Barging down the Erie II: Return of the freight barge

Your semi-aquatic Minor Heretic took to the Grand Canal once more last week, travelling from Oswego, on Lake Ontario, down the Oswego Canal, onto the Erie Canal, through Rome to Utica, New York. At one point, when we were docked near a lock, a massive construction barge went past, pushed by a tugboat. The barge filled the lock to within a few inches of the sides and nearly end to end. The incident was notable because of the lack of commercial traffic on the barge canal. It started me on a train of thought about the possible return of waterborne freight traffic.

I had spoken a couple of weeks before with a Canal Corporation official about the future of freight traffic, and he offered a few thoughts. A canal barge is 8 times more energy efficient than a tractor-trailer on the highway. $4.50 a gallon for diesel fuel is the economic tipping point between trucks and barges. The Canal Corporation is starting to get inquiries about barge freight. They have also started designing a self-propelled barge to carry up to 60 standard cargo containers.

I’d like to explore the possibilities of barge freight and its environmental impact. Interstate 90 generally parallels the canal across New York State. According to the Department of Transportation, between 2000 and 7000 trucks per day travel I-90 between Albany and Buffalo, depending upon the section of highway.

From my limited time on the canal I have seen that the time it takes to cycle a lock is about 20 minutes. A lock tender told me that his could cycle in 10 minutes if there were two lock tenders on duty. For the purposes of this exercise I’ll assume that the Canal Corp. gears up for freight traffic with two operators per lock, but allocate that saved ten minutes for maneuvering. At 20 minutes per cycle, a lock can pass 72 barges a day. At 60 containers per barge, that is 4320 containers per day. That represents a major percentage of the present I-90 truck traffic.

Of course, no system is perfectly efficient. I’ll arbitrarily assume that the canal is busy, but not packed, with each lock passing two barges per hour, or 2880 containers a day.

The Albany to Buffalo run on I-90 is about 290 miles. A tractor-trailer gets about 7-9 miles per gallon (call it 8), so one would burn 36.25 gallons of diesel on the trip. 2880 trucks would burn 104,400 gallons of diesel, producing 22.384 pounds of CO2 per gallon, or 2,336,889 pounds of CO2.

The ratio between the energy consumption of a barge and a truck is dramatic. There is a unit called the ton/mile, meaning the work of carrying one ton of cargo one mile. A truck gets 59 ton/miles to a gallon of diesel. A freight train gets 202 ton/miles per gallon. A barge gets 514 ton/miles per gallon, 8.71 times that of a truck. Divide 2,336,889 pounds that the truck fleet produced by 8.71 and you get 268,299 pounds, saving 2,068,590 pounds of CO2 per day. The polar bears would be happy about that.

Transferring that much cargo to the canal would also save about 92,400 gallons of diesel fuel a day, or 33,726,000 gallons a year. For comparison, that’s a little over half the annual diesel consumption in Vermont.

It makes sense that 200 years ago people built canals. Dig a ditch, let it fill with water, and gravity gives you a smooth surface. You can then build a wooden box, fill it with 120 tons of cargo, and pull it with three horsepower. Ok, mulepower.

I’m not indulging in nostalgia. As oil prices go up and oil availability gets spotty, we are going to be looking for energy efficient alternatives to the “rolling warehouse.” For items that can take four days to get from Albany to Buffalo instead of one, it is a reasonable alternative. 90% of the population of New York State lives within 20 miles of either a canal or the Hudson River. Vermont’s most populous city, Burlington, is connected to Montreal, Manhattan, and Michigan by water. Obviously we can’t transfer all cargo traffic to the water, but as we face ever rising energy prices we should develop this resource to its practical limits.

Lawrence of Arabia on Iraq

Or, "History repeats itself for the 45,896,327th time."

“You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.”

Ho Chi Minh

“Don’t send your military to fight nationalists on their own soil.”

Minor Heretic

The British learned this in America and Afghanistan. The Soviets learned this in Afghanistan. The French learned this in Viet Nam. The United States learned this in Viet Nam, forgot it, and is learning it once again in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The British experience in America is educational. The exact political relationship was different from ours today with the Middle East, but the general economic objectives are the same: maintain compliant states so as to extract natural resources. In both cases the colonized peoples started thinking and acting nationalistically, threatening the economic benefits enjoyed by the empire.

