Listen to Loco2’s radio appearance

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Stuart and Toby (featured on the right) are self-appointed carbon explorers on an African Carbon Odyssey. Soon they will contributing some blogs and/or podcasts here, but in the meantime, read about their escapades on their blog.

My favourite quote so far comes from their arrival into Tunis after a rocky ferry ride; a Fagin character had been bossing them around in a market and on discovering their mode of transport exclaimed ‘Why You not catch plane? You not capitalist!?’ This reminds me somewhat of Dopplr’s decision to term users of their new website ‘fellow travellers’, even though they are most definitely high-flying capitalists. So anyway, we look forward to hearing from the courageous lads as they work their way down to South Africa.

Until then,

Hasta Luego amigos!

Time to give your poor eyes a rest and sit back and listen to Emily & Verity’s tales as they took on the Trans-Siberian.

Taking you from Moscow to Beijing  and  Vladivostok – it’s a priceless journey if you’re into counting telegraph poles, soaking up snowy scenery, reading a hell of a lot, and making new cabin friends…

Emily and Verity’s 3rd night on a Trans Siberian sleeper…

Fifty eight hours in….and twelve more to go!

(Jamie) “First let me say how excellent the posts and podcasts are from Emily and Verity, and to wish them the best of luck on the next leg of their adventure. It still amazes me that it’s possible to hear from them in the middle of Siberia thanks to our wonderful friend technology.

Apart from the brilliant mental image I have of two eco-friendly Swedish architects scouring the world for the perfect sauna, I have one comment on Emily and Verity’s last post: why is the train hot?! This seems rather ridiculous and I’d like to start a campaign for sensibly-heated trains, simply for comfort just as much as the wasted energy when people are forced to encourage Siberian air into their carriage…”

Photos: watchsmart , Bernt Rostad, Bernt Rostad post thumbnail: Bernt Rostad

WOOW. We had our first train panic yesterday and ended up paying a Polish taxi driver about 10 pounds for a 10 minute journey from Warsaw Central station to Warsaw EAST (which is confusingly abbreviated to WS) to catch our sleeper train to Moscow. At the moment we are sitting in an internet cafe opposite Moscow’s red Square, but we thought we might have still been in Warsaw tonight.

We can’t believe we’re here already but don’t feel like we rushed through Europe too much. We’ve been able to gauge the feeling of each city (Brussels, Cologne and Warsaw) in which we’ve stayed. We think this has been mainly to do with our couch-surfing experiences: from a chaotic Belgian barmaid who recommended beer that tasted of HP sauce, to the marketing director of Poland’s largest delivery company, ‘Telepizza’. She made us feel welcome in an initially hostile Warsaw. Tonight we are staying with a very learned, very old, French, German, English and Russian-speaking language enthusiast with an orange dog called ‘Orange’ (in Russian).

The trains so far have been brilliant. The most impressive was surprisingly last night’s from Warsaw to Moscow. The decor of our couchette included lacy curtains and Persian-style rugs and seat covers, and we were provided with our own sink and clean sheets. The female carriage attendant was dressed as we had been told to expect of Russian women – in a miniskirt and knee high boots – so we felt rather silly when we left the train in our layers of thermals. Ironically we found ourselves waking up sweating in a train we thought would be the coldest so far. Too hot to sleep, we admired the snow covered tracks outside.

We really feel like we are moving further into the unknown. It’s not just the language barriers – the people seem to be different too. We can’t imagine getting the treatment here that we got from the restaurant touts in Brussels (one of whom proposed to Emily with his “special cocktail” and refused to take no for an answer).

We hope to send you a podcast soon, perhaps including sounds of the Trans-Siberian railway.

PICS

• Top: Festive chocolate sculpture in AMMMMMAZING chocolate cafe. Belgium, of course.
• Middle: Lake Baikal
  
• Bottom: From Russia with love: The door in the bathroom of the nice old man whose house we stayed at in Moscow

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In August 2007, Kate Andrews, founder of Loco2, decided to get on a fruit-carrying cargo-ship and go across the Atlantic to Costa Rica.

This is the second of five video diaries she made during the three-week crossing (the first one she talks about wasn’t on the CD she posted back). Please make sure you come back and check for the next instalments!

Kate’s 5th day video blog from Jamie Andrews on Vimeo.

Drumroll please….

We have our first travellers embarking on a true low carbon adventure! Emily and Verity are two bright young girls who’ve been saving their hard-earned pennies since finishing their A-levels in July. As we speak they are starting to navigate the streets of Brussels, and I’m sure they’ll be glad to be on a rail network that isn’t British!

With a lot of courage and a sensible amount of organisation they will be making their way all the way to India by train and blogging about the experience here. Using a combination of couchsurfing, hostels, and homestays, the girls are certain to engage with each culture in an authentic way that only surface travel can provide.

