Nuclears and fossils

[imomus]

This is my nuclear family. We're at my brother's wedding, which happened on Saturday. We don't all get together very often, the Currie nuclears, but I always really enjoy it when we do. We speak the same language. We share the same genes. I love them. It's also weird; when I look at a picture like this, I can't help thinking of Charles Ray's spooky 1992 sculpture "Family Romance", where a nuclear family stands naked in a line holding hands, all the same height, at different stages of development. We're all grown, and we're all still here, even if we're somewhat scattered now and all have our own lives.



We were mostly together in the 1960s and 1970s — that would be our "active years" in a music encyclopaedia if we were a rock band. Like a rock band, we toured around the world endlessly. In planes, in boats (my sister's son Robbie now looks exactly like me in a photo taken in 1973 on the SS France, as we sailed into New York harbour, emigrating to Canada) but mostly in cars. In the speech at his reception, my brother proposed a toast to his dear nuclears: "The main thing I remember about my family is that I never said a word," he mused, to the amusement of the crowd. "That we drove all over the world, it seems, the five of us, in a car, and I don't ever remember speaking. But there's something very good about this, because I think I derive from the four other members of my family all the key personality traits that I have now. I took the good bit from each. People say this about me — that somehow I sit quietly and absorb. That's what I did with them, and I think I got a fantastic combination of things."

My brother chose a particularly lovely part of the Norfolk coast to get married on. The wedding and reception were in a barn at Burnham Market, and the next day we all had a walk along the gorgeous beach (pines, dunes, miles of white sand) at Holkham Bay. Mark also chose a particularly inaccessible place; even for a public transport afficionado like myself, it was completely necessary to rent a car. In fact, Hisae and I missed the wedding ceremony itself because I made the mistake of thinking the A1(M) and the M1 were the same road. We turned round at the Watford Gap service station and headed across country, arriving a couple of hours late.



The fossils in my title aren't my family. They're cars, and the fuels they burn. As I drove towards the beauty of my brother's wedding, I couldn't help thinking how ugly car culture has made rural England. I'm sure once upon a time cars were a good idea, an idea you could get behind. When I was born there were 6 million cars in the UK. Now there are around 30 million, crammed into the same small island, all vying for space, polluting the atmosphere, making their drivers disconnected, disembodied, irritable, contributing to global warming, poisoning people, poisoning politics, making transit corridors of places that barely still have dignity as places-in-themselves. Driving past the roadkill and the Fatal Accident Here signs ("call police with information"), making way for the screaming ambulances (two or three of them) en route, I imagined how Chaucer's England, or Robin Hood's, must have been; covered with mixed temperate deciduous forests, traversed by donkeys and horses. Slow life! The air must have been clean then.

From the plane, flying in, I counted a convoy of oil tankers on the English Channel. Fourteen of them, heading south. The next day my plane to Berlin took off from Luton two hours late, delayed by Britain's biggest ever peacetime explosion. A fossil fuel explosion. I got a good view of the fire, just ten miles from the airport, when we took off at 9pm... in fact, after take-off we turned and flew right over the inferno, so close I feared the plane would be buffeted or singed. The lights of the highway snaking past the blazing depot looked oddly normal, oddly unperturbed by this oily cataclysm spilling black smoke across England. The radio reports I'd been hearing all day had been calming in tone: motorists shouldn't panic-buy fuel, there was still enough to go around. People should stay indoors and try to avoid inhaling the cloud of burnt ultra-low sulphur diesel, unleaded petrol, super unleaded motor spirit, kerosene, gas oil and aviation fuel. But as for pollution, well, all this stuff would have been burnt into Britain's atmosphere anyway, just in slightly more efficient ways. No cause for concern. No more than usual, anyway.

I believe that one day we'll look back on the age of the car as an age of fossils, filth and savagery. But I'm the black sheep of my British nuclear family: the only one without a car.

Comments

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Do you see any inconsistency between the condemnation of fossil fuel in your post and your admissions of having flown from Berlin to Luton and back, and thus having contributed to fossil-fuel pollution far more than catching trains and/or ships (or even driving the distance and catching ferries across the Channel) would have?

From what I've read, the boom in cheap flights has been one of the most ecologically damaging phenomena in Europe in recent years. Convenience and price wins every time, and aviation fuel is tax free.

[glowingwhispers.livejournal.com]

You have one of the hippest looking families that I've ever seen.

