Interesting links and notes on updates to my main website.



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assigning blame for BP oil gusher

“I’d like to join in on the blame game that has come to define our national approach to the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s fault. It’s not the government’s fault. It’s my fault. I’m the one to blame and I’m sorry. It’s my fault because I haven’t digested the world’s in-your-face hints that maybe I ought to think about the future and change the unsustainable way I live my life. If the geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts of the 1990s didn’t do it; if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t do it; if the current economic crisis didn’t do it; perhaps this oil spill will be the catalyst for me, as a citizen, to wean myself off of my petroleum-based lifestyle. ‘Citizen’ is the key word. It’s what we do as individuals that count. For those on the left, government regulation will not solve this problem. Government’s role should be to create an environment of opportunity that taps into the innovation and entrepreneurialism that define us as Americans. For those on the right, if you want less government and taxes, then decide what you’ll give up and what you’ll contribute. Here’s the bottom line: If we want to end our oil addiction, we, as citizens, need to pony up: bike to work, plant a garden, do something. So again, the oil spill is my fault. I’m sorry. I haven’t done my part. Now I have to convince my wife to give up her S.U.V. Mark Mykleby.”

New York Times - This Time Is Different - June 11, 2010

Makes a good companion to my previous post what can I do? (about BP oil gusher)

Labels: doom, oil

posted by Richard at 18:37 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

why Canada doesn't matter

World CO2 emissions in 2007 (from energy), megatonnes = 29914
USA = 6006
China = 6283
Canada = 590

Canada is in the noise level.
Do we suck per-capita? Oh my yes.
Do we have enough people that that makes any difference? Not really.

(India, in case you're wondering, is an order of magnitude "better" per capita, but has so many people its emissions are still 1400 megatonnes.)

The US and China are so big in this (to a large extent because of coal), that even the top 5 tells the tale of how this is basically a bilateral problem.

1 China = 6283
2 USA = 6006
3 Russia = 1672
4 India = 1400
5 Japan = 1262

(Canada is 7th, in case you're wondering.)

Note that I am not saying we shouldn't consume less and live in harmony with nature. I'm just saying even if all of Canada went pre-industrial, the US and China alone can take us over the climate tipping point.

When I tried to make this point to Tim Flannery at Writers Fest, he said something to the effect of we all have to pull together and do our part and such. Which probably makes for good politics, but it doesn't seem to reflect the fact that even if the entire world outside the top two emitters gets together and holds hands, our climate fate will still be set by US and Chinese decisions on energy policy.

Labels: climate change, doom

posted by Richard at 11:11 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

everything you need to know about capitalism

It's hard to have a conversation about forestry practices in the redwoods without hearing the name of Charles Hurwitz, CEO of Houston-based Maxxam, Inc. In 1985 Hurwitz orchestrated the hostile takeover—underwritten by junk bonds provided by the financier Michael Milken—of Pacific Lumber, which had been run conservatively by the Murphy family since 1905. By leaving some of their old growth standing, the Murphys, men who learned the lumber business from the chain saw up, had planned to sustain their timber harvest and jobs well into the 21st century. "When the Murphys owned PL, they cared for their employees," Hall says.

With Pacific Lumber, Hurwitz inherited roughly 70 percent of the remaining old redwoods in private hands. In his first meeting with the employees, the dark-suited businessman told them—in a now famous quote—that he believed in the golden rule: "He who has the gold, rules." Hurwitz then proceeded to break up the company and sell its assets. He sold Pacific Lumber's office building in downtown San Francisco and a profitable welding division, and he cashed out the workers' pension fund, replacing it with an annuity from a poorly rated insurance carrier.

Most important for the redwoods, Hurwitz adopted a business model of clear-cutting, doubling—and some years even tripling—the annual amount of timber harvested from the company's holdings, which eventually reached 210,000 acres.

