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.

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.

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.

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.

Male infant circumcision is a human rights abuse.

Ever since Abraham hallucinated a conversation with The Almighty, young religious types have been forced to undergo unnecessary mutilation to appease a non-existent God and the religious fanaticism of their community. What started as a desperate attempt to suck up to God (Abraham circumcised himself to prove his faith) has turned into one of the most useless, repulsive and illiberal practices the Western world continues to tolerate.

Talking about circumcision is understandably tricky: it remains an “integral” part of Judaism, some Muslim sects, and several smaller cultural communities. For Jews, this procedure is so “important” to their identity that deceased uncircumcised males will occasionally get the snip even though they’ve already passed away. A significant portion of the West (especially in the U.S.) already have had the procedure done, and the personal ramifications of being trimmed are understandably complex. Men don’t want to think of their manhood as damaged, changed, or scarred, and few are cognizant of the ethical challenges that inherently arise when we allow adults to treat their children as mere property.

While parents have a vested interest in raising their children as they see fit, the state bears a responsibility in insuring that a child’s rights and autonomy are protected. Our society has falsely raised ethno-cultural and religious concerns above the rights of the individual child - this is a shame. As a devout atheist and libertarian, the idea of an 8-day old having healthy genital tissue removed so that Odin or Krishna loves them more is laughable… even if the procedure is purely secular/cultural, there is no evidence that the child will wish to remain within the identified group when they have the capacity to make their own decisions - irreversible damage to persons that lack the ability to protect their own rights is a tragedy, no different than sterilizing the disabled for our convenience, or tearing the clit off our sisters and daughters.

On the subject of women, I’ve recently tried to avoid making sweeping statements along gender lines when assigning blame - in this case, I will make an exception. Women deserve a significant amount of the hate when it comes to keeping this ritual around, and they need to start taking a more active role in seeing its inevitable eradication. Ask any woman about their thoughts on female genital mutilation and you will get a very cliched and automatic cry of sympathy - ask them about circumcision and you’ll get blank stares and medical misinformation. While next to nobody knows the intimate details of either procedure, they automatically assume that one is “bad” and the other is “fine” because of the current public awareness against the former. How many of you have actually seen a male circumcision? Do you have any idea how much flesh is removed?

Male sexuality is in a tricky place these days… while we have the social power to express our sexuality and desires publicly, we continue to be looked down upon for it. Sure, we can get away with a fart or pussy joke, but male sexuality is brushed aside as being in some ways immature or simplistic. Women assume guys are just looking for a warm, wet spot for their dangly thing, and that after a few mechanical thrusts we’ll be sexually satisfied - our orgasms are seen as easy to attain, our sexual advances desperate, and our willingness to fuck anything that breathes has provided sitcom fodder for years. While women sympathetically cringe at the idea of a clit being mangled beyond recognition, the condescending snicker they give at the idea of a man being sexually violated, hindered, or scarred in some way is offensive. Despite the best efforts of every frat boy ever born, male sexuality is not binary… believe it or not we actually enjoy the sex itself, not just the plateau. People that are circumcised are physically incapable of having certain sexual acts done to them (good ones, trust me), have reduced sensitivity, and lack a natural lube. Masturbation is also infinitely easier, and even just having the foreskin pulled back by your partner feels freaking sweet. These are not unimportant, no matter what some dumb bitch tries to tell you. Almost every male that has been forced to get their wang chopped due to medical issues says that sex is significantly worse after getting cut. Almost every male that has their foreskin “regrown” (a painful, invasive and tiresome procedure) sees a marked improvement in their sexual satisfaction.

Men must stop letting the condescending and ignorant eye rolls of our female counterparts keep our sons and brothers from experiencing their full sexuality. The Christian church encouraged circumcision in the West for the very reason of limiting our sexual desires, to treat us as consummating inseminaters rather than happy and healthy autonomous adults. Just like illiberal societies cutting away at women’s clits in an effort to control their sexuality, we too continue to hack away at our sons (without anesthetic, usually) in an effort to disassociate pleasure from function. Maybe some of us don’t want to.

As for the supposed benefits of circumcision, they’re almost entirely overblown, and more commonly based in guesswork than science. There is some very recent evidence that attests to the fact that the rate of HIV transmission may be lower for circumcised hetero-relations. Still, most of this seems to be culturally based - a religious practitioner generally has a lower-risk lifestyle than their heathen counterparts… less partners, hard drug use, buttsex, etc. While there may be marginal improvements in the actual empirical data, we’re literally talking about thousandths of percentage points. The odds of a Western heterosexual male catching HIV through vaginal sex is next to nil, and the rate of transmission even with HIV-positive coochies is tiny… getting “cut” may reduce this tiny number an infinitesimal amount, but nowhere to the point where it would require a nearly systemic mutilation of all males. Unfortunately, many women now have the idea that an uncut male is in some way “dirty”.. as if we’re unable to keep those areas clean and that’s why doctors have “decided” to cut those bits away… this is plain ignorance. While some parents may get their kid cut so that “more women will like them”, one has to wonder whether the child would make a similar choice if given the opportunity. Any slut dumb enough to comment unilaterally about the relative ease with which uncircumcised males remain hygienic proves their own ignorance and stupidity, and I wonder whether you’d want someone like that bangin’ your son, anyways. This isn’t the desert.

