Here, optimism!

You had me at "digital quantum battery":

Hubler claims the resulting power density (the speed at which energy can be stored or released) could be orders of magnitude greater, and the energy density (the amount of energy that can be stored) two to 10 times greater than possible with today's best lithium-ion and other battery technologies.

What's more, digital quantum batteries could be fabricated using existing lithographic chip-manufacturing technologies using cheap, nontoxic materials, such as iron and tungsten, atop a silicon substrate, he says. The resulting devices would, in principal, waste little or no energy as they absorbed and released electrons. Hubler says it may be possible to build a benchtop prototype in one year.

Ten times better than lithium-ion, in a power-dense capacitor? Pretty nifty. Built out of common elements instead of increasingly-dear lithium? Much better.

It's no exagerration to say that the things that brighten my day are mostly stories about energy storage. Renewable energy production is basically a solved problem at this point: transmission is expensive, but basically a known quantity. Storage is the last nut to crack, and it's actually coming along nicely.

It also gives me a good example of the difference between efficiency and resiliency that I keep harping on. From an article emailed to me by a friend many, many months ago:

Why not just upgrade to a so-called "smart grid" as President Obama has proposed in his economic stimulus package? There are complications, Nocera said.

"First you have to rebuild the grid because the one we have now is a creaky machine from the 1920s, and we keep trying to retrofit it," he said. "Then you're going to have computers trying to manage the energy, which brings up issues like security. You have to make it really secure so you don't have people hacking into things. And then politics. Just wait until you try to run power lines through someone's backyard.

The idea of the smart grid is basically the "efficiency" paradigm: the electrical grid does not, currently, do a good job of sorting out different uses of electricity and determining any kind of value or priority, the way you get (albeit amorally) in a market situation. Enter various smart grid proposals, where hypothetically the grid will know whether there's enough juice to let you turn on your AC or maybe just turn it down a few degrees for you. (Glazing over a varied and huge field for time's sake.) What they all have in common is adding a lot more information and intelligence to the grid.

The other side of the spectrum would be to simply build super-massive battery banks to act as a massive reservoir to both even out the daily fluctuations and provide security to the grid. Now obviously there's virtue to both approaches -- even something as basic as time-of-use pricing is a way of adding information to the electrical system -- but I'd like to emphasize the need for resiliency as well as efficiency: not only would a hypothetical home energy storage system be a good complement to time-of-use pricing, it also gives us things that even the smartest of smart grids simply can't, like a natural demand for renewable energy.

Some kind of small, home-scale energy storage system would be really revolutionary, and there are at least a half-dozen competing technologies out there that could do it.

Taking a break from politics

...or trying to. Seriously.

Maybe palaeoanthropology isn't strictly apolitical, but it sure is fascinating. For example: consider the shellfish. More and more, studies of ancient human settlement patterns are focusing on the early coastal enclaves, and the evidence that early exploitation of protein and Omega-3-rich shellfish provided both a rich food source, and specifically a real jolt to our developing brains in the Middle Stone Age.

Curtis Marean's lecture, if you can spare the 60 minutes or so to watch it, is very interesting. Basically, he may have located -- with impressive precision -- the geographical location where our ancestors come from.

About 170,000 years ago, the Earth was going through a dramatic cooling phase, and Africa's climate got drier very quickly. This meant that hominid populations died out all over, and we know from genetic evidence that the human population shrank dramatically, to a number of breeding individuals certainly less than 1000, and probably around 600-700.

The small band that survived the cataclysm seems to have endured because of their love of shellfish. Basically, their coastal enclaves provided them with highly predictable, energy-rich sustenance while also being located close to diverse plant life that the humans had easy access to. More interestingly, in order to harvest shellfish efficiently, you need a relatively impressive brain and the ability to explain unconnected events in the world around you -- such as the phases of the moon and the tides.