National Geographic - Redwoods: The Super Trees - October 2009
(quote from page 6 of the online article)

Labels: doom

posted by Richard at 09:39 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

your choice of unappealing futures

Cheney (my guess, anyway) - world descends into chaos as resources become increasingly limited in a 9 billion person world. US preserves its capitalist fantasy by projecting power and incredible violence abroad, total surveillance and control at home. the triumph of authoritarian capitalism

Kunstler - everyone lives in a boring gossipy American small town (I don't know why he didn't just say "let's all become Amish!")

Kaczynski (as I understand it) - let's all become Amish!

Friedman - technology solves all problems, green utopia of "sustainable capitalism" (an oxymoron if there ever was one). intelligent grids! self-driving cars! blah blah blah It would be like living in the Star Trek: Next Generation - bland people pushing buttons and having meetings.

Gernsback - (with credit to The Gernsback Continuum) - we all live in orderly domed cities with cars going in tubes between shining towers - of course this requires a totally conformist, authoritarian society in order to keep the towers shining and the tubes unclogged

That's just great. I don't want to live in any of those futures. They're either boring, or terrifying, or a bit of both.

The sad part is Cheney's vision may actually be the most probable one.
It's basically predicated on the majority of Americans being unwilling to change their lifestyles in any major way. That's probably a pretty reasonable assumption.
Of course, Cheney certainly helped his vision along by working obsessively towards it for the last 8 years, but even if we'd had some shiny Green Gore 8, I'm not convinced it would have made a huge difference.

As for Friedman, for god's sake man, have you learned nothing from the last 50 years of covers of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science? There are no flying cars and vacations to the moon. THAT FUTURE ISN'T COMING. Technology didn't change people. Making your book a plea "Dear America, I want my shiny bullet trains and modern airports, please please please" isn't going to turn America or Americans into Europe or Japanese. Not only is the future unevenly distributed, America doesn't believe in that future any more. Writing your wishes in a book (Hot, Flat and Crowded) and labelling it non-fiction doesn't make it so.

Labels: doom, rant

posted by Richard at 10:05 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

a billion here, a billion there...

The future, in advance, for your convenience:

government in the US and Canada will begin shoveling out billions in "infrastructure" money

In the US, they will articulate an overarching theme of a green economy, and as Obama is an urban politician, with an urban voter base, some of this money will actually make it to transit and new electrical grid and such. With the urgency to shovel it out however, tons of it will go to roads with dubious justifications and other such junk.

In Canada they will just shove money at existing constituencies (industrial mining, industrial forestry, whatever other 19th century industries shout the loudest). Token amounts will go to city transit so that the Cons can pretend they also like cities even though their actual constituency is suburb-rural.

Meanwhile, wise columnists will call for reasoned investment, almost none of which will happen. Today's second case-in-point...

One good idea is to avoid stimulus projects that generate ongoing public liabilities. Take roads. Construction companies everywhere are lobbying hard for road-building. They argue that the ribbons of new asphalt will generate instant employment, make a region and its industries more competitive and put smiles on drivers' faces. They're right, to a degree. But a road is a public cost; maintaining one consumes tax revenue forever. Roads also have a nasty habit of attracting traffic, not curing it. Cars and trucks generate carbon dioxide.

If the same money were given, say, to help the rail industry upgrade and extend tracks and buy new locomotives, you would get a whole other picture.

Stimulus will serve the loudest, not the smartest - Eric Reguly - Globe and Mail - December 22, 2008

The Globe, in a follow-on to its call for trains, now calls for transit.

In addition to their obvious environmental benefits, capital investments in excellent public transit can pay off over astonishingly long periods. One need only look to cities such as London, where the Underground tube system is approaching its 140th anniversary, or to New York's subway, which is more than a century old. These and other networks have produced economic benefits that vastly exceed their cost.

From paper to transit - Editorial - Globe and Mail - December 22, 2008

Man do we urbanites love things that run on rails.
Man do we have no chance of getting more than a token investment in what we want.

It would be a golden opportunity for the City of Ottawa to get some money for its light-rail program, if the planning for that program wasn't such an endless disaster that even provincial and federal governments who usually love to hand out cash can't bring themselves to put any money into it.

