(I’m taking a course in climate change law this year, so I’ve been doing a lot of pre-reading for it. This is a series of thoughts I wanted to pass on as I did my reading.)
By this point, everybody except the kooks and the desperate liberal-haters know that global warming is serious business. Most people don’t realize how serious it is, though. We are on a clock that nobody in our political arena is willing to mention.
Many people are aware that four degrees of warming is probably where the catastrophic end of mankind begins – at four degrees of warming, land-based ice shelves melt enough that most of the world’s major cities find themselves underwater. The four degree marker is fairly well known. The problem is that the four degree marker isn’t what we should be worrying about: what we need to worry about is the two degree marker. (One point nine, two point five, it’s somewhere around two and a little bit, most likely.) At two more degrees of warming, most global warming models predict that our climate system will start creating its own warming feedback at such a rate that we won’t be able to stop global warming without some major league scientific brilliance. We will most likely not manage the major league scientific brilliance, and in any case who the hell wants to rely on a Hail Mary pass for the future of the human race?
(Some will say at this point: “but Chris, there’s a reasonable chance that we can afford slightly more global warming than two degrees. There isn’t universal agreement on which model is the most accurate.” And this is true. However, given that the “slightly more warming” models are at best slight outliers, this is not an optimal strategy. Moreover, the other problem is that those models are counterbalanced by equally probable models that are, shall we say, much more disastrous. We should be hoping that the most likely prediction pans out and not get greedy.)
To stop global warming before we hit the inevitability junction of two degrees (and change), we need to cut global emissions drastically. I’m talking eighty-five to ninety-percent by 2030-2040 “drastically.”
Yes, it means we have to convince China to stop building coal plants, but contrary to what some might have you believe, when you show that an environmentally friendly lifestyle approach is both economically feasible (and, in a few years, probably economically preferable to a wasteful one) and healthier to boot, most people will generally jump at the chance to emulate you. Chinese people consume American (and increasingly European) culture in mass quantities: they want what we have, not necessarily because it is better but because our lifestyle has become a status symbol.
And yes, it means giving up a few things, but the trick here is not to think of these as sacrifices but rather trades. I don’t just mean “trading pleasures of life right now for the good of the planet later on,” either. I mean trading one set of pleasures for another.
My favorite example of this is the supermarket. Supermarkets are ridiculously wasteful of energy. You know this – you’ve been in one. Supermarkets have giant banks of open freezers without doors. They have hot lamps shining down on the fresh fish, which have to be laid out in ice to keep them from spoiling because of the intense heat the lamps generate. They have hot air blasters at the front door to keep the store warm in winter, which in turn mean the freezers have to be even more powerful when the hot air blasters are on.
But consider this: the abandonment of the supermarket entirely, and instead opting for delivery. Most supermarket chains already deliver anyway, and there are already delivery-only grocery companies. And deliveries will already be made just about any time of day. So let’s make it universal. I mean, just about everybody has a phone now, or net access, so ordering is pretty much a done deal. There’s no need to operate a massive, wasteful supermarket – you can just deliver from the warehouse. (The additional delivery jobs should make up for the loss of supermarket jobs, at least partially.) The need for bags, reusable or otherwise, disappears entirely. And best of all, consider this as a consumer. You don’t have to make a trip to the supermarket. You get to hang around the home – at a time convenient to you – and you get the time you would have spent on a half-hour or hour long shopping trip for your own purposes.
That’s what I mean when I talk about looking at “giving up” as a matter of trading. But enough about supermarkets. Let’s talk about air travel.
When it comes to emissions control, air travel is the giant in the room absolutely nobody wants to talk about. It’s obvious why: we like to fly. We really, really, like to fly. We like it so much we’ve spread our families all over the world, and we’ve come to regard it as a right to be able to visit them if we want and can afford to. On the whole, we’ve got a point, too: air travel has made the world smaller, and mostly for the better. Our societies grow more mixed, and understanding grows ever greater. (Not fast enough, of course, but certainly faster than in the days of mass xenophobia.)
