Tag: Solaris

  • How Our Maritime Past Can Serve a Carbon-Constrained Future

    This post originally appeared on the Hudson River Maritime Museum’s Riverwise website on June 25, 2020

    The Hudson, the River that flows both ways has been a transportation corridor for hundreds of years before Europeans first saw it.  The Hudson rises in the mountains at Lake Tear of the Clouds in Essex County, NY and empties into Upper New York Bay.  The Hudson is a drowned river as its bottom is below sea level almost all the way to Albany.  The Hudson is also considered a fjord one of very few in North America.  The River has been a commerce highway for as long as humans have inhabited the North American continent.  Henry Hudson and other early European explorers were convinced that the River was part of the Northwest Passage.  

    Lake Tear of the Clouds, headwaters of the Hudson River, c. 1888. Photograph by Seneca Ray Stoddard. Library of Congress

    The Hudson River once formed a bustling highway linking even the smallest communities to a web of regularly scheduled commercial routes. Schooners, sloops, barges, and steamboats provided a unique way of life for early river town inhabitants. Farmers, merchants, and oystermen relied on this vibrant and diverse fleet of vessels to bring in supplies and deliver their goods to market. This arm-of-the-sea was an integral part of the lives of those who worked New York’s inland waters.

    “The Hudson at Tappan Zee,” Francis Silva, 1876, Brooklyn Museum of Art. This painting is actually not at Tappan Zee, but more likely near the Esopus Meadows and depicts the 1830s Esopus Meadows Lighthouse in the background.

    The Hudson is connected through New York Harbor to the Coast and the rest of the world.  With one of the world’s greatest ice-free harbors on earth, New York City was built on a shipping industry that has over time become a dangerously tenuous lifeline to the outside world for the region. Today the far-flung international trade network that once pumped vibrant economic life into the region threatens to collapse as imported natural resources and the fossil fuels needed to transport them become increasingly scarce and expensive. Higher petroleum costs, and higher wages in countries in which much of our imported goods are made could snap that lifeline. 

    Aerial view illustration of the tip of Manhattan in New York City, featuring Castle Garden in Battery Park and docks on the rivers. Brooklyn Bridge under construction is shown in exaggerated scale, circa 1880. Library of Congress.

    New York State’s working waterfronts have long been a key contributor to the region’s financial well-being and our nation’s economy. But, in a carbon constrained future, how will goods and people be moved from place to place, and what role will the Hudson River play in this vision? 

    ​How should we meet the looming challenges of climate change, rising sea level, aging infrastructure, changes to global shipping patterns, threats to food security, and the risks these changes bring to New York’s Hudson Valley.

    Photo by Joachim Kohler Bremen.

    ​The biggest question of all: How do we address this daunting multitude of challenges and turn them into opportunities for transforming waterfronts and ports to effectively and efficiently serve our regional economy far into the future?

    ​The solution in this time of rapid change may be a return to the “Slow Technology” of our recent past — sail powered freight ships – and to the present, solar powered ferries and barges.  Tomorrow, New York City’s port and the ports of the Hudson Valley will likely continue to be a commercial hubs due to their strategic location, but those harbors will likely resemble their 18th and 19th century selves rather than the ports we know today. 

    Solaris, Apollonia, and Clearwater rafted together at Albany, NY.

    We hope the “RiverWise: North Hudson Voyage” has served to engage the public and commercial interests along the Hudson in how ​these two important examples of 19th and 21st Century technology will create opportunities for communities to re-examine how their waterfronts will be used for recreation, conservation, and commerce.  This voyage of discovery is the first of many with more and more ships joining this flotilla of hope and inspiration.  
    ​The next step will be even more critical, to commit to honestly confronting challenges, while also boldly embracing opportunities and possibilities. We must move forward quickly and vigorously, and we need to do more. We must inspire individuals, communities, local leaders, city and state governments to commit to creating a thriving, post carbon transportation and logistics system. We must also commit to the creation of a network of sustainable blue waterways in a region that advocates for a post carbon transition that people will embrace as a collective adventure, as a common journey, as something positive, and above all, as a future full of Hope. 

    Solaris and Apollonia passing Kingston Point. Photo by Carla Lesh.

  • 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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