Four/The Ideology of "The Open Road"

I'm going off the rails on this crazy train.
- Ozzy Osbourne


As the 2008 campaigns for a Democratic presidential candidate moved into Pennsylvania, Jon Stewart and his Daily Show video archivists showed a clip of Barack Obama waving to a crowd from the back of a train car on April 21. "Obama all-aboarded the train to Hopetown," Stewart commented, "doing the whistle stop tour and touting his message of change — because nothing says 'Look to the future' like rail travel."

Good one, Jon. But it needs some qualification.

First, you were talking about American passenger rail travel, the kind that's been throttled and choked and gutted and ignored for half a century. At the same time that rail freight was easily recognized as a backbone of American transportation, rail transport of American people was constructed as old-fashioned and obsolete after the dismantling of city cable and trolley systems proved so successful. The stunning, ornate Michigan Central train station in Detroit, designed by the same architects who gave Grand Central Station to New York, began its slow decline into hideous neglect at the same time that four-wheeled behemoths with fins and rocket flares sped Detroiters out of the city and into cookie-cutter suburbs that sprouted where farms had just recently been producing food.

New York valued Grand Central, and the city thrives. Detroit let its station become a ruin, and the city clings to life support. Union Station in Chicago rivals a good-sized airport for daily commerce and activity. Michigan Central is an occasional movie set for directors filming stories of apocalypse and desolation.

Yeah Jon, that railroad. Not the comfortable 200-mile-per-hour bullets that fly along the landscapes of Europe and Japan from one modern terminal to another, but the aging, broken, dirty, underfunded silver Amtrak hulks that clack along at a top speed of 55 while passing an endless series of abandoned small-town stations faring only a little better than their big brother in Motown.

But now that we've thoroughly dismissed rail travel, Jon, let's do some math together. I know that numbers in rapid succession tend to make readers' brains explode, so I'll take it slowly.

In 2005, Amtrak burned 66.6 million gallons of diesel fuel. This is a huge number, and a bit diabolical, given all of those sixes. But hold on, because here's another big number: 25.4 million — the total passengers that Amtrak trains moved in the same year. 68

Total fuel divided by total passengers: 2.64 gallons per passenger.

We'll keep this opening equation simple. Some passengers traveled across country from Providence to Los Angeles, and others from Chicago to Milwaukee. Some booked sleeper cars, some stretched out in business class, and most sat in their broken and dirty but comfortable coach seats. All could get caught up on work by plugging in their laptops (trains have standard 110-volt outlets everywhere), or avoid work by listening to music, watching the countryside and cityscapes roll by, playing cards, relaxing. A few might even have commuted from suburb to big city only by train for the entire year. And all burned an average of 2.64 gallons of fuel doing it.

Providence to Los Angeles in a rolling bedroom: two-point-six gallons.

Chicago to Milwaukee, writing a business report: two-point-six gallons.

A year's worth of commuting between work and home while reading the newspaper: two-point-six gallons.

Now let's crank up the mathematics a bit, Jon. Roughly half a million passengers each year, or 1,370 people each day, ride the Pontiac/Detroit to Chicago Amtrak route. There are three trains running the route, so 456 people ride each train. If all 456 of them were driving alone in an SUV getting 15 miles per gallon, they'd burn 21 gallons of fuel each for the 290 mile trip from Detroit to Chicago. Less than one tank; not bad.

Except that there are 456 of those SUVs on the highway, headed west. When they get to the Windy City, they'd refill their tanks to the tune of 9,576 gallons.

According to CSX, one of the nation's largest railroads, trains can move one ton of freight roughly 420 miles on one gallon of fuel. 69 So, ten 200-pound people (we're talking about Americans here) from Detroit can go not only to Chicago but about a hundred miles past it on one gallon, getting 42 miles per gallon per person. To move the remaining 44.6 tons of passengers, the train needs just 45 more gallons of fuel.