But air travel as we know it isn’t sustainable. There are no fuel alternatives for airplanes. There are no “electric planes” waiting in the wings. Airplane manufacturers claim that fuel-efficient planes are coming soon, but they haven’t got any proof of it and every incentive to lie to you, so as a general rule not trusting them worth a damn generally pays off.
And airplanes are terrible carbon emitters. They emit plenty all on their own, but worse, they do it at high altitudes where the damage from their emissions is more pronounced. Worse yet they emit other gases that are also warming gases you don’t want high up in the atmosphere. George Monbiot, in Heat, estimates that on a single one-way flight from New York to London, a single passenger on a full plane is responsible for 1.2 tons of CO2 emissions.
There’s no easy way around this: jet planes have to go, save for emergency flight and super-extreme-high-end luxury. If we need to cut eighty-five to ninety percent of our carbon emissions, it’s going to be hard enough everywhere else without having to cushion for the frigging jet plane emissions we refuse to cut because we’ve always wanted to visit Tahiti.
“But Chris,” you say, “you were talking about trades and how it doesn’t necessarily have to be a sacrifice! Was that bullshit?” And the answer is “well, a little bit,” but only in the way that you bullshit a kid to get them to eat their creamed spinach by pretending it is tasty rather than creamed spinach, which is the most disgusting edible thing on the planet. (Yes, it’s worse than maggots.) The point is that there’s something good coming as a result of the sacrifice.
And there is something good. See, when I said we didn’t have the technology to make non-environmentally-damaging aircraft, I was only half truthful. Because we don’t have the technology to make non-environmentally damaging airplanes.
But zeppelins? We can do zeppelins.
(I know it’s in vogue to call them “airships,” but fuck that. They are zeppelins. I know I am being technically incorrect, but “zeppelin” is a cool word.)
We had commercial zeppelin travel over eighty years ago. Now, understandably, the Hindenburg explosion soured people on it, and then the advent of supercheap oil made airplanes more economically feasible than zeppelins – planes were faster and used less fuel, and also they didn’t have trouble when trying to pilot into a headwind.
But apart from speed, none of that is true any more. (Well, zeppelins still have trouble piloting into a headwind, but air maps are a lot better than they used to be and we can minimize the impact of it.) Zeppelins don’t use hydrogen to fill their balloons any more; they use helium, which doesn’t explode and is in fact a fire retardant. And in terms of fuel, new zeppelin design emphasizes their large, flat tops to stack solar cells across them – using the solar energy to power rotors and store energy during the day, zeppelins could feasibly be permanently and cleanly self-powered.
In terms of speed… well. Turtle Airships, the most prominent neo-zep design company, claims their maiden ship will fly up to 200 mph, which would make for about a 17 hour trip between New York City and London – not jet speed, to be sure, but certainly not bad. Unfortunately, that figure is probably crap in the way that all optimistic engineering estimates produced for press releases are probably crap. But even if their ship’s top speed is only half that, you’ve still got a one-way trip of 35 hours, which while not short is good enough to keep international travel alive and well. (Business travel will probably diminish some as a result, but, as Garth Ennis once wrote, well, that’s just fuckin’ tough. They can teleconference, after all.)
Zeppelins also offer what planes can’t – comfort. Planes, after all, are uncomfortable for a reason – they have to pack a whole lot into a giant metal tube that is basically shot into the sky, and making that cost-effective is tricky. Compare to the original zeppelin flights, which were more comparable to luxury cruises – you serenely glide over the ocean (or mountains, or whatever), looking down on the world. Turbulence isn’t particularly an issue. Imagine going up into your personal cabin on the zeppelin – nothing fancy, but your own little room for a day or two as you fly to your destination.
When I titled this post “It’s Only A Matter Of Will,” I meant it; building an airship fleet to replace, say, ninety percent of all jet planes within ten years’ time won’t be cheap, but it’s nowhere near impossible or even that difficult. In exchange for discomfort, increasing expense and environmental damage – instead we can have a relaxing zeppelin ride. The only thing we have to sacrifice is our own desperate need to get there now now now. Is that so much to ask?
