So I’m in Boston right now , and yesterday evening I walked past an Abercrombie store. Wouldn’t you know it - they have topless male models all around the place. Now I don’t frequent these stores, so I can’t say for sure that these models don’t exist in Toronto, but I can hardly believe they do. As I’ve thought about this, I’ve been unable to attach any positive/negative value judgement - I’ll leave that up to you guys. Right now, I’m just showing off what I believe to be a crazy phenomenon.
So long Jeb Bush, and good riddance. New(ish) Florida governor Charlie Crist, another, better republican, has justinvested a very un-republican amount of money into the Everglades. No, we’re not talking the usual $100,000 or $1 million that public parks usually beg for. This is an investment worth $1.7 billion that will purchase over 750 square kilometers of land to add to the park. The best part? This land is being acquired from a sugar producer (this is an industry notoriously damaging to environments everywhere), U.S. Sugar, and will result in this company going out of business within 6 years. There is no government forcing out business here, no draconian intervention, just good old capitalism doing what it does best - tempting a business into its own death with shitloads of money.
What this money, and new land, will allow is the connection of Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades, reestablishing the historical hydrological system. This will provide a more reliable water source for the “River of Grass”, hopefully stopping the slow degradation that has plagued the Everglades for the last few decades, and protecting habitat for everything from Florida panthers to snail kites. And if you’re a bigtime anthropocentric asshole, this new water flow should really help maintain the region’s groundwater supplies - possibly a big deal if the West decides they’d rather import water than give up trying to grow grass in the desert.
I love being able to write something positive for a change.
Alternative energy is booming. The solar industry in the US grew nearly 100% in 2007 (!), and the industry is expected to see a worldwide compounded growth of 40-50% for the next three years. No longer just the idle dream of environmentalists, solar power has become an immensely lucrative investment opportunity, and is spurring the growth of tens of thousands of new domestic manufacturing jobs in North America. In the US, where energy from oil and coal remains dirt cheap, much of this growth has been borne on the wings of federal investment tax credits.
These credits, which currently pay for 30% of the cost of solar installations, were due to be renewed in 2008 - but congress seems content to let them expire. The estimated cost of renewing the tax credit for 10 years is $1.7B - not an insignificant sum, but paltry in comparison to its benefits. The credits have spurred billions of dollars in investment into local industry, jobs, and high technology research. Energy will always be a growth industry, and low-cost alternative power has the potential to become a truly massive export for the US if American businesses can establish early dominance through their famed ability to innovate and commercialize.
While letting the investment tax credit expire represents political and economic myopia, recent news from the Bureau of Land Management comes across as nothing more than utter, blinding stupidity. The agency has proposed a 2-year moratorium on the installation of all new solar plants on public land, citing the need for environmental impact assessments. Clearly, industry of any kind can have a disruptive impact on wildlife, but there is a perverse fucking irony in shutting down growth in arguably the most promising sustainable industry in the world because of fear that solar plants might affect desert habitats.
Ignoring the fact that the solar industry already funds many environmental impact studies on new plants, enacting legislation requiring developers to conduct concurrent assessments on any new plant without completely freezing installations would be trivially easy.
If there is a more perfect example of missing the forest for the trees, I can’t imagine it.
Yeah the old bastard is dead. As you may have heard, George Carlin recently “passed away” effectively stripping me of one of my three living idols. It’s hard explaining the significance of a man like Carlin in a culture so saturated with the fruits of his labours that it becomes difficult to imagine what came before. It scares me that there may very well be a generation that doesn’t know who this man was, nor understand the relevance of his work. Not all of his jokes work any more - his social examinations were relevant and pervasive, and he was able to critique our world in a way that was funny but thought-provoking.
For me personally, George Carlin helped shape the way I view free speech, religion and reason. He refused to allow anyone to limit what he could say or think, and challenged us to fight for our own freedoms alongside. He tore apart the coddled and pretentious douchebags in our society, who hide behind soft language and censorship to remind the “economically disadvantaged” [SIC] and “differently abled” [SIC] how they should think.
“Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins, it’s as simple as that.”
“We don’t have any cripples in this country any more… these poor people have been bullshitted by the system in to thinking that if you change the name of the condition you’re going to change the condition. It doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen…. It’s getting so bad now that any day now I’m waiting for someone to refer to a rape victim as an unwilling sperm recipient”.
