Tag: logistics

  • Introducing Brad Vogel, Erik Andrus Sustainable Logistics Fellow

    You Made It Happen!
    The Center for Post Carbon Logistics Achieves Fundraising Goal

    Meet the Andrus Sustainable Logistics Fellow Apollonia Supercargo Brad Vogel. Brad has been at the forefront of developing an alternate green logistics framework in the NY region since 2019, and we are excited to see him going full time on the sustainable shipping and logistics front.  He will start the fellowship in June of this year.

    The Center for Post Carbon Logistics (C4PCL)  has met its fundraising goal for the Erik Andrus Sustainability Fellowship.  So many of you helped make that happen – and the C4PCL, the Schooner Apollonia, and all the organizations and businesses that will benefit from Brad’s work, could not be more grateful!

    Brad Aboard Apollonia
    The new Fellow will help Apollonia and other sustainable ventures in the Hudson Valley and New York Harbor grow a robust regional green logistics network. Building that network will reduce emissions in communities in the Hudson Valley and New York City.

    Congratulations to Brad – and a special thanks to the many generous donors. We hope everyone will continue to support the C4PCL’s efforts to build green logistics capacity in our region.

     You can can continue to support the new Andrus Fellowship and the mission of the Center for Post Carbon Logistics.  Please consider making a tax-deductible donation here . If you don’t require a receipt you can donate by check here.  

    Some background:

    The Erik Andrus Sustainable Regional Logistics Fellowship is a project of The Center for Post Carbon Logistics. The position is named for Erik Andrus, the rice farmer who created the Vermont Sail Freight vessel Ceres and inspired many regional “make-sustainability-real” efforts. As such the Coordinator will emphasize practical, day-to-day work, but also fundraising and meeting with various governmental and commercial entities, toward these goals but also emphasize sharing of information and building of community to aid in the overall effort.

    Vermont Sail Freight Vessel Ceres

    The Andrus Fellow (coordinator) will initiate, support, and develop a sustainable logistics network that links manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers and consumers, key components of sustainable transport supply chain on the Hudson, the New York State canal system, New York Harbor, and coastal New York. This sustainable logistics network will reduce fossil fuel use and carbon emissions from the transportation of goods and people throughout the region.   

    Schooner Apollonia is America’s only sustainable sail freight vessel, operating on the Hudson River and in New York Harbor.  Over the past three years, Apollonia has shipped over a hundred thousand pounds of goods by wind, reducing regional emissions. Apollonia has made something clear: taking action to build toward a more sustainable post-carbon approach to logistics is possible in our region. Even if the initial steps are small, we need to act.

    Schooner Apollonia


    Inspired by Apollonia’s work, it’s time to take the next step toward greater regional impact – with a full-time fellow dedicated to sustaining and growing tangible, feasible low carbon transport projects.  Your tax-deductible donation to the Center for Post Carbon Logistics will support the hiring of the Andrus Sustainability Fellow to maintain and grow the expanding regional green logistics network that Apollonia has helped pioneer.

    Trade Route

    In the first year, the Fellow will serve the Schooner Apollonia in expanding and strengthening the logistical backbone of its sustainable sail freight network of distribution, storage, transport, and fulfillment services, while also providing support to a select group of regional low/no carbon first and last mile logistics companies, producers, purveyors, wholesalers, retailers, and end users. 

    Specific tasks will include but may not be limited to:

    • Documenting, improving, and expanding Apollonia’s existing trade routes 
    • Providing outreach and interpretation of Apollonia’s mission through virtual, customer venues, and “on dock” events.
    • Coordinating with other decarbonization efforts (both high profile and/or small-scale) across a range of prospective community-centered and commercial ventures
    • Analyzing and greening every logistical input to and output from the Apollonia’s existing trade routes with over 100 shipping partners.
    • Being the point of contact for the 20+ existing docking partners (private, municipal, and non-profit), the hundreds of individual customers, low no carbon first and last mile logistics providers, and thousands of supporters.

    Although initially focused on wind-powered vessels, all practicable methods of eliminating fossil fuel-powered transport will be a priority.  The coordinator will also promote solar vessels, live/electric cargo bicycles and trailers, as well as electric, biofuel and hydrogen powered vehicles, and will participate in the development of a regional network of linked low/no-carbon businesses, organizations, and institutions, and the establishment of resilient regional micro-hubs (ranging from moderate-scale ports and required infrastructure, depots and warehouses, and partnerships with on-call green transport support networks).  

    The long-term aim is to develop a regenerative regional for profit/not for profit hybrid cooperative logistics provider that takes on and continues the work of the fellowship. The goal of both the fellowship and the emergent entity is the same: to create and promote real, practical, resilient change, to build tangibly toward a future of an operational post carbon logistics with end-to-end management of specific services, a vital part of maritime based supply chain management. 