(And one more thing: airships, unlike planes, are not innately explosive guided missiles, lessening their security risk immensely.)
Next week: The biggest carbon emitter you probably never even knew about.
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51 users responded in this post
I’m still waiting for the Flying Car.
Let’s scale down the dreams of luxury a bit.
How about 9 hours to Los Angeles?
With bandwidth and a cubicle, it could be just another day at the office.
I don’t need my own cabin, but something as comfortable as a train with a dining car would be just fine with me.
We can keep the jets for Trans Atlantic and Trans Pacific travel. In fact, lets designate Overland travel as the domain of Airships, and over water for jets.
What we really need to do is get the high speed rail in place. There’s no reason why it should take any longer than 2 hours to get from Toronto to Ottawa. Once you add in airport hassles, that just about matches flying time. For Christ’s sake, the French, Japanese and Chinese have all done it. Why can’t we? We need to completely eliminate air travel for short hops.
Because someone has to say it: Zeppelin rules!
…this had never even occurred to me.
And now I want it. I want this to happen. How can we make it happen?
Most overlooked part of the Hindenberg disaster? There were survivors. People jumped clear. Try doing that from a 747.
Oh, MGK, you kooky liberal. Everybody knows that a sky full of zeppelins is a clear sign of an alternate timeline where the Nazis won WWII. Must you be so insensitive to the Jewish community?
But, seriously, I think this highlights one of the major issues in global warming… mainly, that the situation favors drawing out current technologies as long as possible. If you enact a law that requires a massive paradigm shift (be it banning certain technologies or setting draconian-but-necessary emission standards that make certain technologies impossible to bring to market), you negate the market advantage of current large manufacturers and distributors (that being patents and facilities for the current technologies). Taking the example of airtravel, this means no single company or group of companies has the market advantage, throwing things into relative chaos, and there will be a period of limited or no airtravel as production builds up to meet demand. Obviously, this can be adverted by setting a future mandate that will force the paradigm shift at a known date, but even then, large companies will fight anything that requires them to make large investments in new facilities and R&D. Indeed, a few them may, arguably, not survive it or will be severely shrunken by it. So it falls on the politicians whose interests dovetail with these companies (some of whom may be on the dole, but some of whom are justifiably concerned with the economic impact on their constituency) to fight these paradigm shifts or draw them out as much as possible.
That has been one of the huge problems of global warming — current technologies confer competitive advantage to long-standing producers. Take those away, make them unusable, and you end up with *gasp* a leveled (although certainly not flat) marketplace! I don’t think any politician worth their Iraq War Vote and subsequent Iraq War Critique wants that.
This calls for science, MAD SCIENCE!!!
Ack! Research, then post. Most people died BECAUSE the jumped clear – the actualy gondala was so gentle that people who stayed on survived.
I, er, believe this only strengthens my point.
The problem I have with groceries on delivery is that as good as it sounds, delivery is NEVER at the most optimal time for your convenience. I’ve ordered a shitload of stuff off the internet from a bunch of different places, and everything always seems to arrive between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. during the week, which is convenient for no one who works a 9-5 job.
And trading jets for zeppelins? It’ll never happen. The mental leap is way, way too big. You might as well ask people to start ridings skateboards to work.
So… Can we have a zeppelin with multiple levels? That way we’d have STAIRWAYS TO HEAVEN!!!
Zeppelins is a good word, but personally I prefer dirigibles. Much more rhythmic and fluid, less spittle-filled.
NCallahan is unfortunately right, so what we need is an eccentric billionaire who hates aeroplanes to pump money into a zeppelin firm during the difficult “establishing zeppelins in the public eye as a viable form of transport while haemorrhaging funds” period. Either that, or an EU project, but EU projects take too long.
Seriously: speaking as a passenger, I really want this to happen. I hate planes and I hate airports. The very idea of a sky traversed by solar-powered zeppelins makes me go all warm and tingly.