[(Anonymous)]

"The Buncefield depot is a major distribution terminal operated by Total and part-owned by Texaco, storing oil, petrol as well as kerosene which supplies airports across the region, including Heathrow and Luton" (from the linked BBC article)

So most of that oil would have been used by the airplanes you take to go to, say, Germany, or Japan, or New York...

Momus, should we go back to the age of international transport by boat, propelled by wind only?


--Remi(ttens)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't want to get into quibbles about statistics, because both road transport and aviation need to reduce emissions. But the figures I've seen are that aviation causes 3.5% of global warming. Road transport causes about 60%.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The depot did also store kerosene, as I mentioned in the article. But "most of that oil" is not kerosene. All pollution is bad, but most transport pollution is coming from road traffic. The solution I advocate is the adoption of Japanese models; because of the widespread use of public transport, Japan is one of the most energy-efficient countries in the world, producing just 4.8% of global carbon emissions. For comparison, China is increasing its carbon emissions 5% per year and the US produces 25% of global carbon emissions.

[djm4]

There seems to be an implication in your reply that it's somehow inherently better to be part of the 3.5% than part of the 60%. I don't follow the logic of that at all. The 60% is made up of far, far more people than the 3.5%, so the tiny fractional percentage that you personally contribute as part of the 3.5% is larger than the tiny fractional percentage that you would contribute as part of the 60%.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

Nick's sister is better looking than Liz Hurley.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

God, I knew this would devolve into statistical quibbles. This all gets very complex, and distracts from the general points that:

1. All pollution is disastrous and should be avoided.

2. Public transport (and the aviation I take is public transport) is far more energy-efficient than private transport.

3. Roads and road traffic make for a brutal and ugly world, especially if you include the death they bring in terms of accident fatalities and wars. And we don't know how many will die when global warming really hits over the next century.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Japan is one of the most energy-efficient countries in the world, producing just 4.8% of global carbon emissions.

From 1.9% of the world's population, and with a growing nuclear power programme!

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Establishing which form of transport is most responsible for pollution is hardly a 'statistical quibble'! Your logic only works if you assume that the same number of aeroplanes would continue flying even if they had fewer passengers to carry.

On the pure maths, aeroplanes are about twice as polluting per passenger-mile as cars, and about five times as bad as trains.

cars in the usa

[(Anonymous)]

i don't have a car myself, nor do two of my friends, but i just found out that our three families own a total of 17 cars. personally, i think it's disgusting. i wish i could say our generation is environmentally progressive, but looking outside to the street below, i'm sure that's not the case. i've been living in an overcrowded area right outside of a major univerity, & the highest buildings around are the parking garages. i've lived in london and i saw (inhaled) how bad it was there. yet, there are probably only 50 or 60,000 people living here, and often the traffic outside my window now is as bad as my old window which overlooked new cross road. i think most europeans assume americans to be incredibly lazy or apathetic towards the environment... but i think it's actually far worse than most imagine.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Planes pollute nearly as much as private cars, per km. The reasons cars pollute so much more is that so many more people are making their habitual journeys by car rather than plane. As usual, the most damaging thing is the thing most people are doing, and doing habitually.

[djm4]

Well, I certainly wouldn't want to take away from points 1 and 3, but I'm not really sure how my reply did that.

Point 2, though, is attempting to use a generalisation (public transport is far more energy-efficient than private transport) to answer a specifc case (is flying on a short-haul flight more fuel-efficient than driving in a private car would have been?). However, it doesn't follow from what you said that any public transport method is more fuel efficient than any private transport method.

I'm not sure how I can show this without quibbling about statistics, but be fair; you fired the first percentage.

Re: cars in the usa

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that, and I have to say that the fact that you're the only person saying this here so far, and are anonymous, doesn't portend very well for the future either.

[djm4]

*falls over laughing*

That has to be a US graph, surely. Only that country could consider 21.5mpg as an 'average' fuel economy for a car.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think the table above answers your point. Yes, not all all public transport is, in all cases, more fuel-efficient than all private transport. But that's the general tendency.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The table comes from here (http://www.northwestwatch.org/reforms/climate_airtravel.asp).

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Nonetheless, when I had a car, I got over 40mpg out of it, and it was pretty average, I wouldn't have called in an 'economy' car.

For planes you also need to factor in the diversion costs of getting to and from airports. But it's not a plane-or-car choice, isn't there an excellent train service to Berlin?

