win! →

One of the stumbling blocks to getting solar panels on your house is the up-front costs.

That kind of murky feeling that those shiny slivers of silicon are going to end up costing you more in the long run, not less.

Enter companies like Solar City in New Zealand.

“What if we told you that money does grow - not on trees, but on your roof? With a fixed monthly solar service fee, and no upfront costs, you get the benefits of solar without having to purchase the system.”

I didn’t even know this was a thing.

Solar City even install the system “for free”.

In the pack, you get the panels and also a battery for storing excess-generated electricity. If you’re really rolling in sunshine, you even end up sending some back to the grid for cold hard cash.

This is New Zealand though, not Arizona, let’s not go crazy here.

Indeed, they say that this system will cover up to 2/3 of your home energy needs. The rest comes from the grid, claiming that it’s 100% renewable energy. As the NZ grid is not quite 100% renewable (*yet), this is slightly slimy but I presume it’s some trickery about buying their “part” of the grid’s energy only from the “renewable part”.

I’ve not gone into any in-depth simulations to see how it all works out but it’s definitely a less-scary option than paying for the whole kaboodle up-front.

And it looks like you have a web app that helps you see how you use energy, which could then maybe challenge you to use even less!

All-in-all, this a cool idea and worth a look.

This reads like a paid slot but it sure ain’t.

Ciao!

[Cover photo: from Solar City]

And the times they are a changin': Renewable energy company becomes more valuable than Exxon Mobil! →

In today’s “News I Didn’t See Coming” (via Bloomberg):

“NextEra Energy Inc., the world’s biggest provider of wind and solar energy, is now more valuable than oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp., once the largest public company on Earth.

NextEra ended Wednesday with market value of $145 billion, topping Exxon’s $142 billion.”

If you like pretty pictures, here’s the share price graph to wallop you to what-the-what-the-woweeee world:

The most surprising thing about this plot isn’t the slow but steady rise of NextEra. It’s the precipitous drop of Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

You’d have to be a madman to invest in an oil company in 2020.

I’ll leave Bob on fadeout duties today.

That time I had the crazy idea about a 24-hour European train battle.

Yesterday’s blog post on trains got me thinking.

I live in Paris.

Could I join up a morning train from Paris to Germany that connects somewhere to the Berlin-Prague-Bratislava-Koŝice-Preŝov train and be in Preŝov by the next morning?

Pretty easily it turns out: you can do Paris-Frankfurt-Vienna-Bratislava and hop on to the Bratislava-Preŝov night train there. You leave Gare de l’Est in Paris at 9:04 am and arrive at Preŝov at 7:42 am the next day.

However…

If you look at this trip on Deutsche Bahn, it’s nearly 300 euros and that’s without booking a bed for the night train.

No-one in their right mind is paying this.

However…

There’s a crazy trick you can do with Czech Railways for trains that start in Germany and end up in the Czech Republic. On the Czech Railways website, you put in a query like Frankfurt-Prague, but you add in a connection to the town of Cheb, and this tends to bring up irrationally cheap tickets of around 15 euros rather than around 100 euros for this segment, for reasons known only to God and The Man in Seat 61.

However…

This odyssey involves several connections and is sloooooooooooooow so slooooooooooooow like so slow you start to consider your sanity.

How do I know? I did it once.

But you can survive slow.

However…

When you try and connect it all up, it’s impossible to join a train from France that reaches a German city in time in the morning to connect with a crazy Germany-Prague-via-Cheb trip than then connects through in time to Bratislava to get the night train to Preŝov.

So, yes, if you’re willing to pay whatever, it’s possible.

Screw that.

But it got me thinking…

The question I have for you today: How far can you get from Paris (or, say, London via Eurostar) by train in 24 hours? 36 hours? 48 hours?

How many kilometres as the crow flies?

Are there some extremely cool connections you can string together that are not widely known?

Can you do it in half the price if you get say six extra hours to play with?

What I’m starting to imagine is a team competition that starts in Paris in Autumn 2021, begins at midnight, and each team has up to 24 hours to hop on a train, and then 24 (or say, 36 or 48) hours to get as far as they can from Paris by train.