“– But even if their ship’s top speed is only half that, you’ve still got a one-way trip of 35 hours, which while not short is good enough to keep international travel alive and well. –”
Um… no. For leisure travel, 35 hours is simply unacceptable. That expands to 70 hours round trip, which means you spend roughly three days in transit. And that’s just making the jump from NY to London and back again. If I’ve got a one-week vacation, I’m basically toast.
For overland travel, the Europeans have a fantastic little system set up using a little thing called trains. The infrastructure is more expensive, but operation and maintenance is orders of magnitude cheaper. Trains have the potential to be just as spacious and ergonomic as their airborn counterparts. And, with mag-lev rails and other tech-savy features, they can get you where you need to go while moving in the 200-300 mph range.
NCallanhan: Or Cybermen and we don’t want that. Ok, I do want that, but I can see that most people wouldn’t.
Your right about how business will fight to keep anything not under their control out of the public eye. Look at the electric car or not look at it as the case my be. So, I guess surfs up.
It’s very very hard to get people to accept Hydrogen-powered cars because they go AHHH AHHH NO, HINDENBURG! …and you think they’d be willing to just up and accept getting on something that looks like it? Unfortunately they’re a paranoid lot.
…and at some point they would probably be filled with Hydrogen, if for no other reason than we’re having helium supply issues. The stuff has a nasty tendency to leave the planet after it escapes.
Zeppelins died out because a) they were freakishly labor intensive compared to planes of that era, and b) they tended to twist into animal shapes in bad weather. The Hindenburg was but the after-dinner mint to the Monty Python sketch.
I ran some numbers a while back based on designs from the last round of zeppelin interest, and they weren’t competitive in terms of fuel costs, even if prices went to people-are-growing-soybeans-on-the-front-lawn-for-easy-cash levels, because zeppelin cargo capacity was so much smaller. Didn’t have data on emissions, and I can certainly believe that jetliners are worse — but I’m not sure whether they would be substantially worse. If you’re replacing one jetliner with ten zeppelins, it’s probably not going to favor the zeppelins.
Finally, I wouldn’t rely on Monbiot as a source for anything. The most charitable interpretation is that he’s excitable and sloppy. If he has references, check them.
Obviously, grocery delivery services maintain their own fleets, so they aren’t bound by a mail carrier’s or courier’s delivery schedule. Fresh Direct (the biggest NYC grocery delivery service) lets you specify a two-hour block of time for delivery, and there are plenty of early-morning, late-evening and weekend slots available. You can even reserve a particular timeslot to guarantee that it is available every time you order. It’s really not a problem — at least, not in a densely populated area like NYC. Obviously, groceries-on-delivery isn’t going to work as well in sprawling suburbs or rural areas, but for cities, it’s great.
Gah. First graf above should be in quotes.
Of course, it was just last week that it was revealed the U.S. Bureau of Land Management recently inked a 15-year deal with a private helium refiner that pretty much screws everyone except the refiners.
http://news.google.com/news?&tab=wn&ncl=1238939814&hl=en
(If I comprehend the news reports correctly, the deal requires that it be renewed as is when it’s up, which would take us right up to that 2030 time range.)
I hate to burst your bubble, but the helium supply is dwindling about as fast the the fuel supply – estimates put us at running out in 40 years. It’s the second most common element in the universe, but it doesn’t exactly hang out ’round these parts. On Earth, virtually all of it was produced by radioactive decay over millions of years – which is still going on, but not contributing all that much. We collect it from natural gas fields – basically by taking the gas emitted and cooling that until the only thing that is still a gas is helium. Many natural gas suppliers don’t bother to capture the helium, since they’re making their money on the natural gas.
Demand is already out-pacing supply due to its industrial and scientific applications and . For example, 96 tonnes of liquid hydrogen is used to cool the CERN Large Hadron Collider. This is before we start replacing the world’s air fleet with giant containers of the stuff, of course. And unfortunately, helium diffuses through solids relatively easily, so containers of helium gas is not a great way to hold on to it.
