The beginning of global climate change - pinpointed

I drove us back from Lone Tree to Spanish Fork last night. We didn't get a load for Friday so we both ended up with today (Friday) off duty. I've taken to listening to audio books on the long drives. I'm now listening to Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi". Early in his life, he trained as a paddle wheel steamship river pilot running up and down the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The job required a photographically accurate perfect geographic memory of the entire river and all its hazards - things that changed on a daily basis. Piloting demonstrated one of the incredible capabilities of the human brain that I believe has no equivalent today.

Twain left the piloting business at the start of the Civil war as the steamship industry collapsed. He returned for a visit to the river twenty one years later in 1882 after he'd made a name for himself through his writing and had tried his hand over those 21 years as ....
a silver miner in Nevada;
next, a newspaper reporter;
next, a gold miner in California;
next, a reporter in San Francisco;
next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands;
next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East;
next, an instructional torch-bearer on the lecture platform;
and, finally, I became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England.

(Which makes my hop-scotchy career path look a little more normal by comparison.)

One of the many changes Twain noticed in 1882 about the remaining riverboats - only a tiny fraction of the number that had plied the river in his day - was that they now used coal rather than wood to fire their steam engines. Sometime around 1870, along with the rise of the railroads in the American west, coal replaced wood for fuel and the switch from sustainable bio-fuels to non-sustainable fossil-fuels began.

Of course the trick now is to get all our industry back on biologically derived, and therefore carbon-neutral fuels. Fuel sources created from a process which pulls CO2 from the atmosphere - this year (rather than millions of years ago) - and builds it into an energy-containing burnable molecule (fuel), which then releases that CO2 back to the atmosphere when burned - also this year. The end result is no additional CO2 put into the air, just the same molecules being captured and released (recycled) through every cycle.

Victor and I have been burning through more than 600 gallons of diesel a week. With more than 3000 trucks doing the same, C.R.England uses more than two million gallons of diesel fuel every week, adding more than 44 million pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere each week (according to the EPA's math of 22 pounds of C02 from each gallon of diesel burned). Unfortunately, 44 million pounds doesn't mean anything to me. You?

Hmmmm. In our trucks we can carry as much as 46,000 pounds of cargo with each truck load. So if we were carrying C02 (compressed appropriately to fit) in each trailer, it would require 956 truck loads each week to transport C.R.England's weekly CO2 waste. If C.R.England's three thousand trucks are making just five runs per week each for a total of 15,000 loads per week, we'd need roughly another 1,000 loads per week to carry our C02 waste - 6%. On a per-truck basis, that would mean one out every 16 loads would have to carry our C02 waste. So once every three weeks, we'd have to make a run with the C02 from the previous fifteen loads. That doesn't seem so bad. Instead, for Victor and I, those 46,000 pounds of CO2 just drift away into the Utah and Colorado skies.

Uncompressed, a kg of C02 gas at standard pressure and temperature (zero degrees Celsius at sea level) takes up a volume of 509 liters. So the C02 from a gallon of diesel - 22 pounds (10kg)- would require 5090 liters or 180 cubic feet of space - about the volume of a coat-closet. The Hindenburg airship held 7.0 million cubic feet of gas. Therefore the Hindenburg could hold the waste CO2 from the burning of 39,000 gallons of diesel. Each week, C.R.England's truck fleet outputs enough C02 to fill 51 Hindenburgs.

The Houston Astro-dome holds a volume of 41 million cubic feet, big enough to hold the waste C02 from the burning of 228,000 gallons of diesel. Each week, C.R.England's fleet outputs enough C02 to fill almost nine Astro-domes.