[djm4]

Thanks, I was wondering.

But even taken on its own terms, it doesn't help your case. Let's say you'd decided to drive to the wedding, rather than flying. Being European, you'd have been likely to do it in car with a fuel consumption substantially better than 21mpg. With very little effort, you could certainly have found a 40mpg car to do it in. You'd then (on the basis of that graph) have been polluting at 0.38 pounds of CO2 per mile than you did by flying.

But it's better than that. As I understand it, you flew from Berlin to Luton in order to get to Norfolk. That's not a very direct route. If you'd driven and, say, got the ferry from Hoek van Holland to Harwich, you'd have travelled fewer miles anyway.

I'm not saying you should have driven all the way. I'm a big public transport fan myself. I'm just pointing out that you would (even on your own figures) have contributed less CO2 to the atmosphere if you'd driven rather than flown, unless you'd driven an SUV out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, I think you're being very disingenuous with your anti-car tirade. Yes, of course I'd like to see far fewer cars on the roads. But how many plane trips have you made in the last couple of years? A dozen? Two dozen?The fact remains that your jet-setting, peripatetic lifestyle generates FAR MORE CO2 EMISSIONS than the lifestyle of someone who drives to work every day, and perhaps takes a plane from one European destination to another once a year for their holidays. So why aren't you decrying lifestyles that involve taking the plane more than a couple of times a year? Or is that a bit too close to home?

[anglerfish96.livejournal.com]

Um, but anyway-- I like the family stuff. Family is important, regardless of all the artists who would prefer to run away into their statistical quibbles.

Re: cars in the usa

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps there is a connection between not wanting to use cars and being too lazy to sign up for LiveJournal (all the good usernames are gone, anyway :)

Re: the other anon ... Attempting to explain American's car-driving as a factor of being lazy or apathetic or worse (worse, e.g. intentionally destructive?) is wrong and somewhat insulting. There is nothing inherently lazy about American choices in transportation, but rather Americans tend to have greater needs for personal transit (lower population density, etc) and less feedback on the problems of auto transport (low fuel prices, more dispersed pollution, etc).

I suppose what I'm trying to get across is that blaming Americans for being outright lazy in their transportation is misleading, and does nothing to explain how American (or global) personal transit can be changed for the better. I agree with you that the use of private transport hurts America and others -- I've personally given up on cars as dangerous, inefficient, and dehumanizing, and use a bicycle or mass transit when I must -- but if you have any interest in doing something about it, you shouldn't be so intellectually lazy.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My virtue is not that I chose to fly for this specific journey (I accept that flying is highly polluting). It's that I've chosen never to own a car (and I've had a driving license now for 27 years). My habitual journeys are made by foot and bicycle most of the time, and train if I go further. But I do fly too. The least I can do, to offset that carbon-emitting activity, is have nothing to do with cars and their culture.

[(Anonymous)]

A slightly different, and interesting, comparison between these three countries is the difference is carbon emissions per capita (this data is from 2003, so its probably not fuly accurate today):

Japan, ~2.5 metric tons carbon per capita
USA, ~5 metric tons carbon per capita
China, <1 metric tons carbon per capita (but as you say, growing quickly)

Anyway, I'm not convinced that the adoption of Japanese transport models is really a solution in most of the world. Let's say you drop down the same sort of fast, efficient, accessible public transit present today in Japan across Canada and America. What happens next? Well, the cost of running such a network across in a huge, sparse land is going to be so high that it could not possibly be paid for (I'm not speaking in terms of fares or subsidies, just raw cost). This decreases the utility of shared transport, and increases the usefulness of cars.

I don't doubt that you have considered some of the economics behind this issue, so I guess I was wondering whether you are framing car-use as a kind of moral choice. I have given a lot of thought to my choice to not drive unless necessary, but the real requirements of changing the society around me have left me grasping at what exactly I am trying to accomplish. Short of making a small moral decision that I will do the thing for the collective good rather than the more natural thing for my own benefit, I doubt there is much to be done.

p.s. Your family looks lovely.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The environment and our impact on it is fundamentally a quantitative, rather than a qualitative subject. It's pretty much impossible to have more than the most trivial discussion of it without getting into statistical detail.

However, I think in this example you would have made that journey by air if it had cost three times as much, so I don't think it's an example of the environmental damage caused by cheap flights.