christmas cheer

"This Christmas, remember one thing: there is a mass of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean. It's twice the size of Hawaii. A gigantic churning mass of chemical death. These broken down plastics end up in the stomachs of marine wildlife. Marine wildlife ends up in our stomachs. The damage to the food chain is irrefutable, and irreversible. This chemical slurry grows everyday, shows no signs of stopping, and can't be cleaned up. Happy Holidays!" -- David Dunham

"unless you are profoundly christian, christmas is a consumer holiday celebrating the alienation and post-ecological triumph of modern capitalism. in reality the party's been over since the 70s, so christmas feels like we're at the wake of our own funeral. happy holidays, everyone" -- qzh

"With Christmas fast approaching, try to keep this in mind: the death toll of the Mexican drug war is almost 60,000 people. That's over a five year period. The Mexican government claims that 90% of the dead are members of the cartels, but evidence is mounting that a large percentage of those killed are innocent men, women, and children. Discoveries of mass graves of up to 70 decapitated bodies are routine. And all of this is happening within a 25 minute drive of sunny San Diego CA. The apocalypse is here...it's in Mexico. And all there is to stop it from spilling into the southern US is the longest, least defended and most porous border on the planet. Tidings of comfort and joy!" -- David Dunham

"Dear North America.. Happy Christ Mass / Mithras Mass / Dionysus Mass / Attis Mass / Osiris Mass / Saturnalia / Victory of the Sun God Festival… & every other form of December 25th Sun worship ritual used to control the unthinking masses for the last 3,000-4,000 some odd years… celebrated in recent times by a New(er) Testament of consumerism and unfettered opulence, as best symbolized by the Coca Cola commissioned Santa Claus painting by Norman Rockwell. And uhhh.. stockings, pine trees, eggnog, virgin births, and a little baby manger god. Tender. & mild." -- Lee Reed

"IT'S THE HOLIDAY SEASON, and there ain't nothin' more fun than a new iPhone under the tree on Christmas morn, right? Well, as you transfer your contacts and start taking pictures of your food, keep this in mind: electronic components for Apple products are made in China, at factories run by a company called Foxconn. Since 2009 nearly 20 workers have committed suicide, 14 in 2010 alone. They walk up to the roofs of their worker dormitories and jump off. Foxconn has dealt with the problem by installing netting around several of the dormitories and forcing all employees to sign a "I will not kill myself, boss" pledge. Why are they killing themselves? Maybe because they're not allowed to talk as they stand for their entire 12-hour shift, or because they're routinely forced to work almost 100 hours of overtime in a month. Or perhaps it's because they live at the factories, 24 to a room, some only leaving to see family once a year. It might be because "badly" performing workers are systemically humiliated in front of their peers. And all for about $8 a day. So, as you hurdle over your fourth homeless person in your race to grab that new iPad, take comfort in the knowledge that Steve Jobs is currently in Hell, getting phone-dumped by his 10th grade girlfriend whom he loved with all his heart, on a Motorola Rokr E1 with a shitty connection, for ALL ETERNITY. Season's Greetings!" -- David Dunham

Disaster is the New Normal

Earth Day came and went this year with little fanfare. Token stories about turning off the lights and cycling to work made their usual rounds in the news media. The 24-hour news networks sent camera crews to schools to watch children sing and make paper signs demonstrating the need for everyone to recycle things like paper. As always, nothing really changes for most people. Just the passing of another single day devoted to all things Earth-friendly – whatever that means – during which the penitent ritually cleanse their sins from the rest of the year. And then at some point in the late morning, news broke about a massive oil spill happening in the Gulf of Mexico.

British Petroleum, the company which “owns” the oil well, reports that 5,000 barrels of oil per day are spilling into the ocean, while independent experts have calculated a rate of flow as high as five to ten times that amount. For the past three weeks, we have all watched as the circus shitshow of BP’s improvised attempts to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf have failed. Their latest effort – a tube which has successfully diverted some of the oil to ships at the surface – is clearly intended to recover oil in order to bring it to market, rather than actually stop the flow of oil into the Gulf.

Meanwhile, efforts to mitigate the environmental disaster have centred upon not allowing the oil to reach the Louisiana and Florida shorelines. The logic in play revolves around the fact that the oil which stays underwater will not threaten anyone’s opinion on BP, offshore drilling, or oil use in general. Nevermind that the real environmental damage occurs under the surface of the water, as the marine ecosystem in the Gulf collapses due to contamination. Or that the Gulf of Mexico is connected to every other oceanic body, to which the oil could spread. In the age of the televisual out of sight is, of course, out of mind.

While many among the talking heads on television enjoyed their own hyperbole about this event having the potential to be the single worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States, the reality is that the Earth has been bleeding like this for decades. The BP oil spill is merely a singularity which makes visible a much larger field of gravity.



Certainly, there are many legitimate concerns about how the spill happened. It is true that the oil industry was able to lobby American lawmakers to the point where lax regulations and an “industry knows best” mentality removed some safety protocols which may have averted or mediated the spill. However, pointing fingers at the companies who successfully sell their products to consumers who want them is misguided. We North Americans are absurdly inefficient in our use of energy. It is our desire for an abundant supply of oil which convinced BP and other oil companies of the benefits of offshore drilling. We must now understand that the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico are being discoloured by our inability to reduce oil use when alternatives to fossil fuels are increasingly presenting themselves.

In this capacity, it is we who are spilling the oil into the gulf, and we don’t stop there. As an aggregate dynamic, oil consumption is a process of continual spillage. We spill the remnants of oil into the atmosphere after it has been burned for energy, and we spill oil into the landfill after it has been transformed into plastics. The fact that such “spills” are relatively small in terms of each individual allows each of us to justify our mutual environmental disaster as the “normal way of doing things”.

As we get used to an increasing number of wide-scale environmental disasters, the rather ominous prospect arises that we have come to accept disaster as the new normal. In the wake of continual news about environmental damage around the globe, one might say that the BP spill is just another oil spill. Once the spill has been “contained” – an absurd impossibility – we will move on with our days, go for a drive, and buy another soda.

We must understand that humanity now functions as blind gods on Earth. Ours is the Anthropocene era. Our desires produce change which affects the entire planet, and we are engaging in this change without any idea of the consequences. The first conscious change we need to make is rhetorical. Whenever people talk about environmental issues, the phrase “saving the planet” comes up. The problem with this phrase is that it abdicates us from our responsibilities. Most people do not view themselves as heroes who “save” things, but as normal people living normal lives. They ask themselves How can one person make a difference? and so they don’t attempt to change their lifestyle much. Instead of “saving the planet”, we need to strive to “not wreck the planet”. Such a phrase might then allow a person who chooses to drive four blocks to the corner store to view this action in terms of wrecking the planet instead of not saving it.



There is one hope which must be retained, no matter how remote and complicated the scenario presents. Several years ago, BP adopted “Beyond Petroleum” as a new motto for the new millennium. Perhaps after a few more months of oil contaminating the waters which sustain life on this planet, human civilisation will finally understand the sublime and graceful logic of these two simple words.

an open letter to Stockwell Day and the Conservative Party of Canada

Hon. Stockwell Day,

The other day, I somewhat accidentally managed to come across your blog, and while I am supportive of the need to express your feelings with your constituents, I do wish to challenge some of your assertions.

First of all, let me deal with this procedural detail: I am aware that your personal site in no way represents either the Canadian government, or even indeed your own party. I am also aware that this email address represents an official government of Canada member, and therefore you are not legally required to address non-governmental issues. At the same time however, I cannot separate the opinions expressed on this website as more or less "Official", as they will inform your decisions regarding governmental matters.

I hope it is no surprise that the environment is suddenly a Political Issue (sorry for the capital letters, but since you espouse the National Media...) I have to mention the issue that's perhaps most important for 2007 is Climate Change.

Now just to make the reference, as your writings on the subject are two months old, I would like to quote the following:

"Maybe all my constituents living high up on the West Bench, or Lakeview Heights , or the hills of Logan Lake will soon be sitting on lakeside property as one of the many benefits of global warming.

All I know is last weekend when I got home from Ottawa there was more snow in my driveway than we usually get in a year.

And I was begging for Big Al's Glacial Melt when the mercury hit -24°. Do not despair, my fellow dwellers of the Okanagan and Nicola Valleys ."

I must take your expertise in the matter of Climate Change as proof of your well-read and thoroughly scientific examination of the facts at hand.

Can I take these sets of statements as proof that you do not consider Climate Change to be an important issue? After all, the climate changes on a daily basis, especially in reference to one individual person who might only have the vantage point of one location at a specific point in time. One day in June it's warm, and then come December one looks around and experiences colder weather, at least here in southern Canada.