In the late 18th century the British were short on (semi) willing manpower, so they raised enlistment bonuses and hired mercenaries. They went deeply into debt. Much of the British populace wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the war. The British Army was beset by problems of supply, transportation, and rampant corruption. They won most of the battles of the American Revolution. Unfortunately for them, they lost a couple of big ones called Saratoga and Yorktown. In both these cases the loss was not about tactical military capability. As much as anything the British were defeated by long, fragile supply lines. General Washington operated on the principle that as long as his army was intact, he hadn’t lost. As long as his army was intact, the British had to stay in the field, spending money, losing troops, and generally getting worn down.

In Iraq today we have:
Mercenaries
Debt financing
Supply/transportation problems
Rampant corruption in both the Iraqi government and our own procurement process
Long, tenuous supply lines
Lack of popular support at home
Deteriorating military recruiting, morale and readiness

In the 19th century in Afghanistan the British managed to gain the upper hand militarily several times and dominate the Afghan kings. Still, after a while Afghanistan became just too difficult to manage and they left.

It’s not surprising, any of it. Afghanistan has been a strategic crossroads for thousands of years. The list of invaders stretches from Alexander the Great to the United States. As a result of centuries of practice, those who live in that region have become adept at guerrilla warfare, cunning in politics, and patient enough to wait out and wear down all invaders.

Likewise, the Iraqi resistance in all its forms has the advantage over us. Time is on their side, the population is on their side, and the battlefield situation is on their side.

Below is a piece from the “history repeats itself” category, by none other that Lawrence of Arabia himself.

First I’ll add a factoid that resonates: Lawrence wrote, “When conditions became too bad to endure longer, they decided to send out as High commissioner the original author of the present system, with a conciliatory message to the Arabs that his heart and policy have completely changed.” In our case, James Baker III, Secretary of State under George Bush Senior, sent a message through April Glaspie, then Ambassador to Iraq, to Saddam Hussein a week before he invaded Kuwait. The gist was that Arab vs. Arab conflicts were of no interest to us. In other words, “Go ahead, invade Kuwait, see if we care.” A million or so Iraqi deaths later, when the policy became a political shambles, guess who was appointed to chair the Iraq Study Committee and get us out of the mess? You guessed it: James Baker III.

22 August, 1920
A Report on Mesopotamia by T.E. Lawrence
Ex.-Lieut.-Col. T.E. Lawrence,
The Sunday Times, 22 August 1920

[Mr. Lawrence, whose organization and direction of the Hedjaz against the Turks was one of the outstanding romances of the war, has written this article at our request in order that the public may be fully informed of our Mesopotamian commitments.]

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster.

The sins of commission are those of the British civil authorities in Mesopotamia (especially of three 'colonels') who were given a free hand by London. They are controlled from no Department of State, but from the empty space which divides the Foreign Office from the India Office. They availed themselves of the necessary discretion of war-time to carry over their dangerous independence into times of peace. They contest every suggestion of real self- government sent them from home. A recent proclamation about autonomy circulated with unction from Baghdad was drafted and published out there in a hurry, to forestall a more liberal statement in preparation in London, 'Self-determination papers' favourable to England were extorted in Mesopotamia in 1919 by official pressure, by aeroplane demonstrations, by deportations to India.

The Cabinet cannot disclaim all responsibility. They receive little more news than the public: they should have insisted on more, and better. They have sent draft after draft of reinforcements, without enquiry. When conditions became too bad to endure longer, they decided to send out as High commissioner the original author of the present system, with a conciliatory message to the Arabs that his heart and policy have completely changed.*

Yet our published policy has not changed, and does not need changing. It is that there has been a deplorable contrast between our profession and our practice. We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish Government, and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil. We spent nearly a million men and nearly a thousand million of money to these ends. This year we are spending ninety-two thousand men and fifty millions of money on the same objects.

Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied, and killed a yearly average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats, and armoured trains. We have killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. We cannot hope to maintain such an average: it is a poor country, sparsely peopled; but Abd el Hamid would applaud his masters, if he saw us working. We are told the object of the rising was political, we are not told what the local people want. It may be what the Cabinet has promised them. A Minister in the House of Lords said that we must have so many troops because the local people will not enlist. On Friday the Government announce the death of some local levies defending their British officers, and say that the services of these men have not yet been sufficiently recognized because they are too few (adding the characteristic Baghdad touch that they are men of bad character). There are seven thousand of them, just half the old Turkish force of occupation. Properly officered and distributed, they would relieve half our army there. Cromer controlled Egypt's six million people with five thousand British troops; Colonel Wilson fails to control Mesopotamia's three million people with ninety thousand troops.