I guess what I’m currently worried about with this great and wonderful plan is whether there is some “obviously best trip” that everyone will work out in advance and all the competitors will get on the same train in Paris, and it’ll be a bit dumb.

Clearly more thought needs to go into the rules to make it more of a competition.

If you have any suggestions, send me an email to adventuresofaclimatecriminal@gmail.com.

All suggestions welcome!

Photo credit: Derek Story/Unsplash

I don't know about you but I think it's time for a catch-up on train news

With the skies empty of planes and no real sign of a comeback, trainlandia is exploding with juicy tit-bits.

  • France’s “relaunch” slush fund includes 100 million euros for night trains. Which likely means the Paris-Hendaye and Paris-Nice night trains will be Back on Track in December 2021.

  • Sweden has launched a tender for Stockholm-Hamburg and Malmö-Brussels night trains.

  • Despite most trans-European night trains having to go through Germany, the latter continues to pretend that cars and planes are the way to go.

  • It’s well known that booking train trips right across Europe is a right royal pain in the bum that only some of us get a kick out of. The Swiss are petitioning to make the whole booking rigmarole a lot easier. Good luck with that one.

  • Perhaps the coolest find is this “secret” direct train/night train connection all the way from Berlin to Eastern Slovakia (Preŝov) via Prague, Bratislava, and Koŝice. If you’re a train geek, here’s a great 40 minute-long video of the trip.

In particular, check out the full restaurant on board! This is one of the best things about trains, sipping a local glass of wine as you wooooosh through villages, forests, and river valleys.

The trick with this “secret” direct train is that that Berlin-Prague train has sleeping compartments joined on to it at Prague, so all you have to do is book a seated ticket from Berlin to Prague, then wait for the sleeping compartments to arrive and walk through to them!

Trains are the best.

This news was brought to you by the Back on Track mailing list and Joachim Holstein in particular.

Why it's misleading to talk about 100% renewable energy in New Zealand →

It’s election time in kiwi-land, and with this comes pledges that may or may not intersect with reality as we know it in the space-time continuum.

From Axios:

“New Zealand's prime minister has pledged to achieve 100% renewable energy in the country by 2030 if her party wins re-election in October.

“Robert McLachlan, a professor at Massey University's School of Fundamental Sciences, told Axios Labour's decision to bring its renewable energy goal forward by five years for its COVID-19 economic recovery plans is "ambitious, but it's doable."

Currently:

“New Zealand already produces 84% of its electricity from renewable sources, but Labour has pledged NZ$70 million (U.S. $47 million) to "accelerate a potential dry year storage solution," such as a pumped hydro scheme at Lake Onslow on the South Island.”

“Energy Minister Megan Woods said in an emailed statement to Axios that Labour was investigating the pumped hydro scheme to "shift away from our reliance on expensive fossil fuels and enable the development of more renewable generation."

The idea is that in “good years” you use excess electricity to pump water back uphill to a storage facility, and keep it there to send back downhill for hydroelectric generation in a “bad year”.

This is all very well and good and admirable and bla bla bla bla bla but don’t forget that the rest of New Zealand’s economy is still massively carbon-based.

I recently started to calculate just how much more electricity you’d need in New Zealand just to switch everyone to driving Teslas.

The approximate answer is “a shitload”.

The exact answer eludes me; it’s pretty tricky to calculate this stuff.

With the potential decommissioning of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter in a few years, an absolutely massive amount of electricity would however become available to the grid.

And, based on my back-of-the-pad calculations, even that wouldn’t be enough to switch everyone to electric cars.

Not to mention all of the industrial processes in New Zealand that are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels, some of which could switch to electricity (if it were available and affordable), but others where electricity simply doesn’t cut it (e.g., when you need very very high temperatures).

I guess my point is this: It’s good to dream of a low-carbon New Zealand but a bit fruitless as long as most New Zealanders are still buying second-hand petrol-powered SUVs and happy with the quality of life that directly descends from the big bucks earned from millions of belching cattle roaming the lands.

And most are.