PS: The only estimate I’ve seen put it at 40 years – it’s running out, but slower than that may entirely be possible.
Diffusing through solids is still very slow; its just something that needs to be kept in mind. In all likelihood, more gas would be lost when one of the zeppelins would become damaged and the gas runs off into space through a hole than through diffusion.
Too bad we can’t practically use nitrogen gas by itself to lift zeppelins, as there’s certainly plenty of THAT around…
Maybe we can use cowboys with lasers to round up a bunch of politicians and harness the hot air they generate?
ANY solution that involves- you know what, forget it. We’re screwed.
I think the planet WANTS those four grades, so it can get rid off some billions of us.
we’re so boned.
Would having fleets of delivery vehicles and trucks be better than supermarkets? Have people crunched numbers on it?
I second Zifnab, trains are the best way to travel. I only wish that the US had a modern train system.
Delivery poses a serious problem, as mentioned above. Many people don’t have a big window to recieve perishables. If the delivery gets an order wrong, there’s no fixing it for days (and the delivery infrastructure to deliver to nearly every household multiple times a week would be massive). Plus, it would take away from the many marketing techniques that supermarkets use in order to get people to buy things they didn’t want when they came into the store, and I really don’t think they’ll settle for food spam. Plus, I live in the middle of farmland central, and delivery is simply a non-option.
I’d love for there to be a reasonable alternative to supermarkets, mostly due to the massive amount of waste they produce, but I don’t see a feasible solution. Combined with the helium shortage mentioned above, I’m thinking our best bet is to start working on ways to survive the coming Kevin Costner world, ’cause it’s a coming, like it or not.
Obviously, we can fuel these zeppelins with the helium produced by all the nuclear fusion plants that will be soon be popping up around the world. I am clearly an extremely talented physicist with an excellent understanding of the subject, and I also typed that with a straight face.
The reason that the US doesn’t have a ‘modern’ train system like the UK, EU, or Japan is simple. It’s the same reason that bus service in small towns sucks. For it to be convenient enough to be useful, you have to run fairly often, more often than there is actually demand for year-round. that means nearly empty trains sometimes. this means that ticket prices go up and routes get cut because running empty trains makes no money, which makes trains less convenient, more expensive, and they slowly die.
The USA (and china) is too big and the population is too spread out for trains to be a viable national transportation strategy. They could be made to work better, sure. Both coasts would be well served by a stable train network, Vancouver-Seattle-Portland-SanFran-LA-SanDiego would be a great route. You could do even better on the east coast. It’s filling in the middle that’s trickier.
I have a question, though this may get me slapped with a ‘kook’ label, MGK, while climate change is serious, and I don’t know about other greenhouse gasses, I do know that the totality of human carbon emissions since the industrial revolution is tiny compared to the amounts produced naturally (volcanoes, cows, etc.). now, without getting into the blame game, as it doesn’t really matter if it’s our fault or not, climate change is happening. but given that, does it really even make sense to be worrying about our carbon emissions, and not other, more harmful greenhouse gasses, or trying to find ways to reverse what’s apparently a natural cycle of the earth’s atmosphere that’s just bad for us cause we were dumb enough to live on the coast?
On the one hand, I am still hoping to move to Great Britain sometime soon, and I’ll need some form of travel (hopefully faster than a tramp freighter.)
However, it does seem that commercial air travel is not at a very sustainable point anyway. Airlines continue to operate with razor-thin margins and try to save money by cutting down on frills like “room to sit.” There are probably less comfortable means of long distance travel (see above), but the system seems sort of ramshackle right now.
Exar: It’s a question of balance, mostly. The amount we add tips the scales so that there’s too much CO2 in the atmosphere, and an excess of any one gas is a problem.
Yes.
Most people drive to the supermarket. Lots of people driving in lots of separate cars is much less efficient than a single delivery truck making multiple deliveries. Supermarkets require a large fleet of vehicles to deliver from the depot to the supermarket — if you can instead deliver from the depot straight to the consumer, you’ve saved energy (provided you have enough consumers in a relatively dense population area).
