Keep on trucking
The ideas for efficiency improvements in trucks described by Phil McKenna are welcome 鈥� if late (15 August, p 34). However, the realities of road haulage were not adequately addressed in the article.
In the UK, hauliers feel compelled to maintain a fleet of the biggest vehicles permitted, in order to be seen as competitive. You might think that every vehicle on the road is carrying a full load, but this is a false assumption.
There is also a huge waste caused by the distribution systems of large organisations such as supermarkets, which rely on a small number of large warehouses. Goods from one area can be transported across the country to be packaged before being freighted back to a supermarket near their origin.
Road haulage companies will probably adopt more efficient vehicles as soon as the technology becomes economic. It seems likely that governments will need to intervene to achieve the best from the transport system, something that they have been unwilling to do so far.
The article on advances in truck design contained some overly broad generalisations of the attempts to improve fuel efficiency in the haulage industry.
While it may be true that the American trucking industry has resisted improvements because of the availability of cheap fuel, it has made its vehicles more aerodynamic, albeit involuntarily, because of the takeover of American truck builders by companies such as Volvo and Scania. In Europe, manufacturers have been producing aerodynamic cabs, fuel-efficient engines and lightweight components for at least 20 years.
Because it is composed of mainly smaller, independent companies, the British haulage industry can be mistrustful of change, and is slow to take up new technology because of justified fears about long-term reliability, but we have been investing in fuel efficiency for decades.
Hauliers have long been fitting spoilers and side panels on trailers, and super single tyres to improve airflow. There have also been major advances in fuel efficiency from improvements to engines, not to mention the gains from speed limiters.
When I started up in haulage in 1977, fuel consumption of between 55 and 70 litres per 100 kilometres (4 to 5 miles per imperial gallon) was expected of a 32-tonne truck. Now it can be as low as 28 litres per 100 kilometres for a 38 to 44-tonne truck.
The haulage company Stan Robinson has been campaigning for 20 years to highlight the fuel-efficiency gains to be had with multiple trailers, but it is seen as political suicide in the UK for a government to relax the legislation on lorry length.
While modern technology can bring further improvements, until it is proven reliable and cost-effective under real haulage conditions, it will not be adopted. Hauliers are well aware of possible economies on their biggest cost and are crying out for ways to cut fuel use that will not affect the reliability of their operations.
The new technologies you illustrate are researchers’ pipe dreams: some may well make the grade given time, others will perish along the way.
Borough Green, Kent, UK
Home grid
Clive Semmens discusses the practicalities of producing electricity in your home (18 July, p 27). These vary from country to country. Here in Jamaica, I quite easily generate some 2 kilowatt-hours per day to supply my house, but I do so via a huge ex-forklift battery that weighs nearly 800 kilograms. The grid is sufficiently unreliable that you would want to have batteries anyway.
As well as the high-tech, lightweight batteries for electric cars reported on by Michael Brooks in the same issue (18 July, p 42), we need low-tech, non-lead “house” batteries that preferably are made from cheap or recycled materials. Weight and size are not important, cost and durability are.
Also, we may have a lot of sun here, but the heat is a problem. I found recently that installing a sprinkler above my solar panels gives me a 30 per cent gain in power on a hot day. Why is it that I can’t find panels with heat sinks, fins or hybrid water heater/photovoltaic arrangements? I presume it is because most solar panels are in the cold north.
I have often felt the same frustration Dave Riddlestone describes in his letter calling for more cost-effective solutions to climate change (15 August, p 22), particularly in respect of solar panels, which seem to me to be the most user-friendly piece of domestic energy-generation kit.
I recently suggested to the government that it tenders to have 1 million homes 鈥� those with the best roof orientation 鈥� fixed up with solar panels, financed, owned and maintained by the energy supply companies. The households simply agree to buy the electricity that they use at average market prices. This could overcome the barrier of the up-front cost for the householder, support a sizeable UK solar panel industry, reduce panel prices, reduce carbon emissions and improve energy security.
I am awaiting a response, ever hopeful.
Harrold, Bedfordshire, UK
To go a little way towards cutting my home’s carbon footprint I had solar water-heater panels fitted to my roof. The result was that my combined electricity and gas bill dropped to 拢67 per month.