Tesco supermarkets going "all in" with meat-free concoctions →

From the Guardian:

“Tesco is to become the first UK retailer to set a sales target for plant-based alternatives to meat as it steps up efforts to offer shoppers more sustainable options.

“The UK’s largest supermarket will on Tuesday commit to boosting sales of meat alternatives by 300% within five years, by 2025. Over the past year, demand for chilled meat-free foods – the most popular line including burger, sausage and mince substitutes – has increased by almost 50%, the retailer said. As a result, it is expanding into more categories and creating larger “centrepiece” dishes for two people as well as family-sized portions.”

Pretty impressive.

“The target is part of a wider package of sustainability measures developed with its charity partner the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to try to halve the environmental impact of the average UK shopping basket.

“The trend reflects people paying closer attention to their diet during the Covid-19 lockdown and increasingly adopting “flexitarian” diets—cutting down on meat and dairy while eating more plant-based foods.”

Flexitarian, the gateway drug.

“Among 11 new plant-based foods going on sale at Tesco this week are centrepiece dishes using the wheat protein favourite seitan as a meat substitute, including a beef-free joint and hunter’s chicken-free traybake. Turkey-free crowns and vegan mince pies are launching in time for Christmas.”

Here’s one of Tesco’s photoshoot pictures:

It’s only really the glasses of rosé that let this picture down. Yuck!

On the other hand, it’s perfectly easy to go meat-free without resorting to products engineered to “be like meat”.

But if it helps some people, why the hell not? Some—but probably not all—of these products are going to be indistinguishable from the “real thing” at some point, and then the question of which to eat becomes pretty murky for meat-lovers.

In a surprise to no-one, palm oil labor abuses linked to Oreos, Lysol, and Hersheys and lots of other shit you love →

A fun read in the pauses between stuffing Oreos in your piehole, from the AP:

"Jum’s words tumble out over the phone, his voice growing ever more frantic.

“Between sobs, he says he’s trapped on a Malaysian plantation run by government-owned Felda, one of the world’s largest palm oil companies. His boss confiscated and then lost his Indonesian passport, he says, leaving him vulnerable to arrest. Night after night, he has been forced to hide from authorities, sleeping on the jungle floor, exposed to the wind and the rain. His biggest fear: the roaming tigers.

“All the while, Jum says his supervisor demanded he keep working, tending the heavy reddish-orange palm oil fruit that has made its way into the supply chains of the planet’s most iconic food and cosmetics companies like Unilever, L’Oreal, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.”

Malaysia and Indonesia produce around 85% of the world’s palm oil supply. Have you heard of Borneo? It’s an island divided between these two countries (with a soupçon of Brunei for good measure) that used to be one of the world’s last true wildernesses. It’s the third biggest island in the world, twice the size of Germany.

It’s basically a palm plantation now.

That’s an imagination killer if ever there was one. Not to mention an orangutan killer. Have you seen this video from Borneo of the orangutan in the remnants of the forest it once lived in?

Here’s the problem:

“Palm oil is virtually impossible to avoid. Often disguised on labels as an ingredient listed by more than 200 names, it can be found in roughly half the products on supermarket shelves and in most cosmetic brands. It’s in paints, plywood, pesticides and pills. It’s also present in animal feed, biofuels and even hand sanitizer.”

Am I innocent?

Hell no.

Do I look at labels and try to avoid this shit?

Yep.

Is this hard?

Nope.

Is part of the problem rich societies consuming too much shit filled with this shit?

Yep.

Consuming too much shit in general?

Yep.

Here’s a palm oil example: the consumption of products with palm oil in them has risen 900% in the US since 1999. And there sure as heck ain’t nine times more people living in the US.

And as we know, every dirty story has a bank sitting in the background, pretending to behave, but actually doing really immoral shit.

“Still, giant Western financial institutions like Deutsche Bank, BNY Mellon, Citigroup, HSBC and the Vanguard Group have continued to help fuel a crop that has exploded globally, soaring from just 5 million tons in 1999 to 72 million today, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”

The word “shit” is underused, I find.

PS: Taking the train through tropical central Malaysia these days is like visiting a 100km-long palm plantation, symmetrical rows, lobotomy-inducing scenery. The opposite of nature.