And so, in late November you came home to witness the accumulation of "more snow in my driveway than we usually get in a year". Might I suggest that having "more snow" is consistent with the fact that as the climate warms and the glaciers melt, more water circulates around the planet as precipitation, which in the winter months in Canada falls as snow. Of course, having more precipitation in some areas means that other areas will experience the opposite. Somewhat tangentially, I wish to mention that my grandfather sold the wheat farm he had been running since the 1940s in Stavely, Alberta after nearly ten years of droughts in the 1990s.

Can I here mention that while it was cold out west in December, southern Ontario did not receive any winter until February. While some record low temperatures were set in B.C., we in southern Ontario enjoyed record highs, including one January day which was nearly 15 degrees. See how the Climate Changes as you include other perspectives?

Frankly, I do not wish to dwell on the science or consequences of Climate Change, as this area has been well-covered in the past year by the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, published by the British government, or the preliminaries of the upcoming report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Just in case you missed them, they can be read online:

It is not my intention to provoke any name-calling, buck-passing, or any other such immature approaches to democracy. Frankly, I'll lay my cards down on the table and state that I do not believe that the Conservative party cares one iota for the well-being of the planet. Your party (although, not your party alone) represents corporate and industrial interests, which by their very nature (both legally and ideologically) place their own economic interests above any other interest, including the welfare of the public.

The problem with this approach is that it is our very capacity for industry and corporate exploitation that is at issue here. We abuse the Earth in the name of profit. Furthermore, adherence to the profit motive is not a rational decision when viewed in the context of unequal distribution of economic resources. The only way that anyone can say that "we have to keep industry going at its current pace" and speak from an ethical foundation is if this inequality is addressed. The economics, thanks to people like Sir Nicholas Stern, is clear on this issue. In sixty years, it is not likely that the average person will be able to afford the consequences of climate change; the wealthy will be immune to change in real terms, while the poor face an extinction-level event. In a world in which 2% of the human population controls 50% of the wealth, you cannot talk about the morality of contemporary business practices as the solution to Climate Change.

All that climate change is doing is giving the issue of inequality a temporal dimension: we can act now while we have the choice to either act or not, or we can be forced into change as our climate becomes increasingly inhospitable to our lifestyle. I personally will endorse leaders that espouse leadership by making the energy policy choices necessary for the benefit of all humanity, not simply the business elite. Leaders should be able to see the horizons of history and society, and act according to the interests of human civilization.

From the contents of your own website, as well as the numerous statements that have been made by members of the Conservative government, I cannot in all honesty state that we as a nation are enjoying Enlightened Leadership (see: another Big Idea!).

As a personal message to you Mr. Day, might I appeal to your Christian instincts? Due to the limitations of human nature, are we not intended to be stewards of this Earth and not masters?

no snow = me cry now

It's January 4, and I am outside wearing just a t-shirt and pants. As I was biking home from work today, I passed several groups of kids who were outside playing. Not a single one of them was wearing a jacket. In Hamilton, it's currently 8.4 degrees Celsius, and from the picture you can see quite obviously that there is no snow on the ground. Statistically average temperatures for our region tend to hover around -4.5 degrees Celsius. This time last year, January was exceptionally warm and was followed by a cold February. When I was a child (we're talking the 1980s, so not really that long ago), winter was a season lasting many months, usually from early November through to late March. From the look of things currently, it seems as though southern Ontario will once again experience a drastically shortened winter season, perhaps only a little more than one month.

For those of you outside North America, now is traditionally the time in which the whole of Canada is stuck in a deep-freeze. The winter is a major component of our national cultures and identity. Furthermore, the season is a source of revenue for some and an ecological necessity for others. I myself am a big fan of snow, and its rather conspicuous absence so far this year suggests to me something exceptionally alarming. More alarming however is the fact that other than a major breakup of ice in the Canadian arctic, the weather is not really being discussed in the general media.

There was a bit of an awareness campaign that was sparked by the release of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change by the British government. Frankly, this little bit of bedtime reading should be mandatory in schools and boardrooms.

Oh yeah, that same British government is expecting 2007 to be the hottest year in recorded history. So far, we're off to a tragic start.

entre-acte: ending suburbia

The Guardian mentions that there is a high likelihood that Britain is going to use taxation as a means to control vehicular emissions and encourage energy conservation. This week saw a monumental amount of rain fall on British Columbia, while simultaneously people in Alberta were playing golf in shorts and tees.

As a pleasantly informative digression from your individual fulfillments, why not expend a little electricity watching The End of Suburbia? While the video is sensationalistic at times, the message is well expressed and the history behind the rise of suburban life in North America is quite arresting. Peak oil and climate change are occurring more or less coincidentally, and this happenstance should prove informative to our actions over the coming decade.

An Inconvenient Truth

According to the vast majority of the world’s climatologists, when carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere reach 400 parts per million, we will have attained a level that can only be described as “dangerous”. At this point, the earth’s climate will have reached a “tipping point”, after which there is simply no return to the temperate climate which has sustained human civilization for the last ten thousand years. What puts this little fact into perspective is that our CO2 levels are currently sitting at 379 parts per million, and that number is increasing at a rate of 2 ppm per year (a figure which is itself growing as well). That gives us about ten years, folks.

Scientific data such as this constitute the heart of the film An Inconvenient Truth, which documents Al Gore’s project to bring awareness of the implications of climate change to the masses. Thankfully the film sticks to the climate message without getting bogged down in the behind-the-scenes showbiz minutiae of Gore’s speaking tour.

The facts of Gore’s case are ably presented by director Davis Guggenheim. In most cases, both Gore and the science he presents are allowed to speak for themselves. Gore explains some of the processes behind gathering and interpreting such data – ice cores, atmospheric readings, satellite data, etc. – and then follows through with the results, in a typically professional PowerPoint fashion.

It is important to stress that there is little to no dissension among the scientific community. Gore notes that while scientists are universal in warning us of the dangers we are presently facing, the media has considerably distorted and clouded the issue. You don’t have to look further than a recent Fox News (sic) piece in which a senior member of the National Center for Policy Analysis denounced the science in An Inconvenient Truth by referring to a paper which was published by his own organization (note: the NCPA is not a major centre for climatological research) instead of one from, say the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can see some more of Fox News (sic) in action here.

The “tipping point” that was referred to above works as follows. As the atmosphere accumulates CO2 and the Earth continues to warm, the polar ice caps begin melting. Since ocean water absorbs heat while ice reflects sunlight from the Earth, the arctic must be seen as a “canary in a mine”. Gore explains that if even only parts of the arctic melt, sea levels world wide would be raised seven metres, enough to submerge coastal cities such as San Francisco, Shanghai, Calcutta, and New York. When the arctic disappears, we will have a new climate and geography, period.

It’s a message that most people have heard before, although not likely in such a pressing or intimate manner. Gore likens it to the sudden awareness brought forth by science that cigarette smoking would prove fatal to most smokers. His own family earned a fair amount of money growing tobacco over the years until Gore’s sister, herself a smoker, died. We also get to see some telling photographs demonstrating the effects of climate change over the past few decades. One interesting bit of data that has presented itself to recently for this film to document is the occurrence of the fabled North-West Passage – a shipping lane that has been dreamt of for five centuries – in the Canadian arctic this winter. The times they are indeed a changin’.

Some of us had parents who would tell us almost every day of the week to take out the garbage. We ignored and ignored – sometimes even more so when the nagging persisted – and then all of a sudden garbage day had passed and we were left living with a smelly bag of garbage for another week or two. The insistence is more serious in the case of global warming. Since we are out of balance with the natural order of which we are a part, any catastrophic strain on the system is a catastrophe for us. The focus isn’t really on the future but rather, like Gore’s sister, how we live in the present.

After seeing the film, it is hard not to ask the question as to why the Democrats didn’t run with this at the heart of their 2000 presidential campaign. The Al Gore of this film is passionate, funny, intelligent, and a demonstrable leader. Perhaps the fires in Gore’s belly were lit when he saw the presidency stolen out from under him. At the same time, had the American population witnessed the passion and ability of 2006 Gore in 2000, the vote would likely not have been close enough to allow the legislative coup that brought Bush to office. One cannot help but wonder how differently this new millennium might have progressed under an Al Gore White House.