When our washing machine broke and had to be replaced, I was horrified to discover that all the machines now on sale have only a cold-water inlet, rather than the old-style double inlet for both hot and cold water. Since this new machine has been installed, my combined power bill has gone up 45 per cent to 拢98 per month.
Besides hurting me in the pocket in more than one way 鈥� joule for joule, electricity is approximately four times as expensive as gas 鈥� this makes a nonsense of my efforts to make my home more climate-friendly. I wonder who is responsible for this change in design, and why.
Caldecote, Cambridgeshire, UK
Climate for caring
In his thought-provoking essay, George Marshall suggests that action on climate change is going to be difficult to achieve until the population has a shared belief (25 July, p 24). But is such a shared belief something we can realistically hope to achieve? Is it a prerequisite to taking action, collectively and individually? In my opinion, such pleas for a shared belief are a siren’s call leading to rocky shores.
What to one person is an effort to forge a shared belief is to another an attempt to impose a world view. Trying to convince people to see a problem in a certain way meets with strong resistance if there is a clear agenda to influence their behaviour, as anthropologists Marco Verweij and Michael Thompson show in the book they edited: Clumsy Solutions For a Complex World. Conversely, efforts can be successful when people are willing to play along for different reasons.
In the case of climate change, some people may want to reduce their carbon footprint out of concern for future generations and biodiversity. Others, because it means to them a healthier way of living today.
Many people would be motivated by the idea that reducing your carbon footprint saves money, although this is sometimes not the case. That’s why we still need collective action to stimulate research and investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency so that their costs come down 鈥� putting coal, oil and gas producers permanently out of business.
With enough effort, there is probably a way to make air travel to Thailand carbon neutral, at least for those people who really want to go. But telling them they can’t fly there because it is wrong is a great way to get them to go jet-skiing or dirt-biking at home instead.
The reality of collective action is that achieving a single common sense of purpose as a prerequisite to change simply doesn’t work. We need a policy discourse that recognises that.
Prawns in pain
In his letter (15 August, p 23), Peter Carr challenges research showing that hermit crabs feel and remember pain (11 July, p 24) on the basis that “internal pain receptors would be pointless” ina crustacean, as the damage has already happened when the shell is penetrated.
Pain is not only a powerful prompt to escape or try to prevent further pain 鈥� although even by this criterion it is not pointless. It also provides the organism with a cue to guard the area that has been damaged, in order to promote effective healing. In many animals it also provides the opportunity to learn a vital lesson about avoidance in the future. On these grounds, internal pain receptors would be useful.
Research by Stuart Barr and others has shown that prawns appear to feel pain in their antennae (). As Carr says, they may not have similar sensory functions beneath their shells, but then we don’t have the same sensitivity to pain in our guts as in our fingertips.
I am not convinced by Carr’s argument that the behaviour of prawns piled in a box out of water can teach us about their evolved pain sensitivity. Pain research in animals looks for characteristic escape, avoidance and protective behaviours that occur in response to damage, make evolutionary sense and are reversed by analgesic substances.
It suits humans too well to deny that other animals really feel pain and to conclude that there is no need to treat them any better than inanimate objects.
Assault on battery
Proponents of the electric car studiously avoid discussing the problem of refuelling (18 July, p 42). If we want electric cars to have anything like the performance and versatility of internal combustion ones, they have to “refuel” reasonably quickly; the idea of exchangeable battery packs is an environmental and practical minefield.
A 60-litre tankful of diesel equates to about 200 kilowatt-hours of electricity, assuming the electrical energy is used three times as efficiently as the heat energy from diesel.
For argument’s sake, let’s say we want to be able to “refuel” in 12 minutes, four times as long as filling a tank with petrol. This would require an energy flow of 1 megawatt. In the UK, for example, you would need to multiply that value by six “pumps” at 10,000 filling stations, drawing 60 gigawatts between them.
Where will you build all the necessary power stations, what will they run on, and where will you hide the transmission cables?
For the record
鈥� It was Miguel Nicolelis’s group at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who implanted electrodes into the brains of macaque monkeys (29 August, p 14). Dietmar Plenz, who we wrongly credited with the technique, analysed the resulting data.