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:
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)
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.
At least two companies, Sapphire Energy and OriginOil, are developing ways of producing renewable crude oil through the processing of photosynthetic algae. As oil, this renewable crude is able to take advantage of the massive industrial infrastructure that supports the refinement, distribution, and retail of petroleum, making transitioning a simple matter of sufficient capacity. While there are no figures yet, both energy balance and water usage are supposed to be good. The potential here could be huge.
If renewable oil can be scaled effectively, traditional biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel become largely obsolete, overnight. Ethanol in particular is an inferior fuel to gasoline, both in terms of energy density and distribution logistics (since it is water soluble, it can’t be transported by pipelines), so the prospects for (corn) ethanol start to look pretty ludicrous to anyone but the agricultural lobbies. Biodiesel has potential (largely because it can also be processed from algae), but like ethanol, many existing feedstocks are either derived from food crops, or supplant them in global agriculture, since growing fuel for Americans is more lucrative than food for locals.
Still, while I think (nearly) carbon neutral liquid fuels are a hugely positive development, I have my reservations over widely embracing petroleum alternatives that perpetuate our existing infrastructure. The environmental and social problems associated with our endemic reliance on fossil fuels go beyond just carbon impact and energy independence. While it’s easy to forget given the current emphasis on CO2, carbon is hardly the only pollutant worth controlling - NOx and unburned hydrocarbons play a distinctly more direct role in killing people on an everyday basis, and they can’t simply be engineered away as long as we are using internal combustion engines. Cheap renewable oil also swiftly removes the incentive to rehabilitate dormitory suburbs into thriving local communities in their own right. And even if drivers aren’t commuting for 100 km, cars are still anathema to healthy urban neighbourhoods.
High gas prices (and to a small degree, the environmental impetus of climate change) has driven tremendous innovation in technology and urban planning in recent years, and it would be a shame if the (market) rug was pulled out from under it all. Genuine shifts towards a more sustainable, meaningful future have much more to do with changing the way we perceive our relationship to our environment (and I mean that on a local level, as much as on a macro one) than with simply mitigating the pollution we pump out. Until something forces that mental realignment, the status quo remains broken.
Now I know this site isn’t for peddling music or showing off what I’m into at the moment, but I feel this is a special case. Propagandhi have been a huge influence for me, and I’m pretty sure Andrew as well, since we first heard them sometime early in highschool. They don’t tour often, but when they do they put on one fuck of a show. Plus, this one’s a benefit for the Sea Shepherd Society - a great conservation group in the eyes of a newly graduated marine biologist (despite their “Seal Defense Campaign”, which I can’t fully support). I have my ticket, you should get yours too… (playing at the Phoenix in Toronto on July 27th)
While the dollar figures the funding represents (a few million, annually) are utterly trivial to Exxon, it may be emblematic of something more significant that they are reducing (rather than intensifying) their smear campaigns, given the current political climate. The big cogs are beginning to turn, however grudgingly. I’m still not expecting any positive actions to come from the oil barons of the world, but less negativity is something, anyway.
With assistance from the Ontario government, Wal-Mart and Menova Energy have signed a $5.9 million deal to install modified solar panels on the roof of one store to provide electricity, solar water heating, and light (through fibre optic cables). Better yet, Menova has partnered with Woodbine Tool & Die to manufacture these solar panels. I say better yet because Woodbine historically has produced automotive parts, and has been crippled lately as the auto industry has fallen into the shitter. As president Tibor says,
“To support that level of demand [hypothetically outfitting 25% of Wal-Mart stores over 4 years, pending the results of this test installation] Woodbine Tool & Die’s operations in Ontario would grow by 85 employees and spin off another 240 indirect support jobs in primary metals and installations.”
Take that, all you pessimistic ‘tards who say going green harms the economy somehow. As the decline of North American manufacturing shows (to me anyway), business as usual is what doesn’t work. And if we don’t get on creating “green” jobs, those damn socialist Scandinavians will steal all the potential. I just think it’s funny that big bad Wal-Mart is involved with this… just goes to show that the crossover point of economic viability has already been reached in some areas…