In contrast, each of the two SUVs can move half a ton of passengers 75 miles on one gallon of fuel. Two SUVs are required to move a ton, cutting the distance to 37.5 miles. The ten passengers arrive at the same destination a hundred miles past Chicago having gotten 11.2 miles per gallon per person. An additional 499.5 gallons of fuel are needed to drive the other 446 passengers to the same spot.

How's your head, Jon? Just a few more numbers now, to point out that trains have an 11:1 fuel advantage over cars. And with 22 pounds of CO2 released for every gallon of fuel burned, 70 the Detroit-to-Chicago run produces half a ton of carbon dioxide by train, versus five and a half tons by car. That's for just one of the three daily trips made 365 days a year, so the final yearly tally is 55 tons of CO2 produced yearly by train and 6,022 tons by car.

Let's review:

FUEL
Detroit to Chicago, one person per car: 9,576 gallons
Detroit to Chicago, five people per car: 500 gallons
Detroit to Chicago, 456 people per train: 45 gallons

CO2
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, car: 6,022 tons
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, train: 55 tons

Finally, just to mess with you a little more, Jon, try this comparison:

FUEL
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, one person per car:
10,485,720 gallons
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, 456 people per train:
49,275 gallons

CO2
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, car: 115,343 tons
Detroit to Chicago, yearly, train: 542 tons

Gallons of fuel and tons of carbon dioxide pollution saved: ah hell, Jon, you figure it out. My fingers hurt from tapping all of these calculator keys. But here's a hint: the difference is, as one of my colleagues likes to say, "not insubstantial."

Of course, trying to estimate optimal fuel economy for something as enormous as a train is going to have some flaws in the process. And there is a difference between efficiency miles and consumption miles. But CSX is in the train business, and fuel costs affect trains just as much as they do trucks and airplanes, the other two monster machines of transportation. There'd be no benefit for CSX to estimate its fuel economy at 420 ton-miles per gallon if the number was actually lower.

Okay, so, Jon? You know how everyone's in this rabid search for high-efficiency forms of transportation, with an ultra-high rate of fuel economy? And you know how those machines are all symbolic of an intelligent, sustainable, environmentally responsible future where we enjoy energy independence?

Well, guess what? Nothing says 'Look to the future' like rail travel.



====SOURCES====

68 "Amtrak: Energy Efficient Travel." Amtrak Media Relations, June 2006.

69 CSX Transportation, "Take the Clean Air Challenge." www.csx.com; Sharon Begley, "Sounds Good, but...." Newsweek, April 14, 2008.

70 Vermont Earth Institute, "Carbon Worksheet." www.vtearthinstitute.org/carbonwksht.html

< Infopause: Garbage Island / >

Just before leaving for a conference in New Orleans two weeks ago, I got an email from the folks at VBS.TV (no, not Vacation Bible School - the language over there can be pretty coarse) letting me know about their own investigation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (see chapter 2) and a multi-part video they put together of their journey. Thomas Morton also wrote an account of what he saw out in the ocean gyre.

I can't agree with Morton that "the problem with all the bravado on both sides of the ecology debate is that nobody really knows what they’re talking about," and I try hard to keep from looking for "something huge and incontrovertibly awful [that] you can show anyone a picture of and go, 'See? We’re fucked.'" (Remember, I'm married to Pollyanna.) But he and his crew did some amazing documentary work, and it's been recognized by both CNN and ABC. Unfortunately, I was away from the computer when Morton was interviewed, and couldn't post the links or info before it aired.

But the episodes of Garbage Island speak for themselves.

Three/Ideology and the "Technological Revolution" (conclusion)

In 1965, the President's Science Advisory Committee warned...that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to the burning of fossil fuels would modify the earth's heat balance to such an extent that harmful changes in climate could occur.... The committee speculated about modifying high-altitude cirrus clouds to counteract the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. It failed to mention the most obvious option: reducing fossil fuel use.

