Why, oh why, do I read the Globe?

Marcus Gee:

The Toronto waste department lets you put out overflow garbage if you mark it with a yellow tag, purchased at Canadian Tire for $3.10. But the garbage has to be bagged. So, on a cold and rainy night, I found myself trying to stuff the laundry hamper into a wet garbage bag, muttering curses as the broken edges of the hamper reduced the bag to shreds.

It was a minor hassle and I would have been happy to endure it if I thought I was helping to save the planet. The trouble is that I don’t. Most recycling is a giant waste of time and money...

Oh, goody. It had been so long since Gee had written something asinine about waste disposal, I was starting to forget what unadulterated stupidity looked like in print.

Money aside, recycling gobbles up time and energy. In effect, the city has outsourced garbage sorting to households, turning everyone, from banker to housewife, into domestic trash workers.

Welcome to Canada, the classless society, where in 2009 major newspapers sneer at the implications of upper-class bankers and middle-class housewives being struck down to the level of trash -- pardon me, trash workers. Gee would never call another person trash. Heaven forfend.

Unlike me, most of them do it quite cheerfully, believing they are combatting a dire threat to the environment.

In reality, recycling is a bust for the planet. The materials we recycle – paper, plastic, glass, metal – are not running out. Most metals are in abundant supply. Plastics come from readily available chemicals. Glass comes from sand. Paper comes from trees, a renewable resource. In fact, most paper comes from trees grown specifically for pulp.

Ah, the abundance fallacy. Because human destruction of the biosphere isn't yet total, we should just go ahead and use it all up. But, to go down the list: The price of commodity metals are still at historic highs. (At $6,000 per short ton, the price of copper is higher than any time since the oil shocks, (PDF), excluding of course the last two years of economic frenzy. High prices, for those of you who neglected to take Econ 101 [1] are usually an indicator of relative scarcity, not abundance. But then, we're not privy to the subtleties that come from working at the Globe and Mail, who I'm told have a pretty substantial business section that could explain these things to their columnists.

Quickly, now: plastic manufacturers are leaving North America and moving overseas to places where natural gas actually is cheap and abundant. Glass is extremely energy-intensive to make, which is why the Beer Store and LCBO now recycle and reuse as much as they can -- it's cheaper for bottlers to recycle than use virgin stock.

Paper may be the exception to the general rule -- depending on your interpretation of the data, though you won't be surprised to learn that I side with those who argue that, on a life-cycle basis, recycling paper is better than merely landfilling it. But suppose my side is wrong, and it would actually be better for the planet to dump heavily bleached cellulose into holes in the ground by the kilotonne every year. Here we come to Marcus Gee's perennial complaint: that communities outside of Toronto are unwilling to act as our toilet.

All these materials are relatively harmless if buried in modern landfills equipped with clay foundations, impermeable plastic liners, drainage systems and gas-capturing technology. If there is a shortage of landfills near Toronto, it is only because governments refuse to show the courage needed to convince local NIMBYs to host one in their backyard.

I'm happy to criticize NIMBYism in some forms, but this is really strange. We just had a strike in Toronto which halted garbage collection, and people who live near public parks where temporary dumps were formed went apeshit. Setting aside whether I agree with them, you'd think Gee could at least acknowledge that nobody wants garbage in their backyard, not just yokel NIMBYs that he wants to caricature.

Meanwhile, recycling is an industry that increasingly is being handled in our backyard -- the compost plants that Toronto wants to build are being sited on municipal land, without the Province having to strong-arm anyone. And Gee spurns it.

Why, you'd think that Gee is actually just an irrational crank, with nothing of value to say on this matter. But that can't be right, because he's been given some of the most valuable real estate in Canada's print media to say basically whatever he wants. Surely they wouldn't give such a position to anyone, would they?

[1] I of course did not take Econ 101, as columnists like Marcus Gee used to explain to me during the earlier part of this decade when he was a cheerleader for globalization. So my high-prices = scarcity theory must be Communist gobbledygook.

UPDATE: Should have googled this earlier, but in his column Gee makes much of the $54 million price tag for Toronto's waste diversion plan. The cost of buying the Green Lane Landfill in 2007? $220 million. And that was just acquisition, not including the costs of actually dumping there.

But yeah, recycling is the waste of money.