Here’s their rough itinerary:

• Brussels
• Cologne
• Warsaw
• Moscow
• Irkutsk
• Ulan-Bator
• Beijing
• Kathmandu
• Delhi

…and their route is plotted out on this map.

As well as writing blogs, Loco2 has provided them with a phone so that they can leave podcasts from the trains themselves (fingers crossed they get signal in the middle of Siberia). So thank you to Emily and Verity for sharing their experience with Loco2 and the wider world, and best of luck to them on the first leg of the journey. We look forward to hearing all about it!

That’s right kids, not airships, but normal run-of-the-mill ships that go across the sea.

As we all know from rhymes at school, “in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”, and since then a very large number of ships have crossed the Atlantic and the other seven seas. Unlike the Santa Maria, in the 20th century the vast majority of them have been powered by a fossil fuel of some kind. On Wednesday I read an article in the Guardian about an idea that could change that, at least to some extent. Putting sails back on ships could be a way to make them greener, and crucially for the shipping companies, consume less fuel (which like all fossil-based fuel in the world is becoming increasingly expensive).

Companies such as Skysails are promoting this technology as a cost-saving measure for freight shipping companies, with the slogan “Turn wind into profit” (which reminds me of an amusing advert). Because of the significant contribution to climate change caused by shipping (due to the large number of goods we trade around the world), making freighting by greener must be a good thing (although localising economies so less stuff is shipped is a key part of the solution too).

But how green is cargo ship travel for passengers? Various people have taken this option as an alternative to flying (including Kate, the founder of Loco2; you’ll be able to read blogs about the experience soon) but as yet there is little information available about the CO2 emissions per person because of the fact that the ships are (of course) primarily carrying cargo, not people. This makes it difficult to ascertain the contribution of individual passengers to the overall carbon emissions.

One argument (discussed here) says that because the ship is travelling anyway to get the cargo to its destination, the passengers’ travel is irrelevant, and therefore the journey can be seen as carbon neutral. That’s all well and good whilst we’re talking about a small number of pioneers taking the opportunity to have a trans-Atlantic adventure, but it’s not going to work for large number of passengers (the main risk involved with scaling up passenger numbers is that we’ll go down the polluting cruise ship route).

A way to look at cargo ship travel that takes into account the passenger contribution is to work it out in terms of weight. This is the method that the mighty Barbara Hadrill used to calculate the emissions on her massive adventure to Australia. Barbara worked out that the freight ship leg of her adventure (Singapore – Darwin) produced 285,760 grams CO2 for 2350 miles (see her August 2006 blog).

Calculating in terms of weight is far from an established method, but it is logical, and should help us to think about the comparative advantages of each mode of transport, both in terms of CO2 and fuel efficiency (which is an increasing concern for all of us given massively rising energy costs).

Right off the top of my head, the method goes something like this (I may come back and improve on this as I talk to people about it):

• Think about a humble passenger cabin on a cargo ship where all other space is used as efficiently as possible (because the more cargo the ship holds, the more cost-effective the freighting). This is going to be far better in CO2 terms than a decadent cruise ship where not only the cabin, but the whole ship is engineered around comfort and entertainment, rather than simply getting as much cargo (human or otherwise) from A to B on as little fuel as possible. For a cruise ship calculating the CO2 emissions per person is simply a case of dividing the total emissions by the number of passengers (as that’s the only purpose of the voyage), but for a cargo ship we need to take into account the fact that it’s carrying cargo as well.

• Let’s assume a cargo ship can carry 3000 tonnes of cargo (that’s 3 million kg) and that a person weighs 65kg (about 10 stone). In this situation (if my calculations are correct) the passenger would be responsible for 0.002% of the overall CO2 emissions of the journey. I couldn’t find a fuel consumption figure for a typical trans-Atlantic journey (the nearest I got was here) but we can safely bet that 0.002% of it isn’t very much. Now obviously this assumes that to carry everyone that efficiently we’d need to cram all the passengers into containers like they were cargo, and that would be mental, but it does give us a useful indication of the terms we can view the issues in.

The basic conclusion (and we probably didn’t need to do such ludicrous calculations to work it out) is that using space more efficiently when travelling is a good thing. What it doesn’t tell us unfortunately, is a comparable CO2 per km figure for passenger cargo-ship travel versus air travel (or other means). There’s still work to be done on this, and I’ll be continuing to dig around places like the New Scientist and sustainable shipping sites to try and find more answers.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with two thoughts:

• There needs to be a clear distinction between greenhouse gases that cause climate change (a very pressing global concern) and other pollutants such as Sulphur Dioxide that cause local environmental damage (an immediate concern for some, but not something that will affect all of us).
• We need to think about the feasible efficiency advances available in shipping/ferries (such as solar power) versus the feasible efficiency advances available in aviation (such as airships) and then make bold decisions about mass transportation on that basis.

Coming soon: smaller boats powered by the wind and the sun…

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