PPS: Oreo-Lysol-Hershey bites? Worst snack ever.

[Cover photo: Marco Schmidt]

Politicians pandering to today's farmers rather than to tomorrow's humans →

It’s not only the U S of A that’s in election mode.

In New Zealand, the right-leaning National Party is offering the hint of free massages to farmers if they vote for them.

Sorry, I meant, the hint they’ll let slip on the environmental laws in place, laws that aim to make New Zealand’s waterways clean again.

My bad.

To give an example of how bad it’s got, take the Auckland region. From Wikipedia:

“As of January 2019, Auckland is the region with New Zealand's most polluted waterways, with 62% of rivers and lakes graded poor by the Ministry for the Environment for swimming, and 0% of rivers and lakes graded as good.”

Icky.

New Zealand has a population of around 5 million humans, but the sheep and cow population is equivalent to 150 million peeing, pooping humans.

Or, as Dr Shaun Forgie puts it:

“There are over 6.7 million dairy cows in New Zealand, each producing on average 27 kilograms of dung a day. That is over 66 million tonnes of dung a year. By the time you add in another 3.7 million cattle and 29.8 million sheep that is over 100,000,000 tonnes of dung a year which can sit around for months at a time. To put that into perspective, that is enough dung to fill 41,000 Olympic sized pools, which if joined end to end would stretch from Cape Reinga to the Bluff. That is one river that would not meet anyone’s swimming standards.”

That’s a lotta poop for a small country.

New Zealand markets itself as “clean” and “green”, which is increasingly seen as bollocks worldwide.

But Hobbits, right? Let’s pretend Hobbits come from New Zealand! That’ll save us.

Genius.

[Cover photo: Amelia Wade]

The wurst is over: why Germany now loves to go vegetarian →

In Germany, from the Guardian:

“Around 42% of those questioned said they were deliberately reducing their consumption of meat in some form, by keeping to a diet that was either vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian or “flexitarian”, meaning centred around plant food with the occasional piece of meat on the side.”

The life-changing pun in the title is also from the Guardian. Can’t claim that one.

Meanwhile, in France, always twenty years behind every trend (craft beer, burgers, good coffee):

“France, the other great European carnivore nation surveyed in the project, trailed behind its neighbour, with 68.5% of respondents claiming to eat meat without restraint.”

As for the next time you see rabbit on the menu in France, here’s a fun video of a French rabbit farm from a couple of weeks ago. Not safe for work.

Bit of a vicious circle in France though, this meat-free lark. Finding something without meat in it in a village or small-to-medium sized town is about as likely as winning the Tour de France without doping.

Or, in my case, you’re passing through a mid-sized town and you praise the lord because you see there’s an Indian restaurant flashing on the Google, but its owner is coughing his lungs out like he’s dying of Covid-19 and isn’t even wearing a mask.

Anyway, that’s for another novel. So, good work Germany! Come on France!

[Cover photo: Vincent Vegan burgers in a shopping mall in Berlin. Photograph: Laura Müller]

Carbon negative straws and forks

From Fast Company:

“At a new production facility in Huntington Beach, California, a 50-foot-tall stainless steel tank is filled with 15,000 gallons of salt water, and inside microbes are turning methane—a potent greenhouse gas—into a new material that could simultaneously help tackle the challenges of climate change and ocean plastic. If the material is made into a disposable fork and ends up in the ocean, it degrades as easily as cellulose, turning into a food source for microbes.”

Here’s a photo of what life in the future will be like if they get their way:

Courtesy of Newlight

So, what’s the deal, Neil?

“Newlight, the biotech company that created the material, began looking for ways to make use of greenhouse gas emissions more than a decade ago. “We asked the question, how can we take carbon that would otherwise go into the air, and turn it into useful materials,” says Mark Herrema, CEO of Newlight. “As we looked around nature, we discovered pretty quickly that nature uses greenhouse gas to make materials every day.”

And what did they come up with exactly?