So we have deserts expanding, food resources disappearing, and human populations dropping. If it hadn't been for a larger-than-normal brain, capable of figuring out how to capture, cook, and eat shellfish, you and I literally might not be here today. At the southernmost tip of Africa, driven to near-extinction, a small band of humans held on for just a little longer, and when the glaciers started to recede on the other side of the Earth, this bunch of bipedal, tool-using, and most importantly symbolically-communicating hunter-gatherers would eventually thrive and spread across the globe.

Bill Bryson starts his phenomenal Short History of Nearly Everything by saying, "Congratulations!" By definition, if you're alive today, you are extraordinarily lucky -- every single one of your ancestors for more than 3 billion years survived long enough to reproduce. The odds are not in your favour, and yet here you are. It's kind of silly, but a humbling point nonetheless.

Some nights, I wonder about the ones who never made it. About the African hominids that died in the great cooling that pushed our species to a thin beachhead at the bottom of the world. [1] I'd say they were experiencing the apocalypse, except that they might not have invented religion yet. One thing we can say for them, unlike our modern day Rapture fetishists, is that their world really was ending, and if they weren't being judged they sure as hell were being tested.

There's a sense in which all that was necessary for us to be here today -- that cooling would open up new opportunities for the survivors, who would go on to be fruitful and multiply. Those people were our great-times-10^?-grandparents, and we're fortunate they made it. But, well, tell that to the dead, right?

Of course, I can't resist a little politics, so it's worth pointing out that people who think the human past is a reason to not worry about climate change in the future don't know what they're talking about. The reasoning that "hey, we survived enormous climate change in our distant past, so climate change in the future won't be too bad" ignores a number of complexities, but most importantly ignores the whole "species driven nearly to extinction, with only fortune itself between us and oblivion" thing.

[1] Suck it, Australia.

You and I agree, but with different emphasis

Attention Democrats-in-betrayal: I agree with Glenn Greenwald that Obama got the bill he always wanted. Here's the thing -- he's getting the bill he promised you, too. The whole public option fight was almost entirely absent from the debate during the primaries and the general election. It was a relatively late addition to the debate, beginning in the spring of this year really.

Now, I would have preferred a bill with a PO, or better yet Medicare buy-in. But neither of those things were seriously proposed by Obama during the election, so saying you would have never voted for him if you'd known you wouldn't end up with the public option sounds, well, ridiculous.

Of course, there's plenty of reasonable criticism for the White House and especially the Senate for not trying for a more progressive bill, but here's the thing about Obama -- he's not, never has been, and never will be a President to push the frontiers of the possible. There is a lot of good -- and desperately necessary -- work that can be done within those lines. But -- and this is a comparison that will mainly work for my Ontario readers -- he's basically a Dalton McGuinty-style liberal: wonkish, generally well-meaning, but as much as anyone in politics a Good Liberal(tm), in the sense that he doesn't really hold any unconventional opinions and hasn't, apparently, since 2003.

Anybody, however, who writes things like "No better than McCain" (much less "no better than Bush") is a blithering idiot and should check out, as just one example, the different approaches Barack Obama and John McCain have taken to climate change in the last six months: Barack Obama has sent a substantial number of his cabinet officials (including Secretaries of State and Energy Clinton and Chu) to Copenhagen, while John McCain has basically returned to GOP orthodoxy on climate.

(US) health care dies in the dark

In The Strange Death of Liberal England, a lot of ink is spilled over a constitutional matter -- then of much importance, now largely forgotten -- involving the privileges of the House of Lords, and whether the Aristocracy had the right to indefinitely suppress the will of the elected government. The Conservative Peers had violated all precedent and traditions to put a halt to a Liberal government's policies, and the Liberals responded by threatening to create, en bloc, several hundred new Liberal peers in order to force their agenda through.