More importantly, maybe some real democratic change can be effected as distribution for this film expands. Gore’s take at Hollywood stardom right before mid-term elections and 18 months before the next presidential campaign might seem like post-modern politics at its best. However, even the most cynical viewers of An Inconvenient Truth will be hard pressed to ignore the consequences of inaction. Begin the process of change by taking several of your more environmentally sceptical friends to see this film.



continue watching the film

power down

When Canada became a signatory to the Kyoto protocol, many Canadians held their heads a little higher thanks to an increased sense of moral virtue. After all, we just had to look to the ‘ignorant’ south, who didn’t sign Kyoto, to feel better about ourselves. It’s now a few years later and sadly little has changed in terms of our emissions, despite the Kyoto requirements. Certainly there’s a greater amount of media awareness surrounding the issue, and many Canadians have begun to think about the ramifications of climate change. Indeed, the exceptionally warm winter that we are all experiencing this year should prove that the times they are a changin’. In case you assume this to be a momentary blip in weather statistics, it should be noted that of the ten warmest years in recorded history, eight have occurred since 1990.

We all know that transportation is a big part of the problem, but electricity consumption is also a climate change issue. At it’s heart it all boils down to this: we are going to be using a lot of electricity for the foreseeable future. As more items become electrified and more people (ie: China, India, etc) can purchase and use them, electricity use will skyrocket over the coming decades. There’s just one problem: it can’t, at least with our current methods of production.



Most of North America’s electricity comes from burning coal and oil. This has two fairly severe consequences. Firstly, both are finite resources that will not sustain our current usage profiles let alone adapt to the ever-increasing population. Secondly, there’s that pesky business about air pollution, as emissions from generators are the biggest single contributors to climate change and smog.



It is likely that nuclear power will have to fill the deficit when oil use becomes more prohibitive. Don’t believe me? How about some math on this issue. 65% of North American electricity comes from oil, coal, and natural gas. These technologies will never be clean. Either we accept dirty air which warms our planet, or we reduce demand to 35% of our current usage. Given how much we all like our televisions and fridges, the latter seems unlikely. Renewable technologies cannot currently match this level of production. Once every building is fitted with solar panel roofs and wind generators are almost household items, maybe then we can start talking about sustainable growth. Until then, our growth will be always-already unsustainable. More than likely however, over the next few decades we will see the proliferation of nuclear generation, with all the environmental, social, and safety issues that it entails.

So what can be done by the average person? While not everyone has the money to dump $15,000 into a personal solar or wind generation system, there are many other steps that can be taken to ensure that your energy use is minimized. Of course, if you can afford to install a small wind generator or add solar panels to your property, then please do so. In fact, give me a ring and I’ll help you install your system. Check out Energy Alternatives for more details. If you are building a new house, why not add a renewable energy source? It will pay for itself in about a decade, and then your electricity will be free. Not a bad price, considering the increasing rates that power companies are charging.

One much smaller step that can be taken is to pay attention to those objects in your life that consume electricity. I know this sounds rather pedantic, but little things like changing all of the light fixtures in your house from incandescents to compact fluorescent will be a great step (and since these efficient bulbs last ten times longer than “normal” ones, you will be less of a burden on our landfills), Obviously, I am not suggesting that you ditch your high-tech gear and move into an earth-warmed cave in the woods. Electronic toys can be great fun, and definitely enhance many aspect of our lives. The easiest way to save on power use is to turn things off when you are done using them.



This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people leave appliances running when they are not in use. Televisions, stereo equipment, kitchen appliances – if they aren’t in use, turn the damn things off. Fans, heaters, lights, and such don’t really need to be on when you aren’t actually in the room. Here’s a fun idea: put all your lights and fans on motion sensors and timers so that they only operate when they are needed, then forget about them.

Computer equipment is another culprit. Monitors do not need to be on when the computer is not in use, and you can set up Windows to put the whole computer into a low power mode using the screensaver settings. Don’t leave the machine running overnight unless it’s actually performing a function. In this capacity I am looking straight at Hamilton’s business community. Just walk past a place of business at night and you can see that most of them leave their computers and cash registers on all the time. There’s no need for those monitors to be on all the time guys; turn ‘em off, save some cash. Even better, if you see that a business is wasting power, why not walk in and tell them? It’s usually out of ignorance rather than apathy that waste occurs. Also, when you go away on vacation, don’t leave on lights or appliances as a means to deter thieves. My cop buddies tell me that robbers tend to “case the joint” before doing anything. Most thieves are smart enough to notice things to suggest that you aren’t actually home, such as lights which never turn on or off, cars which never appear or leave the house, and people who don’t come and go. If you want to play this game with them, at least get a timer to control the lights. Otherwise, your little counter-insurgency strategy is entirely laughable.

Perhaps most importantly, if everyone were to upgrade their house to ensure maximum efficiency, a great deal of electricity would be saved. The federal government is actually providing grants for this very purpose. You do have to invest some money yourself to have an energy audit performed and retrofit your house to maximize efficiency. There is serious money available to those who truly wish to lower their household power use. Find out more at the website for the Office of Energy Efficiency.

Reducing our energy consumption isn’t a leftist agenda. In the long run, saving money is something from which we can all benefit. That our air will be more breathable and our climate more liveable is icing on the cake.

Let`s fix this mess.. Chicoutimi style

Saarbrücken transit system, April 2003;
timed cross-platform interchange


Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 7:26 PM
Subject: Let`s fix this mess.. Chicoutimi style (Nov11)


Yo guys,
I thought I'd call on you for your knowledge far and wide.

Alright, I'm trying to get a campaign together at the University for bus passes. There are a small number of students(over 3000) and a large number of parking spaces (1600). Not only that the transit system for the community at large is slim. They neeeeeed this deal, and it just so happens I snaked my way into the environmental commitee at the university and I will try to propose it as a staple campaign.

Ok, number one do you know any info about both campaigns in your schools (guelph and Mac, dunno about queens)?

Number two: did you have a referendum?

Number three: how much was the payment for one semester versus the payment for a bus pass for a month?

Number four: if you got any suggestions let me know.

cheers
aj

hi andy and friends,

i think the HSR got in touch with mcmaster and made the proposal -- they were very short on funds at the time, and were looking for a cash injection, which 15,000 students could easily supply. there was indeed a referendum at the school, but only after the bus pass program had been in place for a year. students who were paying for parking passes felt that it was unfair that they should pay for a bus pass they "wouldn't use", and so they organized a referendum. i imagine that you want to approach the issue from the other side, ie: have a referendum to get the program in place. as for the cost, i think it was $57 for an 8 month pass through the school, which at the time was the price of a monthly adult HSR pass. it's probably up around $70 or something now. i think the graduate student pass was closer to $90 ($101 now), as grad students get a 12 month bus pass instead of the undergrad 8.

the issue i'm wondering about is whether students will support the program if they know that chicoutimi bus service is bad, they will not support paying for the pass. if somehow you can convince the bus line to improve service along "student" routes, then the students might be convinced to back the plan.

i'm going to post this stuff on my web site, which maybe we can use as a forum for this project.

ps: the picture link above takes you to a McGill website to which you might want to extend this project. maybe you could see if they have any experience with the (admittedly different) situation in montréal.

Q x

Go Car Free, even for one Day

There has been a rising awareness of the impact that our transportation choices are having on ourselves and the world in which we live. Over the twentieth century, we got quite a bit of an addiction to the combustion engine. The speed, power, and comfort (read: laziness) which cars promote have allowed modern civilization to become almost hopelessly addicted to this little marvel of engineering. A lot has come as a result: increased productivity, a much higher degree of personal and collective mobility, long commutes to work which keep parents away from their kids, roadrage-inducing traffic jams, air pollution which kills thousands of Canadians every year, dwindling oil supplies which might be required for more important purposes (ie: food production; everything plastic in your life; electricity), and a vast increase in climate change caused by human activities.

With this in mind, we should celebrate September 22nd for what it really means. International Car Free Day was started in France in 1998, and like a stalled SUV going downhill has been growing in momentum ever since. It’s not a difficult concept to follow. Bus, ride, walk, blade – do whatever it takes to get around without resorting to the family car. If you work in an outlying or suburban area, organize a car pool for the day, which hopefully you can make permanent.

This week will see a wealth of car free activities in the city. Following in the popularity of Toronto’s "Open Your Streets" festivals, today should see a number of street parties throughout the city. Throughout in the week, numerous trips were held in which historians and local politicians led tours of the harbour, Webster’s Falls, and the city’s historic sites. If you missed it, join Ward One Councillor Brian McHattie on Sunday for a guided walking tour of Cootes Paradise, which is Hamilton’s best urban-rural area. There’s also the monthly Critical Mass, starting at Hess and George around 5:30. Check out Transportation for Liveable Communities for more details. More importantly, you could pretend that more and more of your days are International Car Free Day.

I know what you’re thinking: my job and my family are important and I can’t change my behaviour. It really isn’t as hard as it sounds. Bogota, a city of seven million people in Columbia, has been having yearly car free days in April, during which all private automobiles are outright banned. Families there haven’t suffered as a result. Alternately, the emphasis on the city’s bike and bus network has created a more liveable and sustainable community that is accessible to everyone.

