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.
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