First of all, we will never have European cities.
And we will never have the North American equivalent, New York.

We could have our own urban models but it will take 50 years of concerted efforts to rebuild and reinvent Canadian cities in a more citizen-friendly and less car-friendly manner. If you take a stroll through downtown Ottawa, you are apt to discover that other than old trolley areas (like the Glebe) and the small bright spot of the market, what you basically have is islands of buildings surrounded by highways, in the centre of the city. No store-window displays. No sidewalk cafes. Nada.

It will take decades to undo that, and I don't see the political or the citizen will to make it happen. Instead, we will continue to (re)build the infrastructure and the industries of the second half of the 20th century, possibly some of the worst buildings, most desolate and soul-less urban environments, and most planet-destroying corporate behemoths ever known. Success!

Labels: 2nd Great Depression, Canada, doom, finance, urban planning

posted by Richard at 14:41 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

Conservatives crave deficit

If there's one thing modern "conservatives" like, it's running a deficit.
It's like they're compelled to seek one.
Don't believe me?

Ottawa shuns 'misguided' bids to balance federal budget

Oh for f-cks sake, just raise the GST back and get back the $10 billion you threw away.

Remember when the GST was 2 percentage points higher and ... yeah, the country was fine and no one even noticed the GST anymore.

Stupid ideological blinders.

RAISE TAXES TO PREVENT DEFICIT

MATCH REVENUE TO EXPENDITURES

How is that not conservative?

Dear Conservatives: You suck.

Labels: doom, finance

posted by Richard at 10:39 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

worst. (market.) week. ever.

The Dow had its worst week ever in terms of points as well as percent drops, losing 1874 points or down 18.15%.

Dow Worst Week Ever:
-The second biggest weekly percentage drop was the week ending July 21, 1933 when the Dow closed down -15.55% for the week

Quick Market Stats: Week Ending 10/10

Labels: 2nd Great Depression, doom, finance

posted by Richard at 22:40 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

Atrios explains the financial crisis

What's going on here has led to liquidity problems, but not simply because people are a bit nervous. There are liquidity issues because the money is ALL GONE NOW.

Crisis - Atrios

Labels: 2nd Great Depression, doom, finance

posted by Richard at 07:06 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

all you need to know about the bailout disaster

The world's biggest and most dynamic economy has been erected on a mountain of debt from the national government on down to the millions of ordinary families with hefty mortgages and wallets full of maxed-out plastic. America bought its vaunted standard of living on credit, and trading partners around the world profited wildly from its free-spending culture. Now the bill is coming due.

It's going to get worse - Macleans - October 1, 2008

What happens when you use derivatives to invent 100x as much money as actually exists, and then "the bill comes due"?

As far as I can tell: KABOOM.

Labels: doom, finance

posted by Richard at 15:54 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

a good year for a 500 year event

I've said it before: if you start having 100-year storms and 500-year floods EVERY YEAR, that shows there is a major problem. Calling it Global Warming was a serious science communications failure. "Global Weather Chaos" or "Global Climate Disruption" would have been better terminology. "Perpetual Extreme Weather" is probably what we're stuck with in our lifetimes.

The deluge is being called a 500-year flood in Cedar Rapids and other parts of Iowa

Washington Post - Iowa Flooding - June 13, 2008

Here's what it looks like to NASA

Labels: climate change, doom

posted by Richard at 07:57 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

San Diego memories

In 2001 I went to San Diego and I was like, "ooh, this is nice".
So in 2003 I went and invited my parents along. This was not so good, as, to quote myself

I'm in San Diego.

To which I would like to add:
San Diego is in the middle of a huge firestorm.
Holy Sh-t.

Manifesto Multilinko (me) - Sunday, October 26, 2003

I really wasn't able to convey to people back home the extent to which San Diego was burning. I finally found a set of satellite image maps to show them. Even then I still don't think they quite grasped it.