    During the initial year of the fellowship, the coordinator will liaise with the Director of The Center for Post Carbon Logistics and the Captain of Schooner Apollonia on a regular basis. The role, in the first year, reflecting the work required for coordinating, executing, and improving Apollonia’s existing logistics and growing the regional sustainability network.  Thank you for supporting this important position, program, and its outcome. 

    Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.

  • As change comes, how will shipping and logistics adapt?

    Despite its present dominance, our current logistics system engaged in moving people and goods from place to place is fragile. It is reliant upon carbon-based fuels driving internal combustion engines. It is interwoven into long-distance, globalized world trade. It is designed for Just-In-Time delivery. And it depends upon its present ability to avoid paying for negative externalities such as carbon emissions and environmental pollution, and to avoid being governed by meaningful labor, environmental, health, and other laws. The World Economic Forum determined in 2018 that if shipping were a country, it would be the world’s sixth-biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

    There are serious doubts as to the capacity of the current system to adapt to structural changes in the status quo. The political context is changing and, in some regions, unstable. Carbon pricing regimes are likely to arrive in the coming years, which will raise prices for carbon-based fuels and for producing goods.

    Warming is undermining agriculture and fishing in many regions, and other economic sectors may be affected. Climate-triggered conflict is already causing mass migration, which is in turn improving the political fortunes of nativist political groups, which is already straining the current world trade model. These trends and unpredictable new shocks are certain to strain the system in the coming years and decades. As an increasing number of sectors act on the need to reduce carbon emissions and an increasing number of policies and strains make carbon prices higher and more volatile, the question is whether local, national, and global economies are prepared.

    Better than asking whether we will be prepared is knowing that changes both predicted and unpredicted are happening and more are on the way—and then asking how we should prepare. How can a new approach to transportation logistics be developed that is resilient to the climate emergency and the resulting changes in the economic landscape, one that stands some chance of preserving some of our current standard of living for future generations, one that is also equitable, inclusive, and just in delivering the benefits of the new system and whatever version of shipping and trade is to come for future decades and generations?

    To answer these questions, we have created the Center for Post Carbon Logistics (CPCL),  Our approach is to identify new—and old—technologies, skills, economic models, and regulatory and logistics practices that will serve the future.

    Our approach will be both global and local. Globally, CPCL will search for examples of effective techniques, both current and historic, that have moved goods and people from place to place. We will consider examples ranging from Renault and Neoline’s partnership  to build a wind-powered ro-ro vessel and cutting edge solar and wind-assist sailing technologies, to existing and in-development trade routes promoted by the International Windship Association and others, to traditional small-scale sail, low-or zero-carbon shipping like Fair Transport, and first and last-mile logistics that have been used for generations and will once again be viable. Hudson Valley contemporary examples are the sail freight vessel Apollonia, and the Hudson River Maritime Museum’s solar electric Coast Guard inspected passenger vessel Solaris.

    Locally, CPCL will model, implement, and evaluate the development of these global practices. One aspect of this will be to build partnerships with local governments, businesses, economic and community development organizations, and nonprofits to develop new, resilient “working waterfronts” that will facilitate regional waterborne shipping, connecting goods to low-carbon first and last-mile delivery modes and creating economic opportunity and jobs. CPCL’s local pilot projects in the Hudson Valley will bring direct local benefits while providing insights to be disseminated widely for locally-tailored replication elsewhere.

    CPCL will also build a central library and database collecting low- and zero-carbon techniques, skills, and tools for shipbuilding, rigging, ship loading, port operations, warehousing, trading houses, and first and last-mile logistics.

    Rigger

    Researchers will collect these practices. Existing skills and tools that are at risk of being lost will be preserved. To build a community of practice, CPCL will provide training and apprenticeship programs with participating partners, developing the necessary local workforce and catalyzing job creation. CPCL will also disseminate the knowledge that it creates and preserves, exhibit at and host regional, national, and international conferences on post carbon logistics and sail freight. It will partner with Hudson Valley institutions to host exhibits for the public.

    The climate crisis is already here, and even though the exact timing is not yet obvious, it is clear that the contemporary logistics system will have to adapt. In the Hudson Valley, local farmers and food processors, distillers, brewers, and cider makers, are already looking for low carbon ways to move their goods beyond the local market; there are practitioners who are ready and willing to pass on their knowledge; local governments are desperate to find new economic development strategies; and consumers are hungry for lower carbon-footprint goods. These are the challenges and opportunities in which the Center for Post Carbon Logistics will engage.

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