More importantly, those freedoms that we have gotten used to are highly dependent on cheap oil, which is quite obviously no longer something we can enjoy. The price of gasoline will go exponentially higher – and this is from industry experts such as Matthew Simmons, CEO of the world’s biggest energy investor Simmons & Company, and Dick Cheney, current VP of the United States and ex-CEO of evil devil's reject Haliburton. When the price of oil jumps from $66 per barrel to $200, and then jumps to $500 a barrel, people will be forced to understand what their freedoms relied upon. It wasn't ideology or economic growth which gave us "freedom", but rather finite material resources which are currently being wasted by bad planning, greed, and human apathy.

In North America, we’ve gotten so dependent on cars that we feel driving to be one of the most important rights and freedoms that we have. George Bush has gone so far as to call this lifestyle "non-negotiable", and with the recent Doctrine of Joint Nuclear Operations (Google it, it’s fun!) which specifies a pre-emptive nuclear strategy for those who disagree with America’s strategy for oil domination, we might in fact learn what it means to be truly free. This right of driving is so important that any attempts to get bad drivers off the road by screening more strictly for those who don’t in fact have the propers skills to drive – perhaps with driving tests every five years -- are routinely laughed away. Again as a cyclist who routinely uses every major street in the city, I can tell you how many Hamiltonians are still under the mistaken impression that bikes do not belong on the road and riders should remain out of "their" way by using sidewalks. Time for traffic school guys. We just accept road deaths as the cost of modern civilization, and to some extent we are correct in that assumption. At the same time, luck-of-the-draw circumstance should not overule proper urban planning.

I myself do not drive, but I can understand the dependence that it fosters. When you’re young, it’s pretty fucking sweet to be able to suddenly go where you want, when you want to make the trip. I know what that feels like. I felt the same when I was twelve and got my first bike which had gears. Suddenly the whole city belonged to me. The dual feelings of speed and mobility are very addictive. Those luxuries – let’s not kid ourselves by calling these characteristics "freedoms" – I found very stimulating, and consequently I remain an avid cyclist to this day.

The thing about youth, especially around the age when you first start driving, is that your lifestyle and recreational habits tend to solidify. By your mid-twenties, you are probably acting as you will when you are in your forties and fifties in terms of habitual behaviour. For this reason alone it is important to show kids that there are indeed alternatives to automobile transit. I can’t stress enough the importance of letting children ride their bikes, scooters, and skateboards around. Please parents, stop driving to school to pick them up. Let them take public transit or find their own ways home. Nobody wants to steal your kids, you've been conned by fear.
It’s also important to let them develop their culture around these activities. The Art Gallery of Hamilton – while doing good work otherwise – should be ashamed that it’s renovation has alienated skateboarders who used the Irving Zucker plaza by fencing off half the area and enforcing "trespassing" laws when boarders do show up. These kids got exposed to the art that was visible from the outside and which might have given them ideas about their own expressive abilities. Fascist ideas about how spaces should be utilized remove a use of public space by a community, which is the whole meaning of a downtown core. Boarders aren’t the problem with the downtown core; Hamilton’s Aerotropical desire to be the longest highway stripmall in existence is what keeps the core from achieving its potential.

We’ve gotten used to accepting roads as belonging to cars; it is time for pedestrians and human-powered vehicles to take back the streets. Keep your car at home, get some exercise, and learn what a living community really and truly can feel like. It’s nice that at this point in time, we have the freedom to choose whether to drive or not. That luxury is rapidly going to disappear over the next decade and a half.

George Bush hates people

There’s something pointedly touching about the notion of an otherwise cocky popular musician at the top of their game twitching nervously before their first ‘political’ statement. When Kanye West went off script during an NBC telethon a week and a half ago, the American media presented the first authentic emotional response to Katrina. The second came the following week when, during a live interview on CNN, a passerby told Dick Chaney to go fuck himself. This earnestness spoke volumes about the power and influence of traditional media. It was almost as though the media outlets had opened themselves to become the voice of the people. Almost.

Let’s not blame the Bush administration wholly for this little debacle, even though his evil policies are destroying the country. I’ll be the first to point out that this may sound a little hypocritical coming from a person who published an article with the title George Bush Isn’t Evil. And I stand by this comment to this very day. Once again, he is merely a figurehead, a symbol of the collective ideologies that are driving America into the void. There was little public outcry as the White House slashed the budget of the Army Engineer Corps – you know, those guys who keep the levees operational in New Orleans. Neither did anyone complain when the Environmental Protection Agency had its mandate changed, as private companies decimated thousands of square kilometres of Louisiana’s wetlands, which would have served to absorb a great deal of the flooding (Google “Mr Bill + wetlands”...). Few Americans seem to be questioning the environmental repercussions of their consumptive lifestyles, which serve to promote climate change and increase the likelihood of extreme weather effects like hurricanes. And nobody questioned the intelligence of cutting governmental programs like disaster management. People enjoyed their tax cuts and their ability to buy bigger cars and more stuff.

In retrospect, all that so called ‘conservative’ fiscal policy smells of so much shit from a dying bull. The public as a political concept is indeed an important thing. Cities get built by people in unison, however randomly and sporadically that may occur. Contrary to the current political zeitgeist of much of North America, they do not get built by corporate strategic policy. On the contrary, corporate policies of late have centred upon raiding the public purse as the last exit strategy for profit margins.

Of course natural disasters can and do happen and are largely outside of our control, and the suffering that precipitates can indeed be tragic and long-lasting. Since civilization tends to operate akin to an archive of information, it seems appropriate to use the wealth of such knowledge and productivity to mitigate against the consequences of such disasters when they do happen.

There has been much talk in the press about why state and federal authorities did not adequately prepare for Katrina, a storm which had been well tracked by meteorological officials for several days. It was widely known that an exceptionally massive category 5 hurricane would hit the Gulf coast and make landfall. And yet no preparations were made. No sandbags or national guardsmen were deployed. No emergency food or medical supplies were stockpiled for rapid dissemination. Instead, the citizens of Louisiana were given the gold ol’ American spirit of independence. Official strategy: good luck and god bless, but to each their own.

When that strategy of independence, ie: brute survival, turned on the American dream of law and due process, adherents were called “looters” and criminals, and were immediately placed under martial law. How dare they take what is not their’s, we were told by the news media. The consequence of this action was not solely the deaths of several looters – ie black people, white looters being called ‘scavengers’ and ‘finders’ – but also Kanye West’s vitriolic response. Hey, desperate people do desperate things; that’s the reason why public institutions are needed. If funded properly, they serve to keep people from being as desperate as they might be on their own.

Ah, looting; there’s the rub. Remembering the joyful operations in Iraq, Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco – hey, Blanco likes black people, right? – issued the following warning to ‘looters’: “These troops are fresh back from Iraq. They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary.” That’s right. While every public service that citizens depend on has been cut back to the gristle, Americans should feel secure in the knowledge that their National Guard will protect them.

After the political fallout of governmental inaction, the horrors that the Bush administration has in store for Louisiana are becoming ever more clear. First volley: the biggest reconstruction contracts are going to the Shaw Group and Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. The companies who are “reconstructing” war-torn Iraq are also going to make millions of dollars reconstructing Louisiana and Mississippi. Nobody should second-guess the priorities of this administration when it was announced that the first projects of reconstruction are naval bases and corporate properties.

Second volley: Bush suspended a Depression-era bill which protects worker wages for governmental contracts. This would allow the companies mentioned above to pay their workers minimum wage for their services, rather than the market rates for construction and related projects.

So to summarize: the Bush admin thinks that the free market is the best solution to governmental projects and consequently guts public institutions, then uses its power of legislation to alter the free market to ameliorate the profit potential of the companies involved. Can you guess who are the winners in this strategy?

Maybe I’m woefully amateur to be saying so, but how about a program which provides the people of Louisiana the resources to build their own communities back up. If they are being fed and sheltered, they would probably jump all over the employment opportunity. Obviously not everyone can help, but I’m sure that many among the hundreds of thousands of newly dispossessed would be willing to help reconstruct their cities as best as they could.

Instead, a few private companies get to gain; their commission is the misery of half a million people. The enormous costs of reconstruction are being added directly to the deficit, already bloated beyond belief by the cost of military operations in the Middle East. My own cynical armchair interpretation of the economic situation in the States is that the Bush administration wants to force the country into a recession. As the economic situation worsens in America, fewer people might be in opposition to the possibility of conscription into military theatres.

But again, that’s me flying off the handle. Bush is doing the best job that he can, which is to be the mirror-as-leader for America. People don’t want to pay taxes. They distrust governmental programmes and want the best opportunities to improve their own economic situations, community spirit be damned. That spirit of America was shown in full force with the preparedness and response to Hurricane Katrina, which the day after the hurricane saw the President strumming his guitar like Nero while Rome burned.