We have not reached the limit of our military commitments. Four weeks ago the staff in Mesopotamia drew up a memorandum asking for four more divisions. I believe it was forwarded to the War Office, which has now sent three brigades from India. If the North-West Frontier cannot be further denuded, where is the balance to come from? Meanwhile, our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the wilfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad. General Dyer was relieved of his command in India for a much smaller error, but the responsibility in this case is not on the Army, which has acted only at the request of the civil authorities. The War Office has made every effort to reduce our forces, but the decisions of the Cabinet have been against them.

The Government in Baghdad have been hanging Arabs in that town for political offences, which they call rebellion. The Arabs are not at war with us. Are these illegal executions to provoke the Arabs to reprisals on the three hundred British prisoners they hold? And, if so, is it that their punishment may be more severe, or is it to persuade our other troops to fight to the last?

We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. All experts say that the labour supply is the ruling factor in its development. How far will the killing of ten thousand villagers and townspeople this summer hinder the production of wheat, cotton, and oil? How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?

*Sir Percy Cox was to return as High Commissioner in October, 1920 to form a provisional Government.

Good Will Warfare

Your studious Heretic has been reading the works of the original blogger, Joseph Addison. With the assistance of Richard Steele, Addison published a series of daily essays in London almost exactly 300 years ago under the title of The Spectator. His medium was rag paper and hand pressed ink, but the intent was roughly the same as today’s laptop legions.

Addison’s writing collided with modern life for me most recently due to an email from an old friend. The subject line read, “They have me on the radio.” My friend is a former Marine who served a tour of duty in Iraq. He and his wife participated in StoryCorps, a project that sends mobile recording studios around the U.S. and assists people in recording their personal stories. His local NPR affiliate selected about three minutes of their 40 minute interview and broadcast it. You can listen to it here. In it, he talks about what his wife calls “good will warfare.” The Iraqis were solidly neutral in their behavior towards the Marines. My friend made it a personal challenge to get an Iraqi to smile or wave at him as he drove by. He figured that for that one moment he had gotten them into a better mood, perhaps even to the point of feeling friendliness.

This might sound naive, except for the solid science behind it. Scientists studying facial expressions have found that people who put on an angry expression that they don’t actually feel experience the same physiological changes as someone who is truly angry. Their muscles tense, certain stress related chemicals pour into their bloodstream, and parts of their brains associated with anger light up on a brain scan. The same goes for smiling. We can fake it and actually feel better. My friend was on to something.

India is home to a multitude of laughing societies. These people gather in parks and laugh. They fake it until they make it. I saw a documentary on the human face hosted by John Cleese of Monty Python fame where he visited one of these societies. A group of fifty or more people stood together in a public park with Mr. Cleese and started a round of the phoniest laughter you might imagine. Soon they were all convulsing with real laughter. They claim great emotional and physical benefits from the practice. Science backs them up, finding benefits for the heart, reductions in stress hormones, and boosted immune response.

This brings me back to Joseph Addison. Specifically, this brings me to Spectator number CCCCXLVII, Saturday, August 9, 1712. I quote:

“…..I would recommend to every one that admirable precept which Pythagoras is said to have given to his disciples, and which that philosopher must have drawn from that observation I have enlarged upon, Optimum vitae genus eligito, nam consuetudo faciet jucundissimum. ‘Pitch upon that course of life which is the most excellent, and custom will render it the most delightful.’ Men whose circumstances will permit them to choose their own way of life, are inexcusable, if they do not pursue that which their judgement tells them is the most laudable. The voice of reason is more to be regarded than the bent of any present inclination, since by the rule above mentioned, inclination will at length come over to reason, though we can never force reason to comply with inclination.”

I would disagree with Addison on the very last clause, being more a follower of David Hume, who wrote that “reason is the slave of desire.” Nevertheless, we can make choices, and by incorporating a practice into our routine, we can fight the good fight of reason over impulse. Habit, as Addison writes, can shape our desires.