“The researchers were particularly interested in ocean microorganisms that can consume methane and CO2 as food. “After they eat that gas, they then convert that into a really special material inside themselves,” he says. “It’s a meltable energy storage material, which you can purify and then form into various parts and shapes and pieces.” The team decided to replicate the process on land, using a tank filled with saltwater and microbes, with air and methane added to start the process. (The methane comes from an abandoned coal mine and other sources, where it would otherwise be emitted to the atmosphere.) When the microbes make the material—which Newlight calls Air Carbon—the company extracts those cells. Then it filters and purifies the material, drying it into a fine white powder that can be molded into objects.”

About here, my BS detector blinks into action.

What energy source does the company use to “extract those cells” and “filter and purify the material”? Not to mention “molding it into objects”.

Real journalism would ask questions like that.

Does producing the straws and forks emit more CO2-equivalent emissions than is saved by what goes in to them?

If so, by how much? Can this gap be closed with a move to renewable energy sources during fabrication?

All questions that should have been asked, and weren’t.

This comes across as advertising.

So, a little trip to Newlight’s website was called for.

It has lots of glossy pictures and it’s pretty inspiring, which of course is the intended effect.

Here, at least, the truth is much clearer:

“When made with renewable power, the production of AirCarbon is a carbon-negative process, capturing or destroying more CO2e than was emitted to make it.

“We work with independent third parties such as SCS Global Services and Carbon Trust, to calculate our carbon footprint.

“Like the mighty pinecone, we’re carbon-negative, and on a mission to help reverse climate change and plastics pollution by turning air and greenhouse gas into AirCarbon.“

The mighty pinecone indeed.

So this only makes sense if you use renewable power.

And at a deeper level, as time goes on, this only works if you build your renewable power source using renewable power.

Still, these people seem legit after all, so good luck to them.

China aims to be carbon neutral by 2060 →

From the New York Times:

“President Xi Jinping of China pledged on Tuesday that his country would adopt much stronger climate targets and achieve what he called “carbon neutrality before 2060.” If realized, the pledges would be crucial in the global fight against climate change.

“Humankind can no longer afford to ignore the repeated warnings of nature and go down the beaten path of extracting resources without investing in conservation, pursuing development at the expense of protection, and exploiting resources without restoration,” Mr. Xi said.”

More kind-of vague details:

“First, while Mr. Xi said China would peak its emissions of greenhouse gases “before 2030,” he did not specify how soon. In the past, China had said its peak emissions would come “around” 2030, after which its total emissions would begin to decline. China is on track to reach peak emissions within the next decade.”

Which means their emissions are still going up, which is kind of terrifying given the planetary hellscape already locked-in by current emissions.

And, come on, 2060 is one heckuva long time away.

Me, I want to own Trump Tower and turn it into a big shop selling circus costumes by 2060, but goals forty years away aren’t goals.

Let’s see how they’re doing in 2025 already, eh?

And, equally importantly, don’t forget that pretty much all the shit we buy is still Made In China. These are our emissions too.

On the idea of retrofitting old coal plants to capture CO2 →

From IEEE Spectrum:

“The Milton R. Young Station, close to the town of Center in North Dakota, is as unremarkable as coal-fired power plants come. But if its owner Minnkota Power Cooperative has its way, the plant could soon be famous the world over.

“The Grand Forks-based electric cooperative has launched Project Tundra, an initiative to build the largest power plant-based carbon capture facility in the world, with construction commencing as early as 2022. If Minnkota Power raises the US $1 billion the project requires, it plans to retrofit the station with technology the cooperative claims will capture more than 90 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from the plant’s larger generator, a 455-megawatt unit. The effect will be the equivalent of taking 600,000 gasoline-fueled cars off the road.”

Okaaaaaaaay…

In a perfect world, you could extract coal (without emitting CO2 somehow), burn it in a coal plant, produce electricity, and capture all the CO2 emitted.

However:

  • extracting coal using machinery/trucks/etc. still emits CO2 in 2020.

  • capturing CO2 emissions from a coal plant requires energy. You get this from burning the coal itself.

About that…

“A coal plant that is coupled with CCS technology may actually be more expensive to run because of an increase in parasitic load, he says. A coal plant uses between five and nine percent of the electricity it generates to run the equipment it needs to operate. But adding carbon capture, an energy- and water-intensive process, pushes this parasitic load up to much as 33 percent.”