Considering how easy it is to keep a wang clean, the relative ease of STI testing, and the liberal access to good latex, even high-risk lifestyles can lead responsible and fulfilling sex lives without this paternalistic crap. If you’re going to permanently mutilate your child, admit it is because of your own religious fanaticism or desperation for community acceptance; Don’t pretend you care about your baby’s wellbeing. You don’t.

While I’m on the topic of filtering water, I recently read about the grandiosely named Lifesaver bottle, which is capable of rapidly filtering out even the smallest pathogens in water, producing 6000 L of ultra-pure drinking water over the course of its filter’s usable life. The one problem is, it currently costs £230, or $460.

I wonder if this product could benefit from the mantra “good is good enough.” While it is an impressive tour de force of engineering development, the $460 price tag is staggering, limiting its audience to the wealthy (who could easily afford to treat the disease, anyway, if it came to that). Existing commercial water filter bottles, or inventions such as the LifeStraw, may not completely purify water - but you can buy 150 LifeStraws for the price of 1 Lifesaver. And even the LifeStraw is too expensive for those who truly need it.

As with uber-supercars like the Bugatti Veyron, it’s an object that has lost all relevance in its pursuit of the ultimate.

I may be putting the case too harshly, because as the Inhabitat blogger mentions, that price must be representative of tremendous R&D investment, and genuine progress is impossible without such costs. One can only hope that the technology will filter down to future products at more sane prices.

I was at the U of T Institute for Aerospace Studies today, working with our wind-tunnel model, and in the downtime while epoxy was curing, I managed to catch a lecture that was part of a seminar on aviation and climate change.

The lecture I saw was an overview of the mechanisms behind climate change related to jet emissions, and despite my lack of background in science (these were lectures given largely by engineers to engineers) I found it really fascinating. I had read that jet flight produces an overall climate impact disproportionately greater than its CO2 emissions alone might indicate (potentially double, or even more), but had no idea about the particulars.

The lecturer, an atmospheric scientist (who I suspect had worked with the IPCC, from what I was able to glean) drew a lot of interesting connections, not only in the realm of science, but also between science and policy. In addition to CO2 (which is largely understood), he spoke of jets’ nitrous oxide emissions and their effect on ozone and methane in the stratosphere, of the effects of contrails, of particulate emissions and their impact on cirrus cloud formation, all of which subtly affect the atmosphere.

Rather than being dogmatic, he was very candid about the many uncertainties involved in the modeling of these extremely complicated dynamic systems (though at the same time, was optimistic that they were eminently solvable challenges, given sufficient research). Given that open acknowledgment, it makes me wonder how many climate change skeptics, especially ’scientific conspiracy’ theorists, have actually heard a credible expert speak on the subject.

Beyond just the science involved, however, one of the points that seemed most urgent to him was the importance of open dialogue, not only between scientific experts in various climate metrics, but between scientists and policymakers. Right now there is a disconnect between the analysis of emissions and climate models and what potential impacts those may have in the real world, or that are happening even now. While the IPCC continues to summarize its research for policymakers, the dwindling role of direct scientific advice in government is happening at exactly the wrong time.

It’s crucial for scientists, engineers, and policymakers to come together and present a snapshot of what we would like the atmosphere to look like in the future, and develop cohesive strategies for bringing that to fruition. While damage has already been done, between research, technology, and policy, there’s tremendous opportunity now to mitigate future calamity. A disjointed effort undertaken by any one party is bound to fail, and that is a failure we may not be able to afford.

Continuing growth in the field of eugenics is raising some interesting moral questions pertaining to one’s legal human rights. To illustrate this point, I dug up this ancient news relic from 2002, wherein a deaf lesbian couple effectively chose to have a “deaf baby”. Obviously lacking in some of the necessary plumbing, these women found little help from sperm banks that screen out disabilities from their donor pool. Turning to a friend who had 5 (five!) generations of deaf children due to some genetic anomaly, they magically transformed his manbutter into two (otherwise?) healthy deaf children for themselves.

Many people view this story as a tragedy – in their eyes, parenting is a responsibility that involves making one’s child physically and emotionally prepared for a life of independence. Condemning one’s offspring to a life of hardship (deafness is undeniably, in absolute terms, a more difficult existence than being of hearing) by removing a natural faculty may very well seem unforgivable. This accusation is not necessarily a fair one, as the sperm used in this case would never have made a baby capable of hearing – the mothers didn’t build a broken baby, they just used a different set of blueprints. The couple counters that this makes their child a member of their world, and more personally and emotionally connected to the experiences of its parents. They also said they were part of a generation that viewed deafness not as a disability but as a cultural identity, which honestly sounds more like post-modern university babble than cognizant parenting.

Legally, nothing could or should be done to these women. The law has been used to systemically oppress and control women’s bodies since time immemorial, and their autonomy cannot be paternalistically usurped for the rights of a hypothetical and non-existent child. Advances in medicine may have us one day re-examine when personhood begins, but restricting a woman’s right to do whatever they please with their fetus is a dangerous slippery slope.

More interestingly, this raises the question of what “responsible” fertilization could one day entail. The couple compares their decision to choosing a black or gay child, and the analogy is a reasonable one. Blacks and homosexuals have effectively created different representations of their own cultures (however heterogeneous they may be), and choosing a child that fits these definitions may be desired. Resultant children would reside within a social context that may very well be prejudiced against their minority status – are the parents irresponsible for “choosing” these respective interpersonal conflicts for their offspring? Should they have instead chosen a blond, blue-eyed bambi with sparkling teeth and a perfect complexion? Should they have a choice?

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…