Penn Gillette shared a story about how the late, great, comedian Lenny Bruce was the last man to be arrested for publicly using “obscene language” in America. During his stage act, Lenny attacked a system that had effectively abandoned its own lower classes, and he presented his material in a language that was discernible for his audience. He didn’t condescend to his fans, resulting in jokes rife with the same bad language they used in their daily lives, leading to his eventual incarceration. As Bruce was getting thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, the cops were harassing the audience members, which happened to include a dirty-haired hippie that refused to present any identification. Claiming he didn’t believe in official I.D., this teenager got arrested and thrown into the back of the same wagon that Bruce was in, leaving the two together for a number of hours. That teenager was George Carlin.
Over the next few decades, George Carlin fought against the illiberal and unjust regulations of a government that tried to control how its people could express themselves. The FCC is a regulatory commission that controls American broadcasting networks (basic television, the radio) that can effectively censor what gets on the air - there’s a reason you’re not allowed to hear swearing before a certain time on FOX, etc. This bureaucratic branch of government is getting federal sponsorship - tax dollars from supposedly free individuals - to tell the general public what words we are mature enough to hear. Premium cable and the internet are free of their restrictions, which is why pervasive media like the Sopranos, Q.A.F, and streaming video can actually represent uncut realities. George Carlin went before the supreme court, albeit unsuccessfully, to protect the integrity of artistic expression and honest and rational discussion. There is no such thing as bad words, only bad people, and Carlin fought against those that try to distract us from the real evils of the world with cozy language or by shaming us in to political correctness. Our world is a worse place without this man in it.
The following two videos are your homework, hopefully the internet survives long enough for you to see ‘em:
It has become a bit of a cliché among our posts to point out the pervasive unsustainability of our society. Occasionally there are laudable developments worth mentioning, but even when we write about these, the discourse is too often tinged with cynicism. We know what’s wrong now, and what can be done, but progress is slow, and maintaining enthusiasm in the face of perpetual disappointment can be difficult. It becomes important to occasionally detach yourself from the minutiae of the everyday, and take the long view.
The question becomes, then, what should the future look like? What is required to craft a world without harmful emissions, without waste? A world where our energy, our buildings, our products, move in closed loops?
Visionary projects such as Masdar City in Abu Dhabi offer us tempting glimpses as to what one such future might look like. While it is a cost-no-object halo project for the UAE (who are wisely investing their present oil wealth into a future that is independent of it), it serves as a beacon, achieving a carbon neutral society using technology that exists commercially today. Yet the same technical feasibility that makes Masdar so edifying in shaping policy today renders it inadequate as a model for the future, given the awesome pace of technological development.
Masdar is today’s vision of a sustainable utopia, but what does 2020’s Masdar look like? Or 2050’s?
One should be able to look towards science fiction as a source of inspiration, but even here, the drama of suffering leads to endemic negavity, promoting a ubiquity of dystopian visions. Clearly, it’s harder to make incisive social commentary by portraying a happy future than a tragic one.
The call to arms for a sustainable future is being ushered in with the stick; but maybe that’s only because no one is growing carrots. I think we need both.
I’m planning to use this mandate as an opportunity to do a number of small design projects, giving a snapshot of my views for a sustainable future, from transportation, to infrastructure, to architecture, to anything else I happen to think of (and I’m open to suggestions). The idea isn’t to create a polished vision, but to develop a jumping-off point for discussion; the Internet is full of people who know a lot more than I do. Besides, my sketching skills are getting rusty, and I need an excuse and some motivation. It should be fun.
An astounding amount of astronomy is dependent on technological advancement, so it’s pretty neat when enough of the little things come together to allow for big breakthroughs. A group of researchers at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland have recently used an intense Chilean telescope to survey the velocities of 150 stars, looking for perturbations of less than ONE METRE PER SECOND!!! (The average speed of stars in the universe is upwards of 32,000 metres per second). The fact this can be done at all just blows my mind, though the researchers claim that with continuing calibration this sensitivity can be increased further (accurate to less than 10cm per second). Anyway, the big finding: it seems that around 30% of stars (of those surveyed anyway) are orbited by planets roughly the same size of earth. This is a much, MUCH, higher proportion than was formerly commonly accepted, and lends evidence to the “crowded universe” theory - the idea that there are a lot of planets out there. I can only hope this means that the odds of finding life out there have increased substantially as well.