On the subject of taking people seriously

I just watched V tonight, and I gotta say I enjoyed it. But, should the unthinkable occur and aliens do actually arrive on Earth, I'd like to take this opportunity to list the warning signs for them being our oppressors, not benefactors.

1) They speak our languages perfectly. The US only becomes concerned about whether or not it has enough funny-language-speaking translators when it's engaged in a war of occupation somewhere. An entire civilization of people who are charming, attractive, and take the time to learn our native tongues? Clearly, they must be evil.

2) They claim to need water. Seriously, we'll let you have Pluto. We don't even call it a planet anymore. Just keep on movin', friend.

3) They claim to need metals or some other resource on Earth. Assuming our understanding of the physics of stellar formation are correct, there's no element on Earth that can't be procured from asteroids at far lower energy cost. And given that the Vs claim the desired element is "abundant" in Earth's crust, they could just get it from the moon (again, at much lower energy cost) because the moon really nothing more than a giant hunk of the Earth's crust, torn off and scabbed over 4 billion years ago.

Nice try, aliens, but you'll have to think up a different set of lies. Oh, and most civilized countries already have universal health care. Go eat the Americans, the rest of us don't need your help.

If you ever needed another reason to not take David Brooks seriously

I'd just like to say a big hooray to Ezra for writing this, apropos of Brooks' curmudgeoning over IMs and text messages:

Columns like Brooks's irk me because they demean not only my lived experiences, but those of everyone I know. To offer a slightly more modern rebuttal, Sunday was my one-year anniversary with my girlfriend. A bit more than a year ago, we first met, the sort of short encounter that could easily have slipped by without follow-up. A year and a week ago, she sent me a friend request on Facebook, which makes it easy to reach out after chance meetings. A year and five days ago, we were sending tentative jokes back-and-forth. A year and four days ago, I was steeling myself to step things up to instant messages. A year and three days ago, we were both watching the “Iron Chef” offal episode, and IMing offal puns back-and-forth, which led to our first date. A year ago today, I was anxiously waiting to leave the office for our second date.

It is not for David Brooks to tell me those IMs lack poetry, or romance. I treasure them. Electronic mediums may look limited to him, but that is only because he has never seen his life change within them. Texting, he says, is naturally corrosive to imagination. But the failure of imagination here is on Brooks's part.

To people like Brooks -- and so many other middle-aged newspaper writers -- communications technology (in the broadest sense) has been something that lets them do the stuff they already did faster, or easier. What they simply don't get is that it lets you do other, totally new stuff, that would have never occurred to a previous generation. Like striking up a relationship between snarky IMs about Iron Chef.

What seems to bug Brooks is that young people have options he never did.

Surfacing

Moved in, unpacking, got a cat, been busy. But I noticed that the CBC this morning was reporting today is the last day for CRTC submissions on the issue of a local TV surcharge for cable and satellite users. This is an issue that leaves me ambivalent.

On the one hand, you've got the cable and satellite providers who are basically abusive monopolies, and on the other you've got the legacy TV broadcasters, who wave the flag of "local TV" when they spend -- and make -- most of their money buying US content and whine about getting nothing from cable and satellite, when they get the very, very lucrative privilege of simultaneous substitution. (How many ad dollars do they get from Oscars and Superbowl broadcasts that they would otherwise miss out on?)

On balance, I suppose the hypocrisy of the legacy broadcasters bugs me more. But the whole issue reminds me of Henry Kissinger on the Iran-Iraq war: It's a pity they can't both lose.

Worse suckage than usual notice

Moving tomorrow, to a house that does not yet have Internet access. Blogging will be even worse than usual, as the title of this post implies.

It's been a busy week -- painting the new place, packing the old place, and my Convocation was yesterday. Here's the funny thing: I don't really blog under a pseudonym -- my name really is John. So it was kind of surprising when, about to cross the stage and shake the hands of the Chancellor, the announcer calls out "Joshua..."

Bonus points: when I corrected the announcer, she double-checked her paperwork, as if I was punking her.

Luckily, the correct name was printed on the diploma.

Will (post-)Kyoto climate action keep the poor in the dark?

No.

I'm tempted to write, "that is all", but apparently the latest talking point is that a lack of electricity is killing the poor, and trying in any way to forestall climate change will prolong the misery or make it worse.

To put it bluntly, this is crap, and not even well-formed crap. Kyoto allows low- and medium-income countries to continue growing their carbon emissions. Any conceivable successor agreement to Kyoto will allow substantial growth in CO2 emissions from the global poor, or it will not come in to being.