And…

“According to IEEFA estimates, that more than triples the cost of electricity generated at a coal plant, from $30 to $96 per megawatt hour (MW/h). As a result, coal becomes even less competitive against solar and wind-generated electricity, which can be purchased today for as low as $35 and $21 MW/h respectively.”

Plus, that billion bucks has to come from somewhere.

This is never going to happen. But they’ll no doubt drag it out for years.

World's wildlife population plunges 68% in 46 years →

It’s all in the title, really. From Rebecca Falconer writing at Axios:

“The World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) "Living Planet Report 2020" that monitored 4,392 species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians from 1970 to 2016 points to one underlying cause for the populations decline and deterioration of nature: humanity.”

That’s a surprise for the ages. Humans you say?

What in particular are these pesky humans doing?

“Deforestation undertaken to increase agricultural land space was the biggest contributor to the decline.”

Some of the more alarming statistics:

“Populations in Latin America and the Caribbean have seen the biggest fall, with an average decline of 94%. Global freshwater species have fallen 84%.”

Ok, maybe we should just forget about all of this and focus on Covid-19 first?

“The spillover of pathogens from animals to humans—driven mainly by human behaviors like urbanization and the demand to eat meat—is increasing, Axios' Eileen Drage O'Reilly notes.”

Um….

It’s all connected, and we truly are a scourge on this planet.

The planet sure is fighting back though.

[Cover photo: An Yuan/China News Service/Visual China Group via Getty Images]

Let's all take a night train when this nightmare is over

Despite the ongoing shitshow, night train news keeps flowing like a gentle mountain stream.

From the Back On Track email update by Joachim Holstein:

“ÖBB will invest another 500 million euros in night trains and build new infrastructure for maintenance in Vienna-Simmering.”

In Austrian Railways’ words:

“To ensure perfect maintenance of the new Nightjet trains, TS is currently investing more than 225 million euros in its TS workshops throughout Austria. At the Simmering location, a maintenance hall is now being built with an investment volume of almost 40 million euros to ensure optimum maintenance of the new Nightjet sets. The new hall will thus become the home of the new Nightjet trains. Here, all maintenance work, starting with small service activities up to repairs and major overhauls will be carried out.”

As a reminder, here are the totally awesome new night train cabins on the way for Austrian Railways:

These are the individual “sleeping pods”. There are also redesigned shared cabins too. I’ve blogged about them before here.

Austrian Railways are the real deal.

The Swiss have also seen the light at the end of the tunnel:

“Switzerland is also getting back into the night train business. It is doing something very simple, but apparently difficult to do in some countries: it is using the revenue from the air ticket levy to promote environmentally friendly transport. Starting in December 2021, SBB plans to run a train from Zurich to Amsterdam, i.e., on the route of one of DB's most popular night trains, abolished in 2016. For this purpose, the SBB will rent rolling stock from the German branch of a US company.”

Here’s more on the incoming Swiss tax on airline tickets (article from June 2020):

“The overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a proposal for a levy of between CHF30 and CHF120 ($32 and $126) per ticket for flights departing Switzerland.”

That’s a lotta dough.

The crazy thing is that most of these up-and-coming and already-here night trains pass through Germany, and Germany is missing in action on this one.

Electric cars are going to be everywhere and soon →

From the New York Times:

“As car sales collapsed in Europe because of the pandemic, one category grew rapidly: electric vehicles. One reason is that purchase prices in Europe are coming tantalizingly close to the prices for cars with gasoline or diesel engines.

“At the moment this near parity is possible only with government subsidies that, depending on the country, can cut more than $10,000 from the final price. Carmakers are offering deals on electric cars to meet stricter European Union regulations on carbon dioxide emissions. In Germany, an electric Renault Zoe can be leased for 139 euros a month, or $164.”

I can smell a Musk-olution coming on:

“A few years ago, industry experts expected 2025 would be the turning point. But technology is advancing faster than expected, and could be poised for a quantum leap. Elon Musk is expected to announce a breakthrough at Tesla’s “Battery Day” event on Tuesday that would allow electric cars to travel significantly farther without adding weight.”