Which brings me back to my Marine friend on patrol in Baghdad. He made a point of friendly engagement with fearful and hostile people in an extremely dangerous environment. He was, in a small way, improving his odds. In this, reason, virtue, and delight coincide.

I won’t belabor the point, but will allow my readers to extrapolate this into their own lives.

Anonymous gestures

I once read a true story by a resident of New York City about a relationship she had with someone she never met, never spoke with on the phone, and never communicated with in any normal way. She and her husband parked their car on the street out in front of their apartment building. They had gotten tired of having their car broken into, so they just cleaned it out and left it unlocked. One morning they found a cigarette butt in the ashtray. Someone had been in their car. Over time they realized that someone was sleeping in their car. At first this disturbed them, but then they realized that they had a volunteer sentry. One evening they left a folded blanket on the seat, and the next morning they found it folded in a different way. This went on for a few months, and then the signs of their anonymous tenant disappeared. They had enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with a complete stranger.

This is a story of accidental interaction that turned into a trusting relationship, and the facts of it may strike us as odd and wonderful. It is unique in its extreme circumstances, but we have these kinds of interactions with strangers all the time.

In Vermont, drivers often signal one another with hand gestures. I mean with the whole hand, not just one finger. I call it the Vermont wave, although I’m sure it must happen sometimes in other places. When two cars come to a stop at an intersection at roughly the same moment, and one has to yield to the other, there is a pause. Often, one driver will flap a hand, indicating that the other driver should go first. Occasionally the other driver will wave back in an “Oh no, after YOU” manner. In heavy multi-lane traffic, one driver will hang back, opening a space, and wave another car in. When a driver faces a left turn from a side street into traffic, another car will stop and wave, and then a car going the other way will see the first stopped car and stop, and the side street driver will make the otherwise impossible turn.

Sometimes, in a coffeehouse, I’ll find a newspaper neatly stacked on a table. Somebody bought it, read it, and tidied it up for the next person.

This type of anonymous gesture is just the most obvious. The fabric of our society is a series of anonymous gestures. Most of them we might call gestures of omission. We refrain from doing things that we could get away with, but that would tend to break down the trust relationship between people. The message we send with these gestures, both committed and omitted, is “Although I don’t know you, I care about you, and I expect you, in turn, to care about me.” They are seldom directly profitable, but they come back to us as we raise the general level of trust and civility.

I recommend assisting other drivers with “the wave.” In the moment, it makes me feel good, and I’m sure it is a pleasant surprise for the other driver, especially outside Vermont. Really what I am doing is creating a moment of added civility and planting a seed in the mind of another person. Perhaps that person will be more likely to wave another driver in front of them. Traffic will flow a bit more smoothly and tempers will be one iota cooler.

This concept of the anonymous gesture is why I so intensely dislike graffiti and its pseudo-hip relative, tagging. Marshall McCluhan’s dictum, “The medium is the message” applies here. Anonymously painting a pseudonym in a public place has some very clear messages, the predominant one being, “I don’t care about you.” More specifically:

- I am willing to impose a symbol of myself on your visual environment without your consent.
- My ego trumps community.
- I am unwilling to engage in the process of community decision making about the appearance of our shared public space.

I despise billboards as much as tagging, but at least the owners and advertisers have to go through some kind of approval process. At least we know who they are and can communicate with them, advise them, or oppose them.

A Buddhist philosopher once wrote, “Behave when alone as if you are with guests.” He was perceptive. The things we do when nobody is watching reveal our inner nature. Those who act with grace and consideration when their identity is obscured benefit twice. They enjoy both the pleasure of generosity and the advantages of a more civil society.

Solar messengers

I just finished teaching a weekend workshop on solar design at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School. I co-taught the course with John Ringel of Jersey Devil, a 30-year veteran and pioneer in passive solar design. We had a friendly and bright group of students, ranging from a Yestermorrow intern to a couple in their 40’s who were looking to build or retrofit a house. Some had projects ready to go, some only distant plans, and a few were looking at getting into the renewable energy business. All were full of questions.