C.R.England, while the largest refrigerated carrier in the world, doesn't even show up on the list of the top 500 privately held trucking fleets in the US. That means each week in the US, the trucking industry produces enough C02 to fill many more than 5,000 Astro domes (covering more than 47,000 acres of land - a square block of land more than eight miles on each side). By the end of a year, the trucking industry in America has created enough CO2 to fill enough Astro domes to cover a square area almost sixty miles on a side. That's an area bigger than the entire Los Angeles basin, or the entire SF Bay area, or big enough to cover the entire eastern quarter of the state of Massachusetts from New Hampshire to Connecticut and replacing all of the Boston and Worcester metro areas with Astro domes. That's a lot of poisonous gas.

According to the EPA, diesel fuel use by the transportation industry accounts for only about 11% of the total C02 put into the air every year. That would mean enough Astro domes to cover a chunk of land 200 miles on each side - essentially all of New England - every year.

When placed in terms like that, it's interesting that we thought we could just get away with it with no environmental repercussions. It would be like throwing a new pair of dirty socks in the corner of your bedroom every night and expecting the pile to never grow and impact the remaining space in your bedroom. When you consider that while colorless and odorless, an atmosphere containing as just 10% CO2 will still kill animals (and humans) in only minutes, it's even more surprising that we'd have so little concern about it for so long (and that some ignorant people still deny it's a problem). That's a lot of dirty socks.

Yup. Reducing or eliminating CO2 production from fossil fuels is a big problem. One I think will only be tackled by a complete switch to bio-fuels.

A feeling of Kinsmanship

The massive quantities of fluid (primarily Guinness) therapy seemed to have worked and I woke up yesterday with my cold mostly gone. Just as Victor and I were about to pull out of the truckstop where we'd spent the night, a young man bearing a striking resemblance to my uncle Phil, only 45 years younger and a foot shorter, walked up to our truck.

Turns out he's another C.R.England student driver, about a month ahead of me in the training program. He told us he thought his trainer may have abandoned him and the truck!

(As bizarre as that sounds, it happens more often than I would have believed. The "phase-2" trainers are truck leasees, out of school only a few months themselves. Apparently some of them realize too soon that trucking and training other truckers isn't what they really want to do and they simply walk away from the truck and the student when the pressure gets too high and they come to that realization.)

After about an hour of communicating with England corporate back in Salt Lake, we figured it all out and were allowed to give the kid - I'll call him Arthur to protect his identity - a ride back to Spanish Fork. What was interesting was my gut reaction to seeing this kid. It was some visceral, genetic empathy because he looked so much like someone of my 'clan' (for better or worse).

I mentioned the feeling to Victor and he knew exactly what I meant. Victor is a pretty typical American in that he has little insight into his geneology but knows he's a blend of African, Cajun, French and other European genetic pools (his family is from the New Orleans area). But he says when he sees people that resemble his family, he feels that same kinsmanship.

Soon enough we're underway, make our delivery in Lone Tree, CO, and I take the wheel driving back to Spanish Fork, eight hours away with Victor in the sleeper and Arthur riding shotgun. He's only 23 and from Brigham City, Utah, about an hour's drive north of Salt Lake. A mostly rural, entirely Mormon community until Morton-Thiokol, makers of the Space Shuttle solid rocket booster engines located their manufacturing and assembly plant there in the '70s (and then moved it somewhere closer to Cape Canaveral in the '90s if I remember correctly.)

From living in Salt Lake from '81 through '96, I got a very good understanding of the Mormon religion and culture having lived and worked with many Mormons for those years. Like most religions, there are devout followers and not-so-devout followers. Not-so-devout Mormons are called "Jack-Mormons". I'd known plenty over the years - just like the rest of us "gentiles" (the Mormon term for non-Mormons) - drinkers, smokers and fornicators. What I found out from Arthur last night was that there are grades of "Jacks". He doesn't drink or smoke, or even drink coffee, but he's trying damn hard to fornicate. For the next four hours (most of it in the daylight as we had an early departure from Lone Tree which allowed me to see more of the spectacular mountains I'd been previously driving through in the dark). . .

. . . Arthur was on the phone trying to arrange for one of the many young women he knew to make the two hour drive down from Brigham City to Spanish Fork at midnight to pick him up.