Tesla are so far ahead, it’s crazy. I still think most people haven’t realised this. People buying Tesla shares seem to have, though.

“The California company has been selling electric cars since 2008 and can draw on years of data to calculate how far it can safely push a battery’s performance without causing overheating or excessive wear. That knowledge allows Tesla to offer better range than competitors who have to be more careful. Tesla’s four models are the only widely available electric cars that can go more than 300 miles on a charge, according to Kelley Blue Book.”

Once electric cars are cheaper than internal combustion engine ones, it’s game over.

Taking the train from Boston to Patagonia...in 1978!

In this time of lockdowns, face masks, travel bans and future dreaming, I just started re-reading Paul Theroux’s, The Old Patagonia Express.

Full disclosure: to escape Covid-19, I’m writing this from a picnic table in a campground in a small village in the French Pyrenees.

Not telling you where I am. Sorry not sorry.

In this travel book, published at the end of the 70s, Theroux manages to get from Boston, USA to the bottom of the Americas almost entirely by train.

Good luck doing that in the 21st century.

The whole seat61.com summary of train travel from Mexico south fits into one measly web page.

Sad face.

The executive summary for Mexico at seat61:

“Mexico used to have a good train service linking all major cities, using restaurant cars, sleeping-cars and observation cars, many inherited from the USA.  Sadly, the Mexican government pulled the plug on almost all long-distance passenger train service some years ago.”

Oh no, Mexico!

But back to Theroux. Even before he gets going on his train odyssey, he has this to say about air travel:

“An aeroplane flight may not be travel in any accepted sense, but it certainly is magic. Anyone with the price of a ticket can conjure up the castled crag of Drachenfels or the Lake Isle of Innisfree by simply using the right escalator at, say, Logan Airport in Boston—but it must be said that there is probably more to animate the mind, more of travel, in that one ascent on the escalator, than in the whole plane journey put together. The rest, the foreign country, what constitutes the arrival, is the ramp of an evil-smelling airport.”

Tell us what you really think, Paul.

His book—as you may have guessed by now—is about the trip itself, not the destination:

“The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.”

Unfortunately, for most people—even those who take trains today—the trip is seen as an inconvenience endured to get from A to B, and these people couldn’t care less that their trains have windows to look out of. Also, countries with high-speed trains end up with high-speed snob citizens that turn up their noses at the very idea of taking a slower train, anywhere, anytime, anyhoo.

I digress.

The good news when it comes to Theroux’s book is that the trains he took in the US still exist today, and—for better or worse depending on your DNA—are just as slow as they were in the 70s.

His first big leg is on the Lake Shore Limited, an overnighter from NY/Boston to Chicago that, in his case, ploughs straight in to an epic snowstorm apocalypse.

Amtrak made this train look pretty damn romantic back in the day.

That’s the “pre-footsies” glass of wine.

Here’s some advertising from even earlier, back when the New York to Chicago trip was called the Twentieth Century Limited.

18 hours! Like a shot out of a gun indeed…

Now, let’s parse a random(ish) paragraph from this leg in the book to give you an idea of what reading Theroux can be like:

“At two the next morning we passed Syracuse. I was asleep or I would have been assailed by memories. But the city’s name on the Amtrak timetable at breakfast brought forth Syracuse’s relentless rain, a chance meeting at the Orange Bar with the by then derelict poet Delmore Schwartz, the classroom (…) in which I heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination, and the troubling recollection of a lady anthropologist who, unpersuaded by my ardour, had later—though not as a consequence of this—met a violent death when a tree toppled onto her car in a western state and killed her and her lover, a lady gym teacher with whom she had formed a Sapphic attachment.”

Slightly edgier than, say, Outside the train window, the snow got deeper and deeper, ain’t it?

[To be continued… (it’s wine o’clock in the Pyrenees at my slightly less-glamourous yet also perfect picnic table.)]

The locals from way back kick up a stink about coal-muppets Adani in Australia →

From Stop Adani:

“Last Thursday, senior cultural leader Adrian Burragubba issued Adani with an eviction notice, demanding the company cease and desist all mining and extractive activities on Wangan and Jagalingou Country. Adani didn’t comply. 