- James R. Fleming, "The Climate Engineers" 58

Dear Mr. Fantasy, play us a tune

Something to make us all happy

Do anything, take us out of this gloom

Sing a song, play guitar, make it snappy.

- Traffic, "Dear Mr. Fantasy"

The problem, in all of this, isn't technology. It's the application of it. Our ideological blinders are firmly in place as we look for new forms of the same old things. In the summer of 2007, Detroit Free Press columnist Bill McGraw drove 2,700 miles to survey Detroit's 2,100 streets and the neigborhoods along the way, with a number of staff photographers on board to document the journey. Of the hundreds of photos and videos the "Freep" posted online, one really stands out: in an abandoned section of Detroit that's returning to prairie, a former city street just sort of disappears into a meadow. The concrete goes from solid, to cracked, to crumbling, to gone. Then buffalo grass and wildflowers (and garbage) take over.

That Detroit street is a metaphor. Once, people used it and needed it. But then they moved away, forgot about it, replaced it with something else, another house, another neighborhood, another street, another life. It used to be there, but now it's not anymore.

That's the way to look at technology's role on a warming planet. Continuing to throw research and development dollars and human brainpower at forms of transportation and energy proven to have been our downfall is illogical, especially with evidence pouring in that the new tech can be even worse than the old tech. Illogical is the nice way of saying that. Evil might be the more accurate way. Every agent of government, agriculture, and industry who smiles and spouts the words "clean" and "green," when neither is true and both need smoke-and-mirrors contortions to fit inside the pill being forced down our throats, knows full well that the pill is worse than a placebo; it's a carcinogen in concentrated form.

You can't run cars on food. 25 gallons of corn ethanol are equivalent to 450 pounds of corn. There's some form of corn starch or sweetener in more than half of the foods on the market. 59 As corn turns into gold for farmers, they abandon other grains, other crops: wheat, barley, hops, soybeans, the prices for all of which have doubled or tripled due to ethanol insanity. 60 Those with means, eat. Those without, starve.

"[W]e should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time," two English gentlemen once told a notoriously greedy businessman. "Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts." 61

Today, those numbers are millions, not thousands. But farmers and businessmen still answer the same way Ebenezer Scrooge did: "If you want my corn, you'll meet the price I quoted... plus five percent." 62

Plus ten.

Plus fifteen.

"I'd rather have corn farmers growing energy rather than import oil from countries that may not like us - that's how I view it," says George W. Bush. 63

I'd rather have a president showing leadership rather than push policies that can murder people. That's how I view it—although I'd ditch the double "rather" in the sentence.

You can't run cars on food. That's not technology; it's villainy. "We must ensure that we protect our wildlife and preserve our way of life," my state senator's computer auto-replied to an email I sent, after its software had isolated the key words in my message and chosen the most likely canned response from its pre-written files. 64 But the computer was wrong. Our way of life is a way of death. It has to fade away, like that street in Detroit, and be forgotten, and be replaced with something else. Seven billion people can't drive seven billion cars drinking seven trillion tons of food. It's not sustainable. And it's definitely not rational. Sensible people don't put their faith into something that grows in the ground, when weather is predicted to become wild and rain scarce. But this is what happens when a "way of life" ideology dictates what forms a technological "revolution" will take. The revolution becomes a literal one, and we spin around 360 degrees to arrive right back where we started from, looking for new forms of old things that created the shit pit we're in. Irrational, and even pathetic.

Just as the scientists in 1965 knew that fossil fuels had set us on the sure road to perdition, yet couldn't see the solution sitting an inch from their faces, a current faction of science is ready to try altering the sea, the sky, the air, our crops, our genes - everything but the same old technology that is still hurtling us down that highway to hell. If anyone really wanted what's left of world oil supplies to last for as long as possible, wouldn't they have mentioned something about conserving it by now? Instead, we speculate about how much or how little might be left in the ground, continue on a maniacal spree to burn up every last drop, and trust blindly that whatever happens next will magically preserve our way of life.