He said, try as he might, most of the girls he knew would sooner or later hand him "the friend card" when he'd try to get too close. So he has lots of girl-friends but not a "girlfriend" since he broke up with his last in December because she was freaking out all the time. He said "a girlfriend would be nice, but a nice girlfriend would be better" and it seemed to him that now that he was no longer in Brigham City all the time, more of those girls left at home were interested in him. Go figure. He says it's because many of them would love to have a man providing a paycheck, but not home to spend it! A twenty three year old single person in Brigham City has slid well down the bell-curve of normality for such a rural Mormon community. Most kids are paired up, married, with a rug-rat on the floor and another on the way by that age.

I listened to one side of his phone conversations with other friends about the relationships of his entire circle of friends for hours. Very amusing and made me glad I'm no longer in my twenties (more specifically dating girls in their twenties) and especially not in Mormon country.

We dropped Arthur off at the distrubution center and one of his women arrived minutes later to pick him up. I climbed into the sleeper, Victor dropped off the trailer and picked up a new one and I woke up eight hours later in Denver. Driving back to Spanish Fork in the next hour or so. I think we're off to Idaho for our Friday run about twelve hours from now.

Economic theories and the decline of western civilization

I've been long wondering about what's wrong with our economy and the entire American way of life that has lead us to such a materialistic existence. Along those lines, I spend much of my time researching exactly those issues and will provide links to articles I find that seem particularly insightful. Just found one.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/system-failure-look-upstream?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+yes/most-recent-articles+(Most+Recent+Articles+and+Blogs+-+YES!+magazine)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

I first saw this guy David Korten just a few days ago on the one hour PBS special program "fixing the future" by David Brancaccio.

http://www.pbs.org/now/fixing-the-future/

It was the first positive news that maybe America has some hope to come out of this crisis with some grace. If we can only wake the walking dead (who don't know they're dead - don't worry, you don't know who you are.)

I can hardly wait until David Korten's recent book "agenda for a new economy" is available as an Audio book.

24 hours in a Denver truck stop

I drove us back to Spanish Fork last night. Another clear and cold night. Lots of stars. Nearly ran over a dead deer at the edge of the road. It's poor little face hanging over the white line into my lane. The moon was rising just as I switched with Victor at the bottom of Spanish Fork canyon at 1am.

Victor picked up the next load a few minutes later at the bottom of the canyon for delivery back in Denver today. With a full dose of NyQuil to get over this cold, I awoke as he put on the brakes at 10am at the Pilot truck stop north of Denver for refueling and a shower(not quite as nice as the last one).

Just as we were approaching the JCPenney for delivery an hour later, our Dispatch Manager messaged us that the load was actually not due for delivery until Wednesday and that they would not accept it today. Her bad. That means we have 24 hours to kill in Denver. In my previous life of travel, 24 hours off-duty in a new city was a welcome opportunity to visit the local art museum, wander downtown, find a good restaurant, meet some locals, etc.

Apparently in the truck driving life - at least while I'm on someone else's truck - it means 24 hours parked in a truck stop miles from downtown. It also means loss of about $1000 income for Victor. (Fortunately I'm currently getting paid by the day, not the mile so I'm still getting paid to sit in this pub and sip Guinness.) Victor, and likely most truckers, are very paranoid about driving off-route and especially anywhere not specifically designed to handle trucks, and about leaving the truck. Three reasons for this.

1. We've been getting about eight miles to the gallon which Victor is ecstatic about. My old-man driving must be paying off for him. At that kind of gas mileage detours are pretty expensive in fuel costs.

2. Most accidents happen in parking lots, followed only by downtown driving. Truckers see the miles they accrue on the highway as pay-day, the few miles accrued near the delivery point or in a town are fraught with danger - accidents waiting to steal your paycheck. Best to avoid unnecessary diversions.