As a fun non-sequitur, Katrina is serving as a nice media diversion from the fact that a little piece of paper entitled “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” is reaching final approval from Donald Rumsfeld. It would allow a preemptive nuclear strike against whoever the White House deems a threat, and “revises the discussion of nuclear weapons use across the range of military operations.” Maybe they’re thinking that the use of nuclear arms would deter further hurricanes from stupidly and arrogantly threatening the U.S. Take that, Hurricane Iraq!

Turning Oil into Trees

Last week the U.S. made it clear that it was no longer going to abide by NAFTA. Since the late 1980s, many critics have argued that NAFTA had always been intended as a one-way deal, with the majority of benefits going to American business interests.

The issue at hand is of course Canada’s long-standing complaint concerning the importation duties that United States trade officials imposed on many wood exports. The most recent – which the BC government, who must have a quotient of horror film aficionados on staff ready for every requisite press release, so brilliantly names ‘Lumber IV’, commenced in May of 2002. At the time, it was argued that Canada was illegally subsidizing lumber production. Since then roughly $5 billion in anti-dumping and countervailing tariffs has been collected from the Canadian Forestry Industry.

Canada has made numerous appeals to both the NAFTA legislating body and the World Trade Organization, and so far every single appeal – except, of course, one done by the U.S. in the U.S. – has demonstrated that Canadian lumber is not being dumped at illegal price levels. Each of these legal actions has demonstrated that the States is acting illegally in collecting duties.

So what has changed recently? Well, for starters Canada won another appeal, this time adjudicated by the very cool sounding NAFTA Extraordinary Challenge Committee. U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman’s stated “We are, of course, disappointed with the ECC’s decision, but it will have no impact on the antidumping and countervailing duty orders given the ITC’s November 2004 injury determination. We continue to have concerns about Canadian pricing and forestry practices.”

In my mind, the issue follows a simple supply model. Canada has a lot of space for a lot of trees. Thanks to urban sprawl, industrial growth, and a tenfold higher population, the United States simply cannot compete with Canada on a tree for tree basis. Obviously, any business which has a controlling interest over raw resources will be able to operate more cheaply. Moreover, despite some ecological nightmares that continue to occur in Canadian forestry, the industry up here has more environmental protections in place than do their southern counterparts, largely due to the early realization that the healthy re-growth of forests results in a more profitable industry. The principal issue the U.S. has with Canadian forestry practices is that our Crown land is cheaper than competing tracts of land in the States. This stance ignores the fact that most land in the U.S. is more expensive than in Canada. Again, let me refer you to the tenfold higher population, the smaller country, and the so-called open-market system. Few people live in Northern British Columbia or North-Western Ontario (I don’t meant North Bay, I mean north of Armstrong), and consequently land prices are fairly low in comparison to, say, Washington State.

More importantly than the U.S. reaction – which we should frankly just come to accept as the manner in which they do business – is that of our own government. All of a sudden, the Liberals seem to have a spine in regard to Lumber IV. First they called off trade negotiations for the simple reason that you cannot bargain with people who don’t abide by trade agreements. Furthermore, today Industry Minister David Emerson spoke about efforts to retaliate: “I have a background from my younger days in hockey. When somebody slammed you into the boards with undue force and aggression, you took their number. I think we've got to take their number." So what number is being taken, specifically? Nothing has yet been announced, but Emerson mentioned that Ottawa is seeking to list a number of American exports that will have duties applied “without serious damage to the Canadian economy and, hopefully, with maximum impact in the U.S.”

Sadly, Emerson was quick to rule out the resource with the most pressing potential to the American economy. By imposing exportation duties onto Canadian oil reserves heading for the U.S., as NDP leader Jack Layton had initially proposed, the American population would quickly notice the results at the pumps. This would have a double effect. The duties would cause the average American to begin to think about why the country’s gas prices are so high, and if Canada played the PR game properly, a great deal of pressure could be exerted. Additionally, it would cause many northern U.S. residents to cross the border into Canada to buy gas, much like Canadians were doing in the late 1980s. This would allow gas tourists to see what a nice country it is up here, with all of our pretty trees.

The reasoning behind Canada’s refusal to restrict oil supply to the States is largely provincial, in that the Albertan economy would be “unfairly targeted” (maybe you should tell that sob story to east coasters, oil ranchers…). Realistically speaking however, every country on the planet needs a hell of a lot of oil, and China or India in particular would love to get a piece of Alberta’s black gold. But of course, that means Alberta’s oil industry might have to actually do some work to promote itself, instead of just opening the floodgates to our southern neighbours.

Out of all of this, normal Americans might start to get news reports concerning the vast amounts of oil that are just north of them, and wonder why they can’t get it as cheaply as other nations. As oil supplies continue to restrict towards the end of the decade, Canada’s oil supply could prove to be the biggest bargaining chip that the country has against the We-Set-Our-Own-Rules American government. And anyway, what are they going to do? Invade us to get our oil? Put pressure on Alberta to secede from the country? The U.S. just doesn’t (*cough* Venezuela) ever (*cough* Iraq *cough*) do that sort of thing.





NAFTA ECC ruling on U.S. appeal of previous NAFTA rulings

BC government site concerning the dispute

Flying on Fumes: the plan to bring Hamilton into the 1950s

There have been some interesting recent developments in Hamilton's urban development strategy. The city expects a 20% swell in Hamilton’s population by 2030, with most of the new development envisioned to use the land around the airport. In a nod to B-grade sci-fi movies of the early 1950s, the umbrella term for this development is the Aerotropolis. This business technocrat’s nostalgic wet dream will apparently house 150,000 while employing 50,000. Hamilton airport will be the locus for this project, and will serve as the centre of a network of highways that will increase traffic flows between the Buffalo-Niagara region and the GTA.

The impetus for development seems to be the more family-friendly nature of real estate in Hamilton, as well as the city’s central location relative to nearby urban centres. City planners believe that new residents will flock to Hamilton in order to avoid the high cost of living in Toronto and its neighbouring suburbs. This belief is preceded by two other acts of faith: 1. that Hamilton real estate prices will stay low, and 2. that the price of transportation will also stay low.

So what is this about our low real estate costs in Hamilton? It is true that you can purchase a home in Hamilton for about 2/3 what it would cost in Toronto and maybe 4/5 of its cost in Oakville or Mississauga. Yet, these lower costs have everything to do with the fact that Hamilton skilfully avoided the economic boom of the mid to late 1990s that fuelled the real estate markets of those municipalities. Smart development has begun to reverse that trend to some degree. Many analysts have stated that due to extensive condo development, Toronto, for example, has cooled off as a real estate market, and prices for homes in several areas have actually dropped since 2002.

If Hamilton were indeed to become a hotspot for development, doesn’t it follow that housing prices will increase to match the extra money flowing into the city? Furthermore, we should question what increased property values would mean to Hamilton’s many lower-income families. The increase in property values associated with a booming suburban development would likely mean the continued marginalization of the downtown core.

The development requirements associated with sprawl include more infrastructure than just highways – roads and sidewalks, water and sewage, electricity, garbage collection, education, health and law enforcement services, etc. Currently, property taxes remain high downtown despite the relative weakness of the local economy in relation to suburban shopping centres such as the Meadowlands. Subsidies have been maintained to encourage business development in outlying regions of Hamilton. At the same time, the city must realize its operating budget from somewhere, and consequently core residents currently bear a majority of the tax burden.

The second and perhaps more prescient issue to consider in the aerotropolis debate is of course energy consumption. As has been pointed out in much of the local press, the city’s plan for development requires a high degree of cheap and accessible individual transportation. Increasing dependence on automobiles in order to link car corridors to distant jobs while living and shopping in suburban areas, and ultimately make the aerotropolis plan feasible, requires a cheap and increasing supply of fossil fuels. Additionally, the economic locus of the project – the expansion of the airport itself – requires a boom in the airline industry. As for being cheap, anyone can tell you that oil prices are going in only one direction.

What about all this oil talk? Sure, it’s almost de rigour to belittle oil these days, with opinions on oil’s links to war, terror, and economic subservience finding much ink in the press. Many people quickly tire of the discussion. But one thing both sides should be able to agree on is that as a collective, modern countries are exceedingly good at using oil. Better than we have ever been, in fact. We have made the process of extracting and consuming oil so efficient that nearly every human in industrialized countries has access to a decent supply of it whenever they need it (and perhaps more tellingly, even when they don’t). Consequently, we started taking it for granted on the consumer side of things, thus allowing a great deal of waste. Oil producers get rich no matter how much oil is used, and consumers, well, they get to have a socially acceptable substance addiction.