“So now, for nearly two days, Wangan and Jagalingou people have shut the main road to Adani’s Carmichael Coal Mine site to protect their home lands from Adani’s irreversible destruction.”

 But, coal! How will we live without coal?

“Adani are destroying Wangan and Jagalingou culture and Country. Soon they’ll start digging the mine and damaging the water table. That’s going to drain the life out of the country and kill their dreaming.” 

The Australian dream is highly overrated.

“That’s why Wangan and Jagalingou people have intervened and launched #StandingOurGround, the next phase in their fight against Adani. They are calling on all of us to stand in solidarity with them.”

Various practical ways to do that can be found by subscribing to Stop Adani’s mailing list.

Extinction Rebellion superglue themselves to planes to stop them taking off

Back in mid-August, from Spiegel:

“Airplanes were unable to take off at several airports on Monday - climate activists from Extinction Rebellion wanted to attach themselves to planes with superglue or get out before take-off. They were verbally harassed by passengers.

“Activists of the climate protection movement Extinction Rebellion protested against domestic air traffic at several airports on Monday. The actions in Munich, Lübeck, Berlin and Düsseldorf were intended to draw attention to the fact that short-haul flights make a "significant contribution" to Germany's "harmful CO2 footprint", the alliance said. According to the Lübeck police headquarters, 18 people were taken into custody there until Monday morning.”

In Lübeck:

“Another 15 people were able to get through the fence at another location and were taken into custody by police forces on the apron. Three of them tried to fix themselves with superglue, the police explained. This could also have been "prevented in time“.

“Three activists reportedly had tickets for a flight to Munich. One passenger had tried to fix himself to the plane to Munich with superglue, the officials further announced. This could be prevented by a passenger as well as the police officers present and the airport security service.”

Superglue.

Dedication? Yes. Ouch? Yeeeeeeeeees.

Coal mining very close to being over like forever in the UK →

From the Guardian:

“Thousands of years of English coal mining will near an end this week with the closure of one of the country’s last remaining coalmines in Bradley near Durham.”

I was like, thousands?

Yep. Wikipedia:

“Coal mining in the United Kingdom dates back to Roman times.”

The deets:

“…Bradley will extract its last coal on Monday 17 August, two months after its sister site at Shotton in Northumberland ended its own coal production.

“The closure leaves only the Hartington mine in Derbyshire, which had planned to shut at the start of the month, as the last surface mine in England still eking out its remaining coal reserves for longer than expected.”

So what’s left?

“England’s remaining surface mines have reached the end of their lives less than five years after miners emerged from Britain’s last deep coalmine, the Kellingley colliery in North Yorkshire, for the final time in late 2015. In England, only small underground mines in Cumbria and the Forest of Dean continue to produce modest amounts of coal.”

Coming to the end of a very long era.

Climate models are underestimating, not overestimating, Arctic ice melt

As a follow-up piece to yesterday’s post on Greenland, from Science Alert:

“The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which hold enough frozen water to lift oceans 65 metres, are tracking the UN's worst-case scenarios for sea level rise, researchers said Monday, highlighting flaws in current climate change models.”

So, yes, these “flaws” are in the “oh Jesus we underestimated how bad it will get” direction.

Dang it!

“Mass loss from 2007 to 2017 due to melt-water and crumbling ice aligned almost perfectly with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change's (IPCC) most extreme forecasts, which see the two ice sheets adding up to 40 centimetres (nearly 16 inches) to global oceans by 2100, they reported in Nature Climate Change.

“Such an increase would have a devastating impact worldwide, increasing the destructive power of storm surges and exposing coastal regions home to hundreds of millions of people to repeated and severe flooding.”

Bye bye New York!

Those pesky scientists just keep on going:

"We need to come up with a new worst-case scenario for the ice sheets because they are already melting at a rate in line with our current one," lead author Thomas Slater, a researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds, told AFP.”

I propose calling this worst-case scenario, ‘The really quite bad scenario that will still underestimate sea-level rise as more negative feedback loops get loopin’.

Catchy, huh?