But fortunately America learned that lesson, and San Diego never burned again.
Oh wait, four years later... 'Mass migration' as state burns

SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) -- More than a half million people had been ordered from San Diego County homes Tuesday as wildfires rage from the Mexican border to north of Los Angeles.

CNN - October 23, 2007

If you want to get my full experience, I have just retro-tagged my old postings, so you can click the "san diego" label below or follow this san diego label link. They're in chronological order from most recent to earliest - if you want to read in order scroll to the bottom of the page and read up (I don't know how to make them appear in any other order.)

Labels: doom, fire, san diego

posted by Richard at 19:51 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

are burning

Forecast is +27° for Monday.

That's Monday, October 8th, 2007, Thanksgiving.

Holy global climate heat doom.

Labels: climate change, doom, ottawa

posted by Richard at 07:20 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

climate doom

Normally I would be posting stories of climate change, but there are literally so many of them that I can't keep up.

Anyway, here's a phrase you should get used to hearing every year from now on:

"It's the (hottest|coldest|wettest|driest) year on record for location X"

Labels: doom

posted by Richard at 09:05 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

a bit drier than you like

Drought, a fixture in much of the West for nearly a decade, now covers more than one-third of the continental USA. And it's spreading.

As summer starts, half the nation is either abnormally dry or in outright drought from prolonged lack of rain that could lead to water shortages, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly index of conditions. Welcome rainfall last weekend from Tropical Storm Barry brought short-term relief to parts of the fire-scorched Southeast. But up to 50 inches of rain is needed to end the drought there, and this is the driest spring in the Southeast since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

USA Today - A drought for the ages - June 8, 2007

If only the scientists had warned of Global Drying.
Useless damn scientists, never giving the world any advice.

Labels: doom

posted by Richard at 15:37 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

the weather in the end times

Russia hot, Europe cold: doom abounds.

MOSCOW, May 29 (Prime-Tass) -- A heat wave has hit Russia in recent days, with the temperature breaking records.

Monday was the hottest day in May in Moscow since records began to be kept 120 years ago, with the temperature hitting 32.2 degrees Celsius, the Moscow Meteorological Bureau reported.

The hot weather caused fires at 14 electric power substations in Moscow.

PRIME-TASS - Heat wave hits Russia, with temperatures breaking records

In Spitzing in Germany, locals have been forced to wrap up after ten centimetres of snow brought out the snowploughs for the first time this year.

Daily Mail - If you thought our weekend was bad look at the weather across the water... - May 29, 2007

Heavy storms, landslides, flash floods and lightning have left at least 23 people dead across Europe.

RTE News - Adverse European weather leaves 23 dead - May 28, 2007

Labels: doom

posted by Richard at 12:30 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

the stupidity of fishing subsidies

To find out, Mr. Sumaila spent a decade building up two huge databases, using hordes of research assistants travelling the world. One database showed the price of each type of fish in every nation since 1955; the other showed exactly what each country's fishermen were being paid for. This, combined with Mr. Pauly's fish-stocks databases, allowed him to see why the fish were disappearing.

What he discovered, and documented in a series of fascinating research reports last year, is that the self-balancing nature of fishing is thrown out of kilter by the widespread government practice of giving fishermen subsidies for boat building and, especially, fuel. This money, which he described as "bad subsidies," are exactly equivalent to the scale of overfishing - the subsidies make the difference between a renewable resource and a dying resource.

Not only that, but fuel subsidies, he discovered, are responsible for the continuation of the most devastating practice in fishing, bottom trawling, which tears up the sea and destroys species. Countries pay $152-million a year in fuel subsidies to trawlers, which accounts for 25 per cent of their income. And the profit they make is only 10 per cent.

"Without subsidies," he concluded, "the bulk of the world's bottom-trawl fleet [would] operate at a loss, thereby reducing the current threat to . . . fish stocks."

Without "bad" subsidies, which amount to $20-billion a year worldwide, there would be fewer people in the fishing business around the world. But Mr. Sumaila concluded that this process would actually give the world more fish.