Everyone was winning until that very famous oil crisis of the 1970s, when prices reached a point that rendered cars inaccessible to many North Americans. What was that about anyway? That’s where the concept of peak oil comes into play.

Peak oil refers to the fact that oil production doesn’t "gush" the way that it does in Looney Tunes. Instead, it follows a bell curve, with production starting slowly, quickly accelerating, levelling off, decelerating slowly, then rapidly declining. Naturally, oil is most expensive when you begin or end the process. Peak oil has already occurred in America’s domestic supply: the U.S. was the gold standard for oil production until it peaked at 11 million barrels a day in 1970, and the country has been in rapid decline since, hence its dependence on foreign sources.
Outside of the US Department of Energy, most industry insiders have calculated that the world will reach peak oil production sometime between 2003 (coincidentally enough, that year was the start of the Iraq war) and 2015. From that point onward, there is no way to avoid a vast increase in oil costs.

As a consequence, any process which relies on oil as an energy source is doomed to becoming increasingly and prohibitively expensive. Being the least fuel-efficient form of transportation available to consumers, aeroplanes are simply not the answer to future development. Air travel will likely return to its roots as a hobby for the rich. This is not to suggest that masses of humans will never fly again, just that until we can make flying vehicles using alternative energy sources, reliance on the industry seems to my eyes a logistical nightmare given the world’s declining stocks of oil.

Maybe just for a second I’ll play the devil’s advocate. It is possible to incorporate mass transit into the proposed development plan. Principally, it is now a perfect time for Canada invest in a high-speed rail network in this country. A corridor in southern Ontario would allow commuters to live in Hamilton and work in Windsor, Toronto, or Ottawa without sacrificing the environment to the blight of highways and their resulting air pollution. Canadian companies such as Bombardier could construct the trains and the infrastructure with steel from Hamilton, thus providing some of those proposed 50,000 aerotropolis jobs. Furthermore, to decrease transportation requirements as a whole, it is time to reintegrate work spaces with domestic spaces, which ironically enough is traditionally what city cores have always done. High-density zoning is the key here, so that we do not have to sacrifice our rich local farmlands to treeless suburban driveways and parking lots as suggested by the current aerotropolis plan.

Maybe Aerotropolis really is a nostalgic dream, back to the highway expansions of the 1950s. Let me complete the metaphor. All those little toy spaceships and cars that signify 1950s Americana, well they were made of American metal back then. Their modern counterparts are plastic, manufactured in China, and engineered to be disposable: three characteristics which signal the increased load we have placed upon our oil supplies, and the increased hubris with which urban planners render economic development as a monolithic and unidirectional entity.

Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas

Guardian Unlimited published an interesting article in May which you can find here .

Launch a local awareness campaign by screening the film End of Suburbia .

Even old guard oil producers like Chevron are getting serious about peak oil.

and now for something completely different

Joys of precious, precious crude. If there's anything that has proven its use time and time again it's our good buddy crude oil. See there's so many cool things that we can make our little pool of hydrocarbons do. Gasoline, naphtha, kerosene, natural gas, benzine, diesel fuel, and the wonderfully enDOWed family of petrochemicals, including plastics, fertilizers and all things poly-, all spring from oil like Athena from the mind of Zeus. The mind in this case are the minds of our most friendly of oil industry scientists, heroes for all (is this what Ward Churchill meant when he called the World Trade centre employees "Little Eichmanns"?).

Here's the skinny:






What a beautiful world of joy and friendly chemicals! See? All those little poly-carbons are saving the world and civilization as we know it.
Or something.

So what happens as oil becomes increasingly scarce? Will we continue to enjoy the fruits of our civilization as democratically as are the current standards? It seems as though our civilization is on the verge of a new form of depression, wherein all that we have come to accept as a token of modern culture will come into question. Food and clothing will be more expensive. Electricity might become prohibitive if alternative energy sources are not optimized. More than likely, the totality of our living standards will have to be redefined. In other words, it's time to get used to a new industrial process.

Oh, the hurt transition will bring...

Happy Earth Day/Lifetime



oil depletion, The Guardian

(how many) x ppl = ?

One of the most comprehensive reports on climate change has been released by the United Nations, and can be found in its preliminary stages here.

1,300 researchers
from 95 countries
and 22 scientific academies

So, once again I have hope that more people can start to believe in the increasingly powerful manner in which human civilization bears down on the planet. It is true that the economic and industrial progress that occurred in the 20th century allowed many positive trends for a majority of humans in wealthy countries. At the same time we cannot ignore the drastic reduction in our planet’s ability to provide the ecological foundation for that wealth and progress.

It’s time to seriously consider the implications for sustainable economies. This consideration necessarily must scale to the individual. It seems that the leaders of our corporations and many in government wish to take a “wait and see” approach, which of course follows in line with a belief in the infallibility of the free market. Are we to allow the welfare of millions to fall prey to a market which is designed to provide a disparity of income across a population?

More importantly, many scientists continue to warn us that the very foundations of our economy are ecological. Our future prospects depend on the adoption of sustainable development.

Could this be the LAST CHANCE! for MANKIND?!? Stay Tuned...

automotive statistics and other games of symantic barbarism

American auto manufacturers have never been ones to face the reality of the changes required by sustainable economies. Now it seems that they are prepared to "educate" the public about the science that they like to believe. It's not that you can bring any real material evidence against what they are publishing; such an exercise would be merely academic. The point is not even whether Ford or General Motors themselves trust the actual words that are being used.

In case you can't read them, the actual words in the ad are as follows: "Autos manufactured today are virtually emission-free. And that's a dramatic improvement over models from just thirty years ago. So if you want to know what it really means to drive a clean car, look beyond your back seat. [Gosh Uncle-Science Man, you're Uncle-Science right to learn me that all chemical compounds ever in the history of ever are visible to the naked eye. Nothing invisible can ever harm us, right Mr. Federal-Budget-Is-One-Crazy-Fucking-Deficit Man? Wait, Gays can spread their homo aids with invisible perversions! And terrorism: TER-ROR-ISM!] See what's under the hood of every new car and light truck we make."

If the medium is the message, then it becomes clear that what is being sold is not the car, truck, or SUV, but rather safety itself. Car buyers need to be reminded of the assurity of their investment, in terms both financial and self-reflexive. See, I bought a good vehicle. I know what I'm doing, and all major decisions in my life are under control. I can afford this vehicle, but more importantly, I can't afford not to have and use it. The underlying ideology behind this ad -- if not advertising in general -- is that the consumer be made aware that a gesture of affirmation to the status quo is a guarantee for mutual success. Of course your kids will be safe, the Auto Alliance tells us: buy into us and we'll drive them to the future in the fast lane.
Publishers need money to do their work, and the importance of advertising revenue to this process has serious consequences for objective journalism, and by extension to the democratic process as a whole. Where can ideological justice be found in such a closed system of accountability, otherwise known as publishing driven by advertiser revenue? Maybe we should begin to hold publishers accountable for (at least some of) the lies spread by their corporate clients.

After all, defamation laws might be turned upon themselves with the following logic:

1. Company X -- let's just lay the poop on the pudding tray and say it was the Auto Alliance -- publishes an ad which tells people that their product follows certain physical laws as determined by the scientific literature.

2. An actual consultation of the scientific literature demonstrates the opposite.

3. Company X reminds the public that they never made any claims to science in their ad.

4. Public watchdogs cry out that the invocation of statistics like 99%, as well as the car-under-the-microscope animation and all of the technology demonstrations from the company website, seem to demonstrate an appeal, maybe even a dependence, to what most come to understand as "science".

5. Company X reminds the public that it is a leader in innovation, growth, and scientific research.

6. An actual consultation of the scientific literature demonstrates the opposite.

7. Public watchdogs try to get media space to share their "opinions" (a kind of news that's always a tough sell if you don't own a 24-hour news-entertainment network).

8. Company X reminds everyone that

AMERICA'S AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY IS THE ENGINE THAT DRIVES THE ECONOMY.
-- http://autoalliance.org/economic/

by buying up ad spaces when other voices want to buy into the dabate.

9. Constitutional Ally (in some circles, known as Minuteman) gets gagged, hooded, and has his penis laughed at by yokels.

10. The general population is made stupider by the fact that they will almost never follow up on the information that they receive in a day.

Company X shouldn't really make fun of the few conscious people who somehow manage to keep their shit out of the swamp, at least in so obvious a manner as showing us all how dumb we are. It's kind of like telling Iraqis that they are free to vote in an election. Yup, Joe and Jane Iraq can say, we are, as you say in your country, free to vote in an election.


Long story short, my case of defamation rests on the fact that by appealing to intelligence and scientific knowledge, the Auto Alliance has incorrectly and quite negatively slandered the true nature of the general public. Let their lies fall like leaves from the sky.

cars should fuck off after spitting in yr face

another consumptive round of innocent behaviour...