3. Believe it or not, both tractors and trailers are stolen on a fairly regular basis. Leaving a truck parked somewhere, especially in a city, makes drivers very nervous. Considering that the tractor alone costs $175k new, an empty trailer another $80k, and possibly millions worth of merchandise within it, you'd think the security systems would be pretty bullet proof. In actuality, there are NO security systems in these trucks other than the locks on the doors. WTF? Sounds like a market opportunity to me (and perhaps a conspiracy between the manufacturers and the mob?).

So, I'm thinking, with an adequate security system (something involving pepper spray) on a truck, it might be a good idea to carry a bicycle or scooter out on the cat-walk behind the cab to allow me to explore inexpensively.

Today, I've found a pub near the truckstop which serves Vietnamese food (though nothing else would indicate ANY Asian connection) to continue my massive fluids therapy for this cold - primarily Guinness - good for what ails ya. The bartender, Debbie (who looks like she could be the actress Meredith Baxter's little sister, see photo), is an interesting woman with a pickle business - http://busydspickles.com

She just handed out samples of her pickled asparagus. Salty and slightly spicy and crisp and tasty. Really good and unusual. She says her favorites are the brussel sprouts so I'm going to get a jar. (Delicious) Apparently excellent in martinis - and you know me and martini mixing. She also said she's driving down to Dallas this week to deliver gift baskets for forty hall-of-fame Superbowl players. There are characters all over.

Ahhh. We found out today that Highest Wind was NOT awarded the Navy grant for the Energy Glider. Damn. Our next possibility is not until March with the USDA. I guess I'll be driving truck for awhile.

Life goes on.

I'm part of a global supply chain

Every day we deliver and unload a few tons of JC Penney merchandise. On Wednesday the load consisted of a dozen or so pallets with stacked boxes of mostly furniture, and well more than a thousand pieces of clothing on hangers, complete with theft protection tags in place. Seems like Prom season is coming up because there were a lot of Prom dresses as well as summer clothing! (It’s still January!) The inside of the trailer has a couple dozen hanging rods across the width, for the full length of the truck, as long as my house in NH – 53 feet. I looked at the manufacturing label on some of the pieces – Pakistan and Vietnam – which is pretty amazing. For the first time in my life I’m part of a global supply chain. Somewhere near the end.

Those Prom dresses had been likely shipped in cargo containers carried by ocean going vessels from Asia to Los Angeles. Some other truck had then delivered them to the Spanish Fork distribution center where I’m guessing they sort them into loads of exactly what each store needs for the next few days. We carried them the final miles to the store where some high school girls would buy them, wear them once, and let them sit in closets until someone decided to throw it in the trash or give it Goodwill twenty or thirty years from now. I wonder what the time constant is on this supply chain? How long between someone makes the fabric, to cuts and sews the clothing, until I deliver it to the stores?

In industrial design and engineering, there is a current movement for cradle-to-cradle design – plan for the entire lifecycle of the product including its eventual disassembly and recycling of the components into something new. I’ve been thinking about that regarding Energy Gliders for the past couple years. Our goal is to make all the components completely recyclable. It makes me wonder about clothing. Is clothing recyclable?

Saint George, Utah

I made it the entire distance of about 500 miles from Denver to Spanish Fork in a bit less than ten hours, pulling into the distribution center at 12:30am. The trucks are speed limited to 62mph. At that speed, no more fuel will flow to the engine. We can only exceed that speed going downhill - which after driving for hours at a max of 62, is pretty damn scary. On hills of about a 3% grade, our terminal velocity seems to be about 65mph. Too much wind and rolling resistance to go any faster than that. I'm very unlikely to explore terminal velocities on steeper grades.

Again, the moon was out and as it rose higher in the sky the snow-covered countryside was magical. Another cold and clear night.

Once we dropped our trailer and picked up the new one, Victor and I changed places in the sleeper. He then drove us down to St.George, Utah while I slept. I awoke at 6-something in the morning as he climbed into the top bunk to wait for the JCPenney receiving guys to arrive at 8:30am.

The drive back was very pretty.