More than that, for this idea to be credible, you've got to believe that the Prime Minister of Namibia or his equivalent is sitting around, with tons of spare cash to build coal plants, but isn't because of the fear of Greenpeace or a stern talking to from... someone.

In reality, the poor have bad access to quality sources of energy because... they're poor. Grow their economies, and you'll give them more choices for energy. The way the costs of fossil fuels are going, maybe they'll choose renewables, or maybe they'll go with some legacy energy system. But nothing about the fight to reduce carbon emissions in the industrialized west will be a material factor in their decisions. At all.

Whoa

There are, of course, reasonable debates to be had on any number of aspects of e-books and e-publishing. But when you find yourself writing that e-books represent a threat of "holocaustal proportions" and that books are the new Jew (!) you should probably just find a pillow to put your head down on.

There are book snobs, who I'm basically okay with -- hell, I am one in a lot of ways -- but book supremacists, for whom text in the form of, say, graphic novels, magazines, or the web are inferior speciments... man. I just don't get it. To cut yourself off from the firehose of human expression because of narcissism. Sad.

A gloomy reminder

No, I don't write cheery things about climate change often. The reason, quite simply, is that I'm pretty well convinced we're doomed. I wasn't this gloomy in the mid-1990s, when I started learning about climate change, because the pre-Kyoto process seemed to be working towards a political solution. I wasn't even that upset in 2000, when it looked more and more like Kyoto was a dead letter, because I read books like Natural Capitalism and it seemed like, irrespective of government policy, it made good business sense to adopt energy-efficient and carbon-free technologies.

But by mid-decade, it became clear to me that the political and economic obstacles to a truly free energy market (one, I hasten to add, that I believe would truly favour renewable technologies) were too substantial, and the science of climate change became more and more alarming. (I started blogging in late 2004 -- you can, if you like, peruse the archives and watch my slow transformation from "hey, neat technolgy will save us" to "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck".)

It's not that I don't still believe that technical, economical solutions to carbon dioxide emissions exist and could be implemented with relative speed. It's that the political will to encourage such a deployment -- or even to stop hindering it! -- is simply non-existent in the largest emitting countries.

So what would it take to keep the planet safe, and limit our risk to a 2-degree change in global temperature? via DL, the answer:

The WBGU study applies the per capita principle to the world population of 7 billion people and arrives at an annual emissions quota of 2.8 tons of carbon dioxide per person. That's harsh news for Americans, who emit twenty tons per person annually, and it explains why the US deadline is the most imminent. But China won't welcome this study either. China's combination of high annual emissions and huge population gives it a deadline only a few years later than Europe's and Japan's.

The WBGU study, available here, says that we can avoid surpassing what it calls "the 2 degree guard rail" IF: we implement a perfectly-implemented globally pervasive cap-and-trade program which allows the United States to emit only 10% of it's current emissions, and has to buy permission to emit any more than that from countries like Burkina Faso. And even then, America's real-world emissions have to come down 90% by 2030.

So, in 20 years -- relatively speaking, a vanishingly short window -- we not only have to a) mandate a global carbon ration (something I strongly support!) but b) commit the western economies to a decarbonization regime that is presently unthinkable.

Oh, that's all then. What're you having for lunch?

The alternative, of course, is a planet where increasing numbers of poor, angry countries are consigned to starve while the wealthy countries of the world hoard what they have and buy up everything they need. And we've made it clear that yes, we will fight you for things you have that we want.

We should reconsider previously held beliefs

The guys who wrote Freakonomics have written a sequel focusing on climate change. And everything, it seems, is wrong. Not "I disagree with it", but provably, factually, empirically incorrect. Worse, they seem to have gotten here exactly the same way as they got to their last book -- by being delightfully "counterintuitive."

You can of course draw your own conclusions, but I'm really grateful I didn't shell out for the hardcover of either book. Meanwhile, Daniel Davies had their number from early on.

"When future generations ask the economics profession 'What were you doing while the great bubble built up ahead of the Second Great Depression?', and we have to reply 'Lots and lots of quirky little working papers about sumo wrestling and speed-dating', it is going to be really, really, fucking embarrassing"

And we did, and it was; thank God nobody told the truth to HM The Queen, or the high brows of the economics profession might be decorating a series of pikestaffs outside Traitors' Gate.