The Conservative peers, when told that the King would eventually accede to the elected government's wishes, were despondent. They could either give in to the Liberal government's demands, or irretrievably alter the Chamber they loved so much -- and the Liberals would still get their way. The choice, they said, was whether to be killed in daylight or die in the dark of their own hand. The Tories decided to die in the dark -- they eventually passed the Liberal budget and the government got its way.

The political crises of 1910-1913 were swept away in 1914, so you don't spend a lot of time learning about the People's Budget, or Home Rule, or Suffragism's impact on British politics. (Unless you're a giant nerd. Ahem.) But to put it briefly, any number of things threatened to spiral out of control in British politics in the immediate pre-war period, and in a lot of cases you found elected politicians deliberately throwing fuel on the fire -- up to and including encouraging Army units to mutiny -- in order to do anything to cripple the Liberal government of the time. Attention to these events was closely paid in places like Berlin and Vienna, and grasping powers looking for their place in the sun began to believe they saw daylight through the fissures in British power. Strange Death tiptoes up to, but never quite says, that the opportunists of 1910-1913 as good as brought on the war by making Britain look weak in the years leading up to the war.

Instead, of course, everybody basically shook hands and threw their petty concerns out the window when the war came, and a United Kingdom became a terrible enemy indeed.

As bleak as I may be sometimes, I don't actually think a world-straddling conflagration is actually going to erupt in the next 18 months, so if I were a member of the US political class, I'd be really concerned right about now about not pushing the system to a crisis. I'd be really concerned that people already question the basic legitimacy of this political system after the clear abuses of the Bush era and their all-too-sad continuation in the Obama era. I'd be really concerned that in a well-armed country of 300 million, statistics alone argue in favour of trying to comfort the afflicted, even if it means afflicting the comfortable.

But then, I'm not a member of the US political class. Joe Lieberman is.

A question

If the United States refuses, flat-out, to acknowledge any guilt or tangible responsibility for emitting the bulk of the CO2 that is actually causing the climate change of today, why should China or India give a fuck about what they might do tomorrow?

Twitfucking

This is the best thing I've read all day. In fairness, the day is only 32 minutes old.

Also, I have to remember this when Vicki and I get to our honeymoon -- I wouldn't put it past my friends...

Is there no story the Economist can't bollocks up?

The Economist on the USAF's purchas of several thousand PS3s:

But the desire to play games is not the reason why the United States Air Force recently issued a procurement request for 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) video-game consoles. It intends to link them up to build a supercomputer that will run Linux, a free, open-source operating system. It will be used for research, including the development of high-definition imaging systems for radar, and will cost around one-tenth as much as a conventional supercomputer. The air force has already built a smaller computer from a cluster of 336 PS3s.

This is merely the latest example of an unusual trend. There is a long tradition of technology developed for military use filtering through to consumer markets: satellite-navigation systems designed to guide missiles can also help hikers find their way, and head-up displays have moved from jet fighters to family cars. But technology is increasingly moving in the other direction, too, as consumer products are appropriated for military use.

The article quotes a small handful of other examples, but it's not much to pin a story on. The PS3, of course, is being bought for its Cell processors. The USAF could just as easily buy the processors without the game console, but it prefers to buy the console. Why? Because, despite the article's implications to the contrary, the PS3 is still being sold at a loss by Sony to try and make up market share. (Hey, when you're third of three, you do what you can.) If the USAF wanted to buy the Cell processors without the consoles, they'd effectively be paying a tax to Sony for the privilege.

The story the Economist actually got is pretty simple: Sony is selling the PS3 cheap, the USAF is buying it cheap. Instead, they want to turn it into a story that, frankly, isn't really supported by the evidence they marshall. Show me the consumer-oriented assault rifles, kevlar vests, and UAVs fighting in Afghanistan and I'll buy your story. Telling me that the iPhone is a versatile piece of electronics that can be useful even for people in the military isn't exactly Earth-shattering.

How is this even remotely possible

Saudi Arabia is running short on sand?