If you have access, read the Nature article. (I think it’s available free for the next few days)
For people that enjoy the subtle quirks of the Interweb or society at large, take a peek over at Google Trends. It would take an aneurysm these days to be unaware of this superpowered search engine that has effectively eliminated the need for public libraries, like, ever. What’s lesser known is that the site happily publishes the statistics (”trends”) that arise in searches, sorted by year and countries. Curious which country searches for pictures of dead babies? How about the most popular month for people to be googling “suicide”? What wins, good or evil?
For the truly adventurous, consider fabricating elaborate back-stories to explain random, hilarious patterns that you may find. I, for one, wonder why anal fisting became all the rage in the Czech Republic as of exactly January 2006.
Geoengineering is the intentional analogue of anthropogenic climate change - global scale modification of our natural environment intended to improve its habitability. In the wake of growing awareness surrounding climate change, geoengineering has emerged as a highly controversial field with vocal advocates and detractors alike. While some see a macro-scale scientific solution as the silver bullet that will save us from ourselves, the sheer scale of the topic and the host of staggeringly complex uncertainties surrounding any geoengineering scheme provide unprecedented opportunity for dangerous unintended circumstances.
I recently watched a BBC documentary called “Five Ways to Save the World.” It details five massive geoengineering schemes, ranging from a gigantic sixteen-trillion-piece space mirror, to forests of artificial chemical “trees” designed to sequester CO2. While the scientists in this documentary largely posit their plans as last-ditch efforts to avoid unmitigated climatic catastrophe, the technological proposals have given the political right another way to embrace pseudo-science in order to prop up the status quo. Lifestyle changes, compromise, conservation, and limiting growth are apparently too dramatic - instead, we should launch a perpetuity of rockets into the atmosphere, seeding it with millions of tonnes of sulphate aerosols to increase its albedo and reflect more sunlight. Sure, it might turn the sky green, swiss-cheese the ozone layer, and acidify all rain, but this way, we could still eat hamburgers all the time! Now why the fuck didn’t I think of that?
Given that we may have already overshot critical climate change thresholds, I think it’s dangerous to dismiss any potential solution out of hand. However, what disturbed me most about the documentary wasn’t even the nature of the proposals, but the sentiment voiced by several of the scientists that, “we should be starting now.” I have no qualms over modestly scaled research projects, but I fear that when any such scheme is initiated at a global scale, the unknown factors stand to overwhelm even the most sophisticated models we can develop today. Given our abysmal track record when we’ve tried to ‘fix’ nature, it’s a risk we can ill afford to take.
Buying locally grown foods is environmentally responsible and a good “green” choice, yeah? Not always. A little while ago some researchers from New Zealand decided to look at “food miles” in a more inclusive way - by factoring in the externalities required to produce food in various locations. What did they find?
“…they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.” (NYTimes)
Some scientists at the University of California are also looking at the truth behind local foods, and have actually found that in the vast majority of cases (dense urban communities being the exception) buying from a farmers market uses more gas and releases more fossil fuels than buying standard grocery store food. How so? It seems that the average farmers market is quite a bit further from most peoples’ homes than a grocery store, and people love to drive to get their food (it IS heavy). The extra time spent driving to a market really adds up apparently, and can negate any benefit from the locally grown food, which explains the exception of true urbanity. Secondly, grocery stores may be more efficient than farmers markets because of what I’m going to call the “carpooling principle”. Food shipped to grocery stores gets tightly packed into big trucks, and the average amount of gas used to transport any one item is relatively small. Compare this with a farmer’s market, where every producer drives their pickup truck in from the countryside.
I’ve gotten a lot of shit from “environmentalists” for raising this as a concern, so I just want to reiterate how much I hate dogma. These “environmentalists” have bought completely into the idea that locally grown foods are the be all and end all, and won’t tolerate any questioning of this “pure logic”. Shouldn’t these people be concerned with what is truly best for the world, not what’s chic or “alternative”? Conventional wisdom is often wrong - that’s why science is so important. Now I’m not saying that I hate farmer’s markets, because I love them, or that the status quo of importing foods from California is acceptable. I feel like a broken record, but again, it is the fundamentals that need to be changed, not the products we buy.