The other thing is, FreshDirect, at least, tends to focus more on locally-grown food. Trucking in perishables from the other side of the country (let alone the other side of the world) is incredibly wasteful.
If we could encourage higher density living and roll back suburban sprawl, build high-speed commuter rail and better public transportation, make people less dependent on cars and keep pushing people to eat locally produced food, all of these things are synergistic with grocery delivery. It’s like a green feedback loop.
Hey, if we started with just high speed trains along the major cities on the coasts, it’d be a great start (plus, yknow, I live in the Seattle/Portland corridor without a car and man would that be convenient for me)
“– Would having fleets of delivery vehicles and trucks be better than supermarkets? Have people crunched numbers on it? –”
We already have fleets of delivery vehicles and trucks going to supermarkets to stock them in the first place. What’s more, we all hop into our little gas guzzlers to make the weekly / bi-weekly / monthly grocery runs on our own. I can’t see how having our groceries Fed-Ex’d on a regular basis would be worse than the current setup. Having a single milk man deliver every second Monday seems far more efficient than having the 20 people on your block (or the 100 people in your apartment complex) take the commute individually.
“– Delivery poses a serious problem, as mentioned above. Many people don’t have a big window to recieve perishables. If the delivery gets an order wrong, there’s no fixing it for days (and the delivery infrastructure to deliver to nearly every household multiple times a week would be massive). Plus, it would take away from the many marketing techniques that supermarkets use in order to get people to buy things they didn’t want when they came into the store, and I really don’t think they’ll settle for food spam. Plus, I live in the middle of farmland central, and delivery is simply a non-option. –”
Ideally, you wouldn’t have deliveries to every person on every day. Again, think of the 50s-era milk man. You’d place your order via phone or internet and expect a shipment every week or every other week or what have you. Getting food would be like having your trash picked up. Just expect a delivery crate on your doorstep on Tuesday.
Grocery stores might lose money on impulse buys assuming they didn’t cram their ordering websites with banner ads and discount buttons, but they’d make it up by conserving on the amount of food they toss out due to waste. You don’t need twenty pounds of oranges sitting in a big bin in the hot air when you know that there’s only an order in for ten. The only real issue is a matter of quality. People like going to the grocery store because food is one of those things you can’t exactly send back when you don’t like it. If the grocery delivery service sends you a sack of moldy oranges, what do you do? If a grocery chain gets hammered by complaints, how do they handle unsatisfied customers? These would definitely be problems to tackle.
As for folks living out in the boonies, I don’t know what to tell you. You’re a minority, for starters, so you’re not on the top of the priority list.
Delivery services like FreshDirect build their whole brand on quality. The idea is that all their perishables are hand-selected, so they never stock or ship the substandard crap you’d pass on if you saw it in the supermarket. The extent to which this scales is an open question — Starbucks used to serve much better coffee than it currently does, too.
Call and complain and any delivery service that wants to stay in business will issue you a credit for your next order. It’s not rocket science.
If they are doing a shitty job, they will go under, like any other business.
One very positive potential upside for grocery delivery services is that there are a lot of urban neighborhoods that don’t have any quality local grocery stores, so people in those neighborhoods end up eating a lot of convenience store junk food. Unfortunately, most delivery services require a computer and internet access, which poor people don’t always have access to. There’s also a perceived “luxury” to having your groceries delivered that deters people in poor neighborhoods from using them, even if the food is better and the overall cost is lower than what’s otherwise available.
Blake, I hope the “food spam” pun was intentional.
“–If the grocery delivery service sends you a sack of moldy oranges, what do you do?
Call and complain and any delivery service that wants to stay in business will issue you a credit for your next order. It’s not rocket science.
If a grocery chain gets hammered by complaints, how do they handle unsatisfied customers?
If they are doing a shitty job, they will go under, like any other business. –”
Ideally, yes. But if you start seeing conglomeration in the industry, with five name-brand stores getting glommed into one super-mega-market enterprise, they’ll send you your moldy oranges and you can sit on a pin because they’re the only game in town.
