On a Floating Bridge

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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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How to use my maps

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).

Calculation Methods

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

Electric Trains

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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Electricity Mixes

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 = ?

Surface Vs Air Travel

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!!)

Conclusion

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.