"There is a potential to actually increase the catch if we can agree to reduce the scale in the short term," he said, "and avoid subsidizing the industry too much in the long term."

I f**king hate subsidies.

Globe and Mail - A dose of global cod-liver oil - May 26, 2007 (full text for subscribers only)

Labels: doom, environment, rant, subsidies

posted by Richard at 19:09 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

climate accommodation

I am so far gone that when I saw an ad for "Nepture", with big Splash ad photo,

http://www.waterparkcity.ca/

and read "the ultimate waterfront residence",
what I actually read it as was "the ultimate waterproof residence",
and I thought wow, they're already building condos that are global-warming-water-level-rise ready?

Labels: doom

posted by Richard at 10:26 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

subsidizing ourselves to death

I find it rather bothersome that, while we as individuals are supposed to strive $100 at a time to buy local sustainable underpants made from carrot tops or whatever, our governments continue merrily subsidizing unsustainable activities to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

So you maybe want to spend a bit more energy communicating to your governments that they should stop subsidizing destructive sh-t, and a little less worrying about whether American cotton is worse than New Zealand merino wool or whatever.

Our highways and truck stops are crowded with 18-wheel warehouses -- publicly funded, incredibly costly and focused only on getting goods to market at top speed. The result? Pollution, short-sighted city planning and gridlock

Ottawa Citizen - Speed trumps all in just-in-time economy - by Clive Doucet - April 22, 2007

Chanting "there is no economy without an environment" might also help those who insist that doing anything would be too expensive, boo hoo hoo. Yeah, call me the next time you do a study that tells you something you WANT to do will be too expensive. Funny how the studies only confirm it would be impossibly hard to do stuff you didn't want to do anyway.

The ridiculous thing is we don't need to do anything that costs any taxpayer dollars. Spend LESS. The problem is too much spending on bad things. Stop doing that.

Energy efficiency saves money. Stop building cr-p cheap buildings and driving around in cr-p cheap cars in some stupidity of false economy. "All activities of the federal government will exceed the highest international standards of energy efficiency". How hard is that sentence to write? No committees, no reports, no giant layers of twisty legal terminology.

Sigh.

http://www.akerman.ca/doom.html#Subsidies

Labels: doom, subsidies

posted by Richard at 10:11 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

and the storms they did multiply, and sweep across the land

The rain totaled 7.81 inches in Central Park from early Sunday to Monday morning, the National Weather Service said. The previous record in the park for April 15 was just 1.8 inches, set in 1906.

Snow fell in inland areas, including 17 inches in Vermont, with flakes still falling Monday across sections of Pennsylvania, upstate New York and Maine.

Nearly 300,000 homes and businesses had lost power from Maryland to Maine.

CNN.com - Storm floods Northeast, cuts power to 300,000 - April 16, 2007

Labels: doom

posted by Richard at 18:22 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

plastic is the new lead

Oh, those Romans, unawares as they were slowly driven mad by water from their lead pipes.

So will history read "oh those Canadians and Americans, unawares as they were slowly poisoned by water from their plastic pipes and containers"?

I had a nice glass juice container but
1) I am clumsy and manage to smash glass stuff on the kitchen floor all the time (I may eventually replace the kitchen tile with cork on the theory that it may be more bouncy and less smashy)
2) As a case in point, I dropped the container when it was full of juice as I was putting it into the fridge. Although it only fell a couple feet, it smashed into pieces including many many tiny glass shards.
3) I hate tiny glass shards because they're hard to see and pick up, and I worry about pets accidentally stepping on them and hurting their feet (which was a concern at the time, although not any more)

Plus which, I'm not sure how much benefit from glass at the end of the tap, when many many metres of the water's travel is through plastic - including I think down the street (I saw them putting in big new plastic pipes when they fixed the street).

Suzuki apparently will only take tap water, in a glass or glass container.

All this apropos of Globe doom story "Bisphenol A: We're all fvcked now". Err, ok it's called 'Inherently toxic' chemical faces its future.

Labels: doom, the future is plastic

posted by Richard at 10:31 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)