Of course, if all the local food chains go the same way, you get the same problems. But the difference is that if I don’t like my oranges at HEB, I can drive across the street to grab a sack from Krogers or Randalls or Safeway or whatever. If I get a bad sack of oranges by delivery, I’ve got to cut my registry to Whole Foods or Walmart and I won’t see a good orange for another week.
It’s not catastrophic, but its annoying. And people will continue to hop in their cars and do the driving themselves if they believe its worth the extra $10-$20 in gas they shell out every month.
Now, what they really need to do is have groceries delivered by Zepplin. That idea has some potential.
“f I get a bad sack of oranges by delivery, I’ve got to cut my registry to Whole Foods or Walmart and I won’t see a good orange for another week.”
Okay, seriously, people who are interested in how this is working so far in the real world should look at the FreshDirect website. I don’t know where you’re getting this “registry” and “another week” stuff, but I can place an order for oranges with FreshDirect at any time up until 11:00 PM tonight and they will bring them to my door tomorrow, sometime within a 2-hour timeslot of my choosing. And if I want to use another delivery service the day after (PathMark, or whatever), instead of FreshDirect, there is absolutely nothing stopping me from doing so.
Yeah, there are a lot of things that could go wrong with grocery delivery. There are a lot of ways companies could do it badly. There are legitmate concerns about how the FreshDirect model woud scale to other markets. But these are all, for the moment, purely theoretical concerns. Non-supermarket based, direct-to-consumer grocery servcies are already working extremely well in NYC. It would be insanity to not at least try them in other places, based solely on fears that things that aren’t currently going wrong might one day go wrong.
You lost me in the beginning there, but by god, did you ever get me back.
“– Okay, seriously, people who are interested in how this is working so far in the real world should look at the FreshDirect website. I don’t know where you’re getting this “registry” and “another week” stuff, but I can place an order for oranges with FreshDirect at any time up until 11:00 PM tonight and they will bring them to my door tomorrow, sometime within a 2-hour timeslot of my choosing. –”
Ok, touche. I was going with a model akin to the PeaPod program that my local grocery store put out about five years back. It bombed because the premiums were too high, the delivery times were too long, and the general consensus was that food delivered to your door wasn’t as good as the food you could pick up yourself.
“– Yeah, there are a lot of things that could go wrong with grocery delivery. There are a lot of ways companies could do it badly. There are legitmate concerns about how the FreshDirect model woud scale to other markets. But these are all, for the moment, purely theoretical concerns. –”
Purely theoretical concerns are a rather big deal when you want to raise capital for a business project. And since this is a purely theoretical discussion – unless anyone has a few million in spare cash sitting around to invest – I’m just saying what I’m saying.
A new delivery model of groceries doesn’t just have to work. It has to be so much better than the current system that people will voluntarily give up the weekly commute. That’s the hurdle you have to make it over in order to succeed. So all these problem – theoretical or otherwise – are, in fact, a big deal.
[…] Christopher Bird on Zeppelins as the solution to global warming. […]
It has to be so much better than the current system that people will voluntarily give up the weekly commute. That’s the hurdle you have to make it over in order to succeed.
Yes, but what I am saying is that this hurdle has already been cleared — at least in New York. FreshDirect is extremely popular and successful. All of the local brick-and-mortar grocery stores are scrambling to offer comparable service. So there is an actual working model that you can point to and say, “Okay, here’s what works — let’s do it like this.”
Railroads, transportation conglomerates and governmental bodies all over North America will come to regret the rail lines that have been torn from the ground willy-nilly in favour of more-profitable-in-the-short-term road bound alternatives over the past few decades. This is especially glaringly visible out here in BC.
Finally, no offense, but that Turtle Airship website is a complete piece of crap. They want $3 billion in start-up capital and they can’t afford good HTML? Yeah, I’m just not seeing it.
The concept is intriguing and the theory is inspiring, but the folks launching this thing look like guys operating out of their parents’ basement. When Boeing or Airbus gives this a serious look, we might be in business. For now, I just don’t think you realize the level of technical expertise required to make a real reliable flying machine.