The United States military consumes roughly 350,000 barrels (one barrel = 42 gallons) of fuel every day to keep its ships, planes, Humvees, tanks, Strykers, and hundreds of other machines running. 65 The average daily oil production in Iraq is two million barrels (bpd). This means that every six days, the United States burns 100% of the oil that Iraq has produced that day. If M. King Hubbert was correct, and 2005 was the year that world oil production reached its peak, then it'll be every five days soon. Then every four. Ultimately, it'll be the futile one-for-one exchange mentioned earlier. Oil consumed in order to consume oil. Hello?

But the same government minds that are watching this development unfold in Iraq are the ones who make recommendations like this one from the General Accounting Office (GAO) to Congress in February 2007:

To better prepare for a peak in oil production, GAO recommends that the Secretary of Energy work with other agencies to establish a strategy to coordinate and prioritize federal agency efforts to reduce uncertainty about the likely timing of a peak and to advise Congress on how best to mitigate consequences. 66

Look closely. What's that plan again? What's the vision for strong, decisive action? Break it down:

Recommend

Work

Establish

Coordinate

Prioritize

Reduce

Advise

Mitigate

Yep, they've got a plan: replace oil with verbs!

We're on our own, ladies and gentlemen. The captain and crew bailed out a long time ago. But they didn't take all of the parachutes and life rafts with them. The ideology of a technological solution to our dire situation is not, in itself, problematic. Technology can be an awesome thing. Some amazing human brains are testing innovative and creative ideas right now. They know the clock is running down, but it's an ideology of a rapid, even "overnight," technological revolution being the singular answer that'll create even worse problems if we do it wrong. As our first witness, we call corn ethanol to the stand. As one scientist put it on NPR's Science Friday: Yes, we have to move fast. But we also have to move smart.

This shift is a big one, and heavier than a Plymouth Roadrunner. It requires going to the center of everything and then not only pulling the center out of place, but discarding it, leaving it behind, letting it be consumed by buffalo grass and wildflowers — and then replacing it with a new center worthy of Sir Terry Leahy's label, "a revolution of thinking." And keeping in mind, during the whole process, this observation from Alexis de Tocqueville two centuries ago:

I think than men bestir themselves within certain limits, beyond which they hardly ever go. They are forever varying, altering, and restoring secondary matters; but they carefully abstain from touching what is fundamental. They love change, but they dread revolutions. 67

The left brain can't handle moving the center — "touching what is fundamental." The left brain screams that if something works, say, like a way of life, then you just don't fuck with it. You leave it alone, keep it going, sing some Status Quo.

But technology can't be the only thing that's revolutionary in the immediate future. For once, it turns out that an oil company is being straight with us: we are "the greatest source of energy in the world," just as Chevron points out. And the right brain holds the creative energy for a huge collective ideological shift into Right Thought and Right Action. Technology will follow our lead.

====SOURCES====

58 The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2007.

59 "Starch - An 'Indispensable' Food Ingredient Faced with Market Challenges." Flexnews: Business News for the Food Industry, Jan. 29, 2008.

60 C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, "How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor." Foreign Affairs (Council on Foreign Relations), May/June 2007; "Editorial: The World Food Crisis." The New York Times, April 10, 2008.

61 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

62 Ibid.

63 Martin LaMonica, "Bush Commits to Renewable Energy for Climate Change, Energy Security." C/NET News, March 5, 2008.

64 Email message from Sen. Debbie Stabinow (D-Michigan), Feb. 14, 2008.

65 Hon. Steve Israel (D-NY), "Next Generation Energy Security Initiative." April 9, 2007.

66 United States Government Accounting Office, "Report to Congressional Requesters: Crude Oil: Uncertainty About Future Oil Supply Makes It Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production." Feb. 2007.

67 Chapter 21, "Why Great Revolutions Will Become More Rare." Democracy in America, Book II, 1840.