We're now off until midnight Sunday night when we drive back down to Spanish Fork, pick up a trailer, and do the drive back to Denver Monday morning.

Sleep Deprivation

We’re allowed by the Department of Transportation (DoT) fourteen hours of “on-duty” hours at a stretch, which can include up to eleven hours of driving. The rest of those fourteen hours are likely taken up by loading and unloading the truck, refueling, or doing safety checks on the truck.

After driving until 12:30am Wednesday – just an hour and a half from Salt Lake – I hit the sleeper bunk and Victor continued driving. He’d last woken up at 6pm that day. He woke me up at 7:30am in Vail Colorado in the middle of a snowstorm. The DoT was requiring tire chains on all commercial vehicles (us) to get over Vail pass so we needed to put them on. Fortunately I’d been trained on exactly that only two days before. We had the chains on in about a half hour and headed up the pass no faster than 40mph. No truck wrecks or crashes that we saw but a few spun-out ‘four-wheelers’ (what truckers call people in cars) heading up to the ski areas.

We took off the chains a few miles later after the worst of it, and arrived near Denver to clear skies at about noon. We refueled (see the photo) and because we bought more than 50 gallons of gas, we got free showers, normally $10. My idea of trucker showers was not nearly this opulent. Marble tile, full wall mirror, a complete private bathroom, not just a shower!

We then drove down south of Denver to Lone Tree, CO to the mall and the JC Penney within it. Our deliver time was 3:30pm but we were two hours early. I walked into the mall to publish the previous post but then Victor called to tell me Penney’s would take the load early. So we spent the next two hours unloading the truck (triggering a future post about global supply chains). As soon as we were done at about 3:30pm, I drove us out of the Denver area and back up through the passes over the mountains, requiring chaining up the tires again on Vail pass. It also involved the scariest half hour of driving in my life. No chains, coming down from the previous pass in snow-storm conditions.

Physics dictates four ways these eighteen wheelers can slide. 1. the front wheels can slide forcing loss of steering ability. 2. the drive wheels can slide jack-knifing the rig. 3. the trailer wheels (we call ‘the tandems’ ) can slide also causing a jack-knife. 4. all wheels can slide, which surprisingly is preferable, if given a choice. Coming down steep slippery roads could induce any of those slides. With chains on the drive wheels, the most likely is the trailer slide which is discovered by glancing in the side mirrors and suddenly seeing the trailer in one of them. Recovery is done by accelerating slightly and pulling the trailer back into line behind the drive wheels. Slides of all types are started by braking too hard. So while coming down hills we downshift and then apply gentle braking pressure almost continuously while praying one axle or another doesn’t lock up and slide. As I told Victor, that kind of driving is NOT what anyone has in mind when they think of the romance of driving truck. A glorious day on I-10 in west Texas – that’s what I had in mind.

By 6:30, it was dark. Victor had been awake 24 hours, and I was getting pretty tired on my less than six hours of sleep. So he climbed into the sleeper and I continued driving through some spectacular snow-covered mountain country under a full moon. I wish you could have been there. I-70 through Garfield canyon is about twenty miles of civil engineering wonder through steep walled canyons – some walls in the moonlight and others dark. Impossible to photograph.

I stayed awake until I simply couldn’t keep my eyes open any more. Victor, took the wheel and continued driving the rest of the way to Spanish Fork, swapped trailers, and started driving east toward Denver again.

I awoke at 7:30am today after sleeping eight or so hours and only being awoken by the roughest of bumps or the longest of rumble strips. Victor is wired, but amazingly alert. He will drive to Denver and then I’ll again try driving us the 500 or so miles back to Spanish Fork during the night. I’m now getting to see Garfield canyon in the daylight and while pretty, not nearly as magical as last night in the moonlight. Today I’ll get a 90 minute nap in Denver before we leave. And fortunately, the weather today is blue skies everywhere.

Too much Stuff?

