Cutting emissions with rail upgrades, or, stuff white people like

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A lot of the discussion about carbon emissions is pretty one dimensional -- more low carbon energy means less emissions. Efficiency, when it enters the discussion, is often conflated with conservation -- which, at least to Americans, carries connotations of making do, of cutting back, of low-flow toilets, brief lukewarm showers, and long bus rides to work listening to homeless people ranting about the CIA's implants in their teeth. Somehow, this has not caught on.

It is a mistake to confuse conservation and efficiency. Efficiency can be big, bold, and transformative. For example: doubling and electrifying America's railway system.

About 39.5% of US freight is transported by rail. The vast majority of the American rail system is powered by onboard diesel engines. This is an inefficient, wasteful technology with large associated carbon emissions. Electrified rail has been around for decades, and not only allows you to power your train with zero-carbon energy from whatever source, but also decreases the energy requirement as the train doesn't have to haul a diesel engine with it. Power can be recaptured via regenerative braking, just like a hybrid or electric car.

The second major problem with the American rail system is congestion. In many areas, traffic slows to a crawl, averaging 4mph or less. The Chicago area is a particular offender:

A recent trainload of sulfur took some 27 hours to pass through Chicago — an average speed of 1.13 miles per hour, or about a quarter the pace of many electric wheelchairs.

Obviously the comparably slow speed of rail transport, due to congestion, is one of the reasons the rail system, passenger and freight, have continued to lose market share to the roads. The solution is simple: double the tracks. Most railroads in America are single-track, meaning there's no passing lane. Every mechanical problem, every delay ripples back through the rest of the system. With doubled lines everywhere a slowed or stopped train can simply be bypassed.

So what would be the cost of that? Obviously there would have to be a costly study to determine the cost, but as a back-of the envelope calculation, a recent project in Spain doubled and electrified the tracks of an existing railway at a cost of €2.125million/km. Apply that to the US railway system (ignoring the economies of scale inherent in a far larger project, and cost differences due to terrain, etc.) the cost to double and electrify the entire US rail system would be about $500 billion.

That's a steep bill, but infrastructure spending returns a lot of money to the economy with new jobs and business growth. As a comparison, the Fed's Quantitative Easing program, in which the government essentially prints money and gives it to the banks, has printed up $3.8 trillion so far, a total that continues to rise by $85 billion per month. Yes, really.

We need to think bigger. A zero-emissions future is not going to look like today. Our economy needs to be fundamentally restructured, beyond adding bike lanes and wind farms (as good and helpful as those things are.) And in the political sphere, climate hawks have been caricatured as anti-consumer, anti-growth, neo-Puritan hippies (and some are; not that there's anything wrong with that).

The people buying into this messaging and off-put by it are the white, conservative, hierarchist males. And you can resent 'em if you want, but there are a lot of them and they have a lot of power. Maybe nothing will get them on the right side of history, but if anything can, it will have to start with showing them that our dreams for our country are big, bold, and ambitious, and that the world after fossil fuels is one of abundance and hard-driving industry.

Real green jobs: 4 more key projects

 I've written here about why conventional "green jobs" are a problematic concept. When the government tries to cultivate a given industry to create jobs, there are many potential stumbling blocks. The industries may not be labor-intensive. The government may back the wrong industries or the wrong technologies. The parts that are labor intensive may move overseas. They may require extensive training, and when the work is completed, that training may be useless.

Over here, I suggested a few nontraditional paths to green jobs:

1. We could upgrade the nation's rail infrastructure with electrified rail replacing diesel engines and with the addition of double-track lines to minimize traffic congestion that can slow trains to an average of 2mph on some routes.
2. We could weatherize every home in America.
3. We could fully fund fuels management on all federal lands:
4. We could construct a backbone of HVDC lines.
 
These measures address the problems with traditional "green jobs" plans by striving for the following:


1. They focus on national infrastructure, a traditional "public good," rather than seeking to identify and promote particular companies or industries.
2. In themselves (without assuming a cascading effect of private-sector adoption) they significantly mitigate our national contribution to global warming.
3. They involve significant amounts of unskilled or semi-skilled labor (cutting brush, laying rail, weatherizing homes).
4. Much of the work generated necessarily comes from workers in the United States.
5. They are large, nationwide projects (large enough to stimulate employment, large enough to make a real difference to the climate.)