Canada finally seems to be getting a little serious about adopting a more Kyoto-friendly environmental strategy in 2005. The federal budget, for example, has $1billion earmarked for “cost-effective initiatives” to reduce carbon emissions in industry. Of course, it seems somewhat likely that this money will be used to buy emission credits from countries which are “cleaner”, rather than actually doing something to make our industries sustainable. So where do us little people fit in? As a matter of fact, everywhere. After all, we shouldn’t think of Kyoto as a “governmental” policy, but rather as one for all energy use.

The reality is this: reducing emissions will require changing energy sources. The vast majority of the North American population has been willfully avoiding changing lifestyles, largely thanks to the efforts of oil lobby groups and reactionary conservatives. Note that neither of these groups represents the scientists who actively study the biosphere or industrial systems, and who have themselves been the principle catalysts for change in the media. Maybe I’m a bit wacky for this, but I’ll trust the biologists who study tree rings, ice cores, and coral formations for climate change rather than politicians and industrialists who have shareholders to address. Britain’s New Scientist magazine had a recent article on climate change which noted that 19 of the 20 warmest years on the scientific record have occurred since 1980: “the bottom line is that we will need to cut CO2 emissions by 70% to 80% simply to stabilise atmospheric CO2 concentrations”.

So, knowing that many shortsighted industries are going to drag their feet on this issue, isn’t it time that citizens became empowered and actually took control of their own negative influence on climate change? Over the next few articles, I’ll outline a few simple ways to – how can I say it – join the 21st century and not ignorantly pollute like all those pricks who lived in the 20th.

One of the more positive changes that you can make for both yourself and the environment would be to adopt cycling into your lifestyle. This alters the energy source that you use for transportation from the oil and gas in your car to the food that you eat daily. It’s really not as impossible as you think. I can speak from experience that once you attain even a marginal level of fitness, then every part of Hamilton is accessible by bike within an hour or two at the most. Those of us who ride regularly can get from Westdale to Stony Creek in about 30 minutes. Granted, it does take a bit of willpower to go riding when the weather’s not the best – winter tends to leave only a few diehards on bikes. But then there’s all that “character” that gets built if you do become a year-rounder. I’ve noticed over the years that most people are impressed by the callous disregard of personal safety in the face of extreme danger, and these same people are easily convinced that heavy rain or a cold wind are terminal challenges.

Naturally I don’t really expect every car off the road and every family on bikes all the time. There are indeed many times when a car is decent option, but I bet that if you are travelling alone in your car, then that moment is not one of them. How often are cars used when they are not required, like most work or school commutes, short trips to the corner store or a friend’s house, vacations along routes where buses or trains are available, or trips to city downtown areas? You can shop for almost everything you need by using a backpack. When you do buy large items, get a cab or use the bus. Hey parents: let your kids walk home with friends. Not to be a grandad or anything, but in my day friends and I either rode a school bus, biked, or walked the 1.5km to our french school almost every day. The few kids who had “nervous” parents would always be driven to school, and picked up immediately afterward so they couldn’t get into “trouble”. These kids grew up to be special people. Those of us who walked or rode never got accosted or abducted, because by and large our cities are safe places during the day.

There’s also the bonus of actually getting to see the scenery while you travel (a gift from rail travel as well, by the way...). Trust me, cycling through the wine country around St. Catherine’s is much nicer than going for a drive there, as you get to smell the grapes in the fields and not the gas in your tank. We are quite lucky to have a pretty extensive network of trails for cyclists in Southern Ontario, and accordingly one can get to any major city in a day trip.

There are two key problems, however, that might keep a lot of people from riding anywhere except in parks and on trails. Cars can pose a fair hazard, especially when you combine their inertia with driver error or arrogance. Many people that I have spoke with cite Hamilton’s manic drivers as the key reason why they themselves drive. It’s too dangerous to cycle on roads they say. I’ve been riding safely in the area for over 10 years now, and will admit that I have had a fair share of “incidents”. Usually these involve cars that don’t see you while turning or changing lanes. As a cyclist, make sure you are visible by getting some lights or reflective tape for your helmet. The easiest way to stay safe is to plan a route which uses as few large streets as possible.

To those drivers who think that bikes should not be on the road and want to make a point by “scaring” us: check the Highway Traffic Act, which hopefully you remember from driving school [aside: why aren’t drivers tested every few years to make sure they are actually fit and capable to drive?]. A bicycle is a vehicle, with the same rights and responsibilities as other users of the road; you may occupy any part of the lane if it is warranted by your safety. So if things are getting ridiculous on the road when you are riding, then slow cars down behind you, and make sure that they have to change lanes or wait to pass. Principally, you need to maintain a sense of calm. Enjoy the ride, but enjoy it by keeping aware of your surroundings. Nothing pisses drivers off more than cyclists who aren’t paying attention to what they are doing.

Sometimes, no matter what, there’s nothing you can do in the face of road rage. The other day, I was assaulted by a random middle age guy whose aggressive driving at the Main + Queen intersection caused me to impulsively throw a snowball at the back of his car (Little Man: that pop can you thought I threw at your car I had picked up to recycle, no more). Endangering other cars, he then spun around to try and teach me a lesson. Little Man: that cum-in-my-face of your spit was classy, and makes me wonder if you kiss your wife with the same lips. I chose to go home instead of fight you because I like challenges, and it was tougher for me to not care about what you did than give you a broken nose and a heart attack.

Problem #2 involves a larger project. Current urban developments are by and large car-specific, or in other words engineered with car traffic in mind to the exclusion of other forms of transport. Cycling is easy in cities that are not suburban track developments. As pointed out in a decent agit-prop documentary called The End of Suburbia, track developments can only exist when every citizen owns several cars and oil stays cheap. As such, for most people in these areas it’s virtually impossible to access public transit or commute with a bike. The only solution is to not purchase a home in these developments, and instead become more socially responsible in an urban setting. Developers aren’t evil men wasting the world’s resources on the most unsustainable communities that they can build. They build what makes them money, and right now a lot of people are buying into the suburban nightmare. If people stop buying, then companies will stop building.

Despite a few obstacles, riding is one of the most positive changes that you can make in your life. Think of it as cheap transportation with a lot of free exercise. Kids learn from example, so getting families riding at young ages is important. They have to get used to daily physical exertion in order not to get accustomed to laziness and obesity, which are arguably the biggest obstacles faced by sustainable transportation. Make a change, and you can feel a bit better that they might have a planet that’s in better shape then when our generation found it.

when is it time for a change? how about now

Remember all that talk in the 1980s and 90s which surrounded the environmental problems which we would all be facing in the 21st century? You know: rising sea levels thanks to the melting of arctic glacial ice, rapid and extreme shifts from desert to ice-age temperatures, increasing hurricane and high-wind activity? Thinking they were all just cries of lunacy from that weirdo geography teacher from the tenth grade, by and large we ignored climate change (inaccurately called Global Warming back then) in favour of business as usual. No skies are falling, we said as over the 1990s we began to get addicted to SUVs and other equally stupid ways to accelerate climate change. It was the head in the sand approach, and it failed miserably.

Let me make this perfectly clear: WAKE THE FUCK UP AND LOOK AROUND RIGHT NOW. Notice that our seasons have been radically altered from the four traditional ones that we grew up with. You might also notice how animal populations have reacted: birds have altered their migration patterns, fish have moved to different waters, and flying insects which normally stay dormant over the winter now have altered life cycles. I think the problem with the way we were taught environmental issues way back then was that all the discussions involved what was going to happen in the future. In retrospect, this was entirely the wrong tack. It allowed many people to ignore data that was presented to them, disregarding it like the nonsense from a religious pamphleteer.

The new mantra is this: climate change is happening now, not in a few decades, not next year. Right the hell this second. Just as it was happening all throughout our recent history when we were talking about future calamities. If you add to climate change, you are making that difference now, not in the distant future which you might not be alive to experience. This sense of immanence can be seen in fact as the hope of the environmental project, as only by focussing on the now can we stand to make change in the hearts and minds of the world.

So here’s a current example, some data to be reconciled if you like. According to the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, due to glacial melting there has been a rise of 25mm in ocean levels since 1960. 2002 had the highest level of glacial melt ever recorded. Now, I am not a scientist and 25mm might not sound like much, but when you multiply that by the surface area of the oceans involved, you end up with quite a bit of extra water cycling around the planet. Where might that water go, you ask? For starters, you might have noticed that it has been raining a lot these days. Today (January 13th), it is currently 14 degrees and raining steadily. You might also want to look around, as heavy rains have recently washed out massive parts of Costa Rica, Panama, Ohio, and California (re: the famously fatal landslide of a few weeks ago, which occurred after nearly 21 days of continuous rain).