The course covered passive solar design, that is, designing buildings so that sunlight and heat and air go where you want them when you want them, without the use of pumps or fans or other mechanical devices. The functionality is built into the structure. This is John’s specialty. I taught about active solar design, that is, devices that collect solar energy and deliver it as electricity or heat. Essentially this is photovoltaics and solar hot water. My (lame) joke is that we teach passive-aggressive solar.

I’m not going to attempt to outline the course here, but I’d like to touch on a few subjects that relate to the discussions that we had.

An underlying theme for me is an analogy based on the multiple meaning of the word insult. Aside from the usual social meaning, it is a term of art in medicine. A physical impact, very high or low temperature, a poison, or a dose of radiation can be termed an “insult” to the affected part of the human body. When we disturb the natural landscape or dump a poisonous chemical we are perpetrating an insult on a natural system. By analogy, we are behaving like some arrogant person with enough wealth and resulting power to go around carelessly insulting people without consequence. Our wealth is all that nature provides us, plus the stored treasure of fossil fuels and minerals. What most people don’t seem to notice is that our wealth is running out. I discussed this concept with John and quoted a jazz standard: “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.” It reminded him of the old saying, “Don’t insult people on your way up; you’ll meet them again on the way down.” We are on our way down, and the cumulative effect of our insults is coming back to get us.

Another concept that John articulated quite deliberately is that all the energy we have is from the sun. We rely on present day solar energy for our food. Hydroelectricity relies on the sun driven water cycle. Coal, oil, and natural gas are naturally processed plant matter that absorbed solar energy millions of years ago. Even the uranium for a nuclear power plant was born in the supernova of some other sun billions of years ago. We couldn’t buy, at any price, enough energy to replace the service that our sun provides us on a daily basis. Consider that the sunlight streaming through a one-foot square window is equal to 2,000 watts of incandescent light. We are bathed in it, as direct sunlight, wind, and rain. We ignore it to our own deep disadvantage.

When a client approaches John to design a house, an addition, or a renovation, he doesn’t even ask anymore whether they want him to incorporate passive solar design. It would be like asking if they wanted indoor plumbing. The sun is there, waiting to be invited in, or kept out, as needed.

One of the problems we face as our fossil fuel supply dwindles is that 99% of the buildings in the U.S. were designed and built on one of three principles.

Before the 1860’s, the design assumptions were that the occupants would cut ten cords of firewood a year, that they would spend the winter huddled near the stove or fireplace, and that they would accept the fact that in midwinter water would freeze overnight in the upstairs rooms. These were then retrofitted for assumption number two.

This was that high quality anthracite coal would be mined in the Appalachians and burned in furnaces in the basements of buildings. This assumption held into the 20th century, and slowly transitioned into assumption number three.

The latest assumption, still held today, is that we will have either a tank of cheap oil in the basement, a tank of cheap propane out back, or a pipeline full of cheap natural gas leading to our furnace.

The result is that there are houses in America to this day that have no insulation in their walls, and I mean literally none. Many have little insulation, and very few are near the ultimate level of energy efficiency that we can obtain by practical means. Most modern houses have no design relationship to the local climate, the path of the sun, or prevailing winds. This is a huge environmental, economic, and political problem that tends to get lip service and meager public attention. So far, our wealth of fossil fuels and the ability of the earth to absorb insults have obviated the need to pay close attention to our energy use. Now we are about to experience what happens when our wealth runs out. We will need to flip that 99:1 ratio of old design principles to new. This will require the education of America about the realities of energy.

Our fifteen students were all eager to learn the techniques of harnessing the sun. They were all aware of the need for it. Our students shared stories of encountering skepticism and hostility to the concept that the era of cheap, convenient, and consequence-free energy is ending. To their credit, they spoke of trying to convince friends, relatives, or coworkers of the inevitability of this change. This is the task of those who understand that the opposite of renewable energy is non-renewable energy (meaning that it will run out). Knowledge imposes on us the burden of responsibility to act.

And yet, on a sunny weekend in Warren Vermont it didn’t feel like a burden. Sharing knowledge about solar energy was a joy for John and me, and it appeared to be rewarding for our students. Solar design can be a puzzle, a game, a science, an art, a hobby, and a vocation. It can be practiced on the level of basic principles, simple arithmetic, or rigorous mathematical analysis. Solar design is a one time investment in thought and materials that delivers free heating, cooling, light, and ventilation for the life of the building. If we must be messengers, it is good news to be carrying.