With those principles in mind, here are four other key projects with the potential to create real green jobs:


1. Rapid transit for the hundred largest cities in America. Subways and elevated rails work. Annual ridership of the New York subway is 1.6 billion. Most of the ten largest cities in America have them. Radically expanding electrified mass transit not only gets people out of their cars, it gets people too poor to afford cars mobility to get out to work (or their doctor's appointments, or to care care, or to do their shopping).

2. Paint all roofs white. Part of the problem with traditional approaches to creating "green jobs" is that jobs like working in a solar factory or erecting offshore windmills are highly skilled. Not very many people are qualified to perform them, and those that are are likely already employed. Meanwhile, while every sector of our economy has an unemployment problem, the worst problem is among those with a high school education or less:

So a green jobs plan with teeth should provide jobs to people at the bottom of the educational ladder -- which will also provide a greater dollar-for-dollar stimulus. So how about painting roofs white?

AGWObserver highlighted exciting recent research on "negative radiative forcing":

The radiative forcing benefits of “cool roof” construction in California: quantifying the climate impacts of building albedo modification – VanCuren (2011) “Exploiting surface albedo change has been proposed as a form of geoengineering to reduce the heating effect of anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases (GHGs). Recent modeling experiments have projected significant negative radiative forcing from large-scale implementation of albedo reduction technologies (“cool” roofs and pavements). This paper complements such model studies with measurement-based calculations of the direct radiation balance impacts of replacement of conventional roofing with “cool” roof materials in California. This analysis uses, as a case study, the required changes to commercial buildings embodied in California’s building energy efficiency regulations, representing a total of 4300 ha of roof area distributed over 16 climate zones. The estimated statewide mean radiative forcing per 0.01 increase in albedo (here labeled RF01) is −1.38 W/m². The resulting unit-roof-area mean annual radiative forcing impact of this regulation is −44.2 W/m². This forcing is computed to counteract the positive radiative forcing of ambient atmospheric CO₂ at a rate of about 41 kg for each square meter of roof. Aggregated over the 4300 ha of cool roof estimated built in the first decade after adoption of the State regulation, this is comparable to removing about 1.76 million metric tons (MMT) of CO₂ from the atmosphere. The point radiation data used in this study also provide perspective on the spatial variability of cool roof radiative forcing in California, with individual climate zone effectiveness ranging from −37 to −59 W/m² of roof. These “bottom-up” calculations validate the estimates reported for published “top down” modeling, highlight the large spatial diversity of the effects of albedo change within even a limited geographical area, and offer a potential methodology for regulatory agencies to account for the climate effects of “cool” roofing in addition to its well-known energy efficiency benefits.” Richard VanCuren, Climatic Change, DOI: 10.1007/s10584-011-0250-2.

 If a single square meter of roof counteracts 41kg of CO2, then painting 50 square meters of roof is the equivalent (in warming terms) of removing one ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. Depending on what kind of a carbon price you favor, this could be worth $50-$300. And you don't need a lot of education to slap on white paint.

3. Upgrade interstate highways with an automated highway system. There are roughly 50,000 miles of interstate highway (accounting for a third of all road travel) -- upgrading them would be a massive project that would be undertaken in stages. It would be expensive, but the payoff would be huge (not unlikely building the roads in the first place). Intelligent highways would move people faster, with greater fuel efficiency and fewer accidents.

The systems that have been road-tested (so to speak) rely on sensors planted meter-by-meter in the highway. This would be labor-intensive, but doubly rewarding; trips on intelligent highways would burn far less gas, and would be far less likely to get bogged down in traffic, where 4.8 billion hours a year are wasted. For knowledge workers, self-driving cars would also make driving time more productive -- makeup will be applied more evenly; kids can be yelled at more effectively! -- without the risk that the distractions will lead to lethal accidents.

4. Implement no-till agriculture in American fields. No-till agriculture in appropriate soils and with appropriate crops has been found to sequester carbon, reduce NO2 emissions, reduce soil erosion, and conserve water, all at a reasonable cost. To encourage this, we can provide carbon sequestration credits, free training in no-till methods.

This promotes employment in custom weeding, herbicide application, as well as sequestering carbon. Less fuel is burned when tilling is omitted.

Substituting employment costs (jobs) for diesel fuel costs -- and sequester carbon in the process. Sounds like a green job to me.