There’s a “restaurant” here in Florida called Dinners2U (www.dinners2U.com) That will let you order a complete cooked meal for two over the phone or ‘net, and bring it to you, at reasonable price.
They seem to be doing ok, as I see deliveries made by their vehicles about as often as I see pizza deliveries (this is a middle class* neighborhood….)
If a prepared foods business can make a go of it, I wonder if a food delivery service would fly**…
Something to invest my future lottery winnings in***.
*real middle class (approx $50K income, not McCain “Middle Class” of $3 milllion)
**Fly by ZEPPELIN!
*** Probably a money loser, like most new businesses, but better than the traditional Florida Lottery winner investment plan of strippers and booze.
@Exar:
It’s not just the human carbon emissions that’s a problem, it’s also the wholesale destruction by humans of one of the earth’s primary carbon-absorbtion systems, namely forests. Those two human activities combine with or greatly exacerbate other factors to grossly upset the natural balance of Earth’s carbon emission-absorbtion cycle (which normally involves a LOT of carbon being constantly emitted and absorbed).
Something just occured to me concerning the delivery-schedule problem for food. Couldn’t part of this be solved just with bigger mailboxes ? If a good proportion of buildings had an easy to use system of big lockers that have something like a oneway door through which you can put a big packet, but only get it out with a key, you could easily order non-perishable food and just pick it up in the evening. Taking that further, you could think about lockers that are refrigerated, and to stop packet spam or vandalism, you could have something like single-use passkey to open them – just give them out when ordering something.
In fact, I’d find this useful even without a food-ordering joint here – whenever I order something, I end up needing to get it from the post office a day later because of course I’m not home when the mailman comes around.
I walked past a little Sobeys on Bloor Street tonight. It’s in a former Blockbuster Video store, so it’s small. They probably still do all the wasteful things like blasting the heating and cooling systems at the same time, but at least it’s not in the middle of a suburban power centre surrounded by acres of parking, you know? People can walk to it.
On the other hand, I just got back from a major conference with municipal politicians from all over Ontario, and I am fairly certain most of them either don’t believe in global climate change or won’t allow themselves to change their behaviour because of it. They are still approving crazy development that makes car-dependency inevitable, even if it hurts them in more direct ways than GCC (like the massive infrastructure maintenance costs they are paying out). A lot of people in the provincial government are just as bad (“a 4-lane divided highway from Ottawa all the way to Kenora, that’s what this province really needs”) and I can’t even start with the feds.
We need to start with basic upgrades to rail service to make it practical for more intercity trips within the continent. We don’t even need real high speed rail; 200 kph with reliable service would start changing things, and that’s doable with existing fixed infrastructure (the next person who says “mag-lev” gets horsewhipped). Air travel on trips of 600 km or less has to end, period.
Another problem with delivery-only is that providers may not be willing to deliver to poorer, more crime-ridden neighborhoods. Personally, I can’t do e-commerce since my credit is bad and I can’t even qualify for a debit card.
So we’re going to replace my trip, from my place to the supermarket and back, with a truck that drives from the supermarket to my place and back. Where’s the fuel savings?
Unless I’m just supposed to schedule my life around the convenience of the food delivery service. “Sorry boss I can’t come in to work today, I have to sit at home because my food is going to be delivered sometime between 8 AM and 8 PM.”
So we’re going to replace my trip, from my place to the supermarket and back, with a truck that drives from the supermarket to my place and back. Where’s the fuel savings?
One car making ten stops on one delivery trip is massively more efficient than ten cars making one stop on one pickup trip, plus under the delivery model there’s no need for a supermarket in the first place – all deliveries can be made directly from the warehouse, rather than using the supermarket as an intermediary point between business and consumer.
Crimson Skies anyone? Personally, I would love for zeppelins to cruise the skies, so I could shoot em’ down in my six-winged, prop-powered, hot rod plane.
/Gonna go play that game now.