I thought so, but it easily fit inside the cab. But I've now discovered that we'll be back in Salt Lake every weekend. Victor's 'dedicated' run always starts at the JC Penney distribution center in Spanish Fork (with nine very large wind turbines just behind it at the mouth of the canyon). From there he drives to whichever JC Penney needs a load that day. Today we drove to an extremely nice shopping mall south of Denver - Park Meadows with a delivery of stuff for the store which totaled only a few tons out of the 23 we could carry.

Stuff to bring and sleeper cabs

The school originally told us to bring enough clothes to go twelve days without laundry. I don't know about you, but I've never owned more than eight or nine underwear at a time. So I'm now bulked up with twelve underwear, twelve undershirts and twelve pairs of socks. I suppose I'll find out soon enough how much clothing the truckers actually bring on the road with them.

I was hoping I'd be driving down south and could leave behind much of my cold weather gear (and keep from buying more). A few of the students had those nice heavy cotton duck Carhart insulated overalls and they seem really warm. Much of our driving training was out on the 'backing range' in single-digit temperatures where long johns under sweats, under jeans, and seven layers of upper body clothing still weren't quite enough to stay warm while standing around waiting for my turn driving the truck. But it seems in the normal course of trucking, we'll be outside no longer than a half hour before and after each driving shift - climbing around under the truck doing a pre-trip inspection. I'm thinking those old-style ski warm-ups that simply zipper up the sides of the legs will be more than adequate and a lot more convenient that struggling into the coveralls. The truck cab has been warm enough that I've been stripping down to my undershirt while driving. Maybe this is a situation where a single thick layer of warm covering is much better than lots of thin layers.

I also don't know exactly how much time we'll be driving and how much time we'll have for other things. Theoretically, with no loading/unloading stops, just fuel and bio-breaks, two drivers in a single truck can get coast-to-coast in less than seventy hours. The Department of Transportation has fortunately limited our driving time to no more than eleven hours of driving following ten hours of continuous off-duty time (hopefully spent sleeping). So two drivers could keep alternating shifts of ten hours of driving and sleeping and get coast to coast in just under three days. I'm sure plenty of people do that, and I'm prepared to try it for awhile if my instructor wants to 'run' like that. But I've brought enough clothing that we could also go see some sights without me looking like a truck driver. Hopefully that's how he runs instead. If I'm still doing this in three months when I get "solo-certified", that's how I plan to run. Might as well make the most of it. It would be pretty sad to drive all over America for a few years and never stop for anything other than loading docks and truck stops.

Yes, these trucks we drive have "sleeper-cabs". Much bigger inside than I thought. Two beds that fold up against the back wall of the cab when not in use, and lots of shelving and closet space - sortof. So when one of us is off-duty but we want to keep the truck moving, the other driver pulls the curtains, puts in some ear-plugs, and straps himself into the bottom bunk with what looks like a cargo net. The motivation to keep the truck moving continuously is that we get paid by the mile. So when the truck isn't moving, we're not making money. Many of the drivers have leased a truck with a weekly payment of something more than $400. So as long as the truck is moving, they can make their payments.

Driving out tonight

I just spoke with my driving trainer, Victor. He has a dedicated run for JC Penney which apparently has a large distribution center in Spanish Fork, Utah, about an hour drive south of Salt Lake City. Victor called me from I-70 near the Utah Colorado border. Said it's been rough and slow travel over the night with avalanches and wrecked cars going over the Rockies west of Denver.

He has another student on-board now who he will drop off tonight at the school in Salt Lake at 9pm. I get on the truck at 10pm and drive us down to Spanish Fork to get the load, and maybe up over Soldier's Summit towards Price, Utah - a drive I've done dozens of times over the years on the way down to the deserts of Southern Utah. But never in an eighteen wheeler.

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.

I'll be sure to catch a nap this afternoon after some yoga. Maybe just hold that "corpse" position for ninety minutes.

Graduation

I graduated today from the C.R.England trucking school and got hired as a driver. Tomorrow I head out on the road with an experienced driver - my instructor - for 30 days and more than 15,000 miles of driving.