The Newtown Pentacle

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– photo by Mitch Waxman

Extortion monies to WordPress have been paid out, and ostensibly, you should be enjoying an “advertising banner ad insertion free” experience here at Newtown Pentacle. If you see ads inserted into the flow of the post, in between paragraphs or drop down ads, please let me know. This cost me a few bucks to do, so if you want to help out with the cost, buy one of my books (link at bottom of post). I apologize for the annoyance over the last couple of months, and as mentioned, I was neither responsible for the ads nor profited off of them. So, there you are.

Also, man oh man, just check out the exhaust coming off of the NYC Ferry boat in the shot above. Why the design spec for these vessels didn’t include using LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) as a fuel source, I’ll never be able to guess. Well… that’s disingenuous, I actually know exactly why they used #2 fuel oil, but it still boggles that they didn’t adopt a fuel source that pumps out fewer airborne particulates for the ferry service.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

There’s so many point sources for airborne pollution in NYC, they’re virtually uncountable. When I was a kid, it was still common practice for large apartment houses to operate trash incinerators. You’d routinely see black palls of smoke rising into the sky. There were also municipal incinerators at work, including the notable one in Greenpoint along my beloved Newtown Creek. Schools, City buildings, and a lot of private residences still used coal to power furnaces and boilers. At P.S. 208 on Avenue D in Brooklyn, we’d often grab bits of coal that spilt out of the coal shoot during the delivery process and sprawl obscene messaging on the sidewalks with it. Well… if “up your nose with a rubber hose” is considered obscene. It was then. This was the late 1970’s and 80’s, btw, not some distant depression era dystopia.

There was a big effort in New York State early in the first Pataki administration to replace this coal powered world with an oil based one. The next step is going to involve replacing the oil burners with gas powered ones. There’s a fractional difference in the amount of CO2 which burning these different fossil fuels puts into the atmosphere, but there’s a difference (which is measured in tonnages) in terms of how much black particulate ash and dust enters the air and then precipitates down onto the ground and into the water. Coal particulates, in particular, are pretty high in antibiotic metals, notably arsenic and lead.

With LNG, you’ve got all the manufactured gas problems, of course. One of the best bits of branding in the corporate and political arena – ever – is usage of the term “natural gas.” The current Presidential administration has recently coined the term “Freedom Gas” for manufactured gas, as a note.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Saying all that, the best near term strategy for not choking to death on our success as a culture seems to be either figuring out how to beat the laws of physics as far as new electrical battery technologies go, or the adoption of LNG fuel cells for powering our various heavy vehicles. I have a friend who’s working on a pilot project at the Port, testing out the deployment of LNG powered semi trucks. Right now, as you’re reading this, there’s hundreds and hundreds of trucks idling at the Port waiting for the cargo cranes to unload one of many cargo ships. The shipping containers will be loaded onto the trucks, at which point they will be on their merry way, but until they’re loaded up, the trucks are sitting there idling – sometimes for 8-12 hours at a pop. This goes on 24/7 and 365 days a year.

LNG is a commonly used fuel source for ferries and other heavy vehicles, – right now- and particularly so in East and South East Asia. For some reason, it’s considered “novel” and dangerous in North America as we consider “gas” in our cars as being safer than “gas.” LNG is still a hydrocarbon based fuel, of course, but compared to burning oil or coal…

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Buy a book!

“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.