Key to this understanding is the awareness of one’s place in the world. I mean by this the knowledge of how one’s life impacts the globe. I predict the 21st century to be one of absolute self-awareness, as we will increasingly find ourselves without the luxury of the 20th century gameplan of “seemingly unlimited resources causing a comfortable ignorance”. There are a few programs online which can calculate what is known as an “ecological footprint”, which details the amount of emissions leading to climate change that are produced by your lifestyle. The point is not for you to be weighed people down with the doomed news of the inevitable decline of the world. Instead, use this information to begin altering your life to suit the sustainability of the earth. It is not evilness which pollutes the earth, but rather lifestyles to which we have become accustomed and do not seek to challenge on a daily basis.

The public needs to made aware that environmentalism is not a punitive process, for the simple reason that we will all be punished together for our environmental crimes; we are all guilty. Environmentalists are well aware that humans by their very existence will make an impact on the earth. The point of the environmental project is to try to move such impacts from the “negative” column to the “positive” one. Take using public transport as an example. Owning a car today brings an annual cost of ownership of about $5000 to an individual, plus $20,000 on average for the car itself. Buying a yearly Go Transit pass (with HSR included) between Hamilton and Toronto costs $3216. Positives: less cash, less pollution, plus you can read while travelling, and sometimes you get to meet the cast of Train 48. If you work in the city you live, it’s even cheaper to travel (a yearly bus pass is $780 in my city, while bikes cost pennies a day to operate and give you another positive: exercise).

The most obvious positive that consumers can notice is a reduction in their energy bills. By installing energy efficient lightbulbs (low-volt halogen, fluorescent) in all your fixtures, can reduce lighting energy use by 70%. The US Department of Energy estimates that current lighting systems account for 25% of electrical demand, of which 5% represents the electricity required to cool or remove the waste heat generated by those old lights. There’s also a landfill issue here, as energy efficient lights tend to last 10-25 times as long as incandescent bulbs (thus making your $5 bulb even more of a wise purchase over its $1 grandfather). If Canada were serious about Kyoto, it could ban outright the manufacture and sale of old-style lightbulbs and subsidize the purchase of energy efficient ones so that we can get rid of all the shitty technologies that consumers have normalized.

There’s a big reason that many scientists are studying climate change, principally that we will be increasingly unable to cope with the change in ecosystems that we have ourselves fostered. Life is a rather fragile thing when viewed in terms of individual species. Just because the earth can survive without us, we should not begin to think that we can survive without it.

ucsusa.org – Union of Concerned Scientists
safeclimate.net/calculator/ – calculate your ecological footprint
changingtheclimate.org – play a new game, the Big Game SUV Hunt!
arctic.noaa.gov/detect/index.shtml – arctic change, according to the NOAA

go rant! go!!

milkin' it

I would hope that conscientious objectors to factory farming practises have tried to spread the word to their immediate circles. I mean, food as a ritual as well as a commodity is perhaps the most immediately normalized behaviour. Many people quite rightly find it difficult to change their eating habits to be either more healthy, more environmentally or ethically conscious, or otherwise.

The fact of the matter is that any research done into where and how supermarket products come into being will demonstrate that our eating habits need to change. It's unlikely that this can be done through legislation, although I would like to see the adoption of a code of ethics and rights in regard to how we treat all sentient life. Frankly, it's a tough sell to a world which does not as of yet fully recognize the universality of human rights.

Dspite some appeals to a sense of Nietschean moral relativism about the consumption and/or exploitation of animals, I cannot fathom a code of conduct in regard to human and animal rights-to-life that is not fundamentally a gesture of empathy. While this sense of compassion and sensitivity extended beyond our own bodies is indeed subjective, it is not irrational and represents a complication to traditional Darwinian evolutionary models.

And yet that is precisely what seems allowable in the human experience. This is most immediately suggested by the negative consequences of modernization. Humanity must recognize the danger that some of its actions pose to the biosphere by many of our insutrial practises. This will change, either by our progression toward sustainability, or our increasing inability to cope with the environmental degredation that we have imposed on the planet. The comsumption of animal products can contribute to this effect, especially when animals are involved in industrialized farming practises which do not consider them sentient organisms.

Environmental questions will increasingly test our ability for a functional morality. The most pressing concern in my mind regarding this fate is how we learn to live with the lifeforms on this planet in a sustainable and non-deleterious manner.

keep things around

don't you throw that piece of shit Swiffer in the trash

This past summer, a friend told me that the $69 DVD player which he had purchased a little over a year prior had died. Naturally, this petit mort occurred about a month after its warranty had expired. I told him that he should get it fixed anyway, as the motor required to fix the loading tray couldn't cost more than $50 to install. That kind of thinking was absurd to him, as he could just pick up a new player for another $69, and that spending about $69 a year on DVD players was actually a pretty good idea. "It's like leasing a car," he admitted.

I tried to argue that there was more at stake than the cost of the player, as electronic components are not easily recycled on the consumer end of things. If Canada were to landfill, say, 200,000 DVD players every year, then we would quickly learn the value of keeping these things around for a while at an increased purchase cost rather than continually disposing cheap models. Then there's the fact that consumers are currently working too much as it is, and such product disposability would quite literally mean throwing away the labour required to earn the money to pay for the shitty product in the first place. Surely consumers would not put up with the illogical nature of an accelerating pace for product disintegration as our technological ability increases.

The first company to prove me wrong was Disney, which announced this summer that it would adopt the disposable DVD system of Flexplay, er, "Technologies". Flexplay thought it would be a good idea to produce DVDs that would self-destruct 48 hours after being exposed to air, thus rendering them effective pay-per-view options for all of us lazy bastards who find it hard to return films on time. Instead of bringing the film back, you toss the DVD in the garbage. Purchase price: $5 - $7 per film, roughly equal with high-end video rentals. Long term cost to the environment: rising logarithmically with trends in human stupidity. One of these trends would be the proposed introduction of these disposable DVDs into every fast food lid you ever purchase, from pop cans and cups to pizza and burger boxes. It should be noted that this trend was inaugurated by AOL's decade-long bombardment of our landfills with tens of millions of unsolicited CDs.

The recall of 175,000 Swiffer vacuums should further demonstrate to us the irrational redundancy of badly produced consumer items. There is simply no reason in contemporary technological terms that an item as benign as a vacuum could betray the owner in so widespread a manner. Companies like to make things as cheap as possible . And yet at the same time it is ungodly to think that we cannot simply make a vacuum and that would be the end of it. I mean by this that the vacuum you have would stick around for a while longer than Proctor & Gamble wants it to. But then in all honesty, no one purchasing a battery-powered vacuum would concern themselves with permanence.

The Swiffer rag came to prominence by confusing the public into thinking that things weren't clean unless you actually made more garbage than you had in the first place. Now you are expected to throw away your entire electrical cleaning system after a limited number of uses. Proctor & Gamble understands well that the foundation of the company's business is the production of garbage, and so they fetishize this act in their commercials. Nice ass you say, as the TV mom dances the dust into her garbage can, along with a Swiffer product. That paid actor sure looks happy now that her prop house is easily cleaned every day. In order to demonstrate the apparent ease with which you clean your house, the production of garbage is glorified by literally getting the cleaning supplies you used out of your life, kind of as though they were never there to begin with. I do hate to state the obvious here people, but those reusable rags that we all used to use before 2000 still work wonders.

We can indeed see these moves to complete disposability -- planned obsolescence, as those marketers like to say -- as demonstrating the end of consumer culture in a logical sense. I mean by this the fact that, in general, production comes pretty easy to us. The economic structures which provided so much personal, technological, and cultural development are currently operating in a field of hyper-production. Industrialism was the growth spurt which has allowed us to realize many benefits for individuals and society as a whole. Yet once grown, it should be time to put away childish things, or at least put them into their proper context. Now that we have demonstrated the capacity to provide for many, it is time to provide a degree of permanence to our possessions. Sustainability is adulthood in this context.

It is time for populations through government to stand up to the market whims of companies and force them to accept that which they have continued to regard as externalities: the cost of cleaning up the shit which they produce. This cost is deferred to future generations. Some US lawyers have even gone so far as to argue that this process amounts to taxation without representation, a position which would ultimately undermine the authority of the present government. We are, after all, in this together, and polluting the earth is to pollute ourselves. Do not kid yourself about involvement with environmentalism (to appropriate Lenin's comments on politics). We cannot allow companies to pollute the earth just because it interests them economically. This is a form of warfare, and perhaps the definitive Orwellian omnipresent-conflict that was heralded to consummate the 20th century. What we call economic logic in the present day is usually a euphemism for totalitarian greed and a tyranny for power which is antithetical to democracy. Ecology is democracy in its most primal and universal form.