Complexity, Vulnerability, and Deception

The way I've blogged -- when I've blogged, lately -- has been to store up points of interest in the tabs of my Mozilla browser until something catalyzes them in to a tab-dump. Meanwhile, there's always been some stuff left over from every tab-dump, little odds and ends that don't really fit with whatever I feel like writing that day.

Take this story: to run an average UK home, you'd need 100 cyclists putting out their best efforts for about... 11 hours. Given that some of these people were incapacitated for a day or so afterwards, we can guess that the slave population needed to sustain a UK home's energy budget -- not including the energy needed to run a car! -- is probably several hundred slaves. This means (if it means anything) that the average Brit would need to rely on a level of human bondage far greater than all but the wealthiest Confederates. And of course, the Brits are relatively efficient!

Now, the article is actually relatively meaningless, except as a useful metaphor. As the article itself notes, humans are poor livestock: you'd be better off burning the fodder than feeding it to humans. (See: Matrix, terrible science thereof.)

But of course, we do all sorts of things in the modern economy that have the appearance of efficiency but are, in fact, madness. Take bee slums and impotent turkeys, the title of Chip Ward's excellent essay from 2007. We subject bee colonies to forced bussing across the continent, crammed in with tens of thousands of other bees in environments where disease, anxiety, and waste all build up in to a toxic brew. This is "efficient" because we make maximum use of the bees to pollinate a wide variety of crops -- but sometime in the last two years we passed a threshold where the stresses built up and we got colony collapse all over the world.

As for the turkeys, well, the modern commercial turkey is so over-engineered by market forces that it needs to be artificially inseminated. This may be efficient, but it is kind of repugnantly delicious.

The point is one that Joseph Tainter makes in his excellent book -- which I've written about before -- The Collapse of Complex Societies. Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote was inspired by Tainter and wrote The Upside of Down which I loved. CoCS makes the basic point that complexity comes with costs. The examples above -- bees and turkeys -- may be examples of efficiency, but they're also examples of complexity and the costs it brings.

Expanded to the level of human societies, we need to understand that complexity manifests itself as the concentration of energy in to expansions of power -- in several senses of the word "power", of course. Pre-hydrocarbon societies collected energy in the form of food, wood, and other forms of natural energy which were then concentrated in to forms of power: furnaces, livestock for agriculture, and not incidentally soldiers for war.

The exploitation of coal, then oil and gas, fundamentally changed that dynamic. Instead of basically the entire population being involved in one way or another in the energy economy -- until the 20th century, the large majority of people were farmers -- the efforts of a relatively small number of workers in oil wells and coal mines liberated a much, much larger number of farmers: farm productivity surged, especially post-WWII, thanks to massive substitution of oil energy.

This is a phenomenal success story for human society: incredible efficiency, allowing the society we enjoy today to exist. It's also got a built-in warning: the base of this pyramid is crumbling beneath us. As fossil fuels become increasingly unuseable for a variety of reasons, the whole edifice of our society is threatened. Canadian economist Jeff Rubin is actually a relative optimist on this front -- he simply thinks we've got a lifetime of recession ahead of us. The worst-case scenario is in fact the collapse of the complex society we happen to live in.

Here's the thing that I worry about: its appears, based on the historical record, that it's very difficult to tell when collapse is happening. One example is Rome. There's some debate about whether or not Rome even "collapsed" in a meaningful way, but I think that debate is deeply mistaken -- a 95% decline in the population of the city itself makes Detroit look like a wonderland, so I think "collapse" is a useful and correct term.

But even in the midst of that collapse -- the population decline started in the 300s, long before the Goths came over the walls -- it was not obvious to the citizens of the Empire that the best times were behind them. Even keen observers seem to have not grasped what we going on. Ugo Bardi gives us the example of Namantianus:

Everything was collapsing around him and he decided to take a boat and leave. He was born in Gallia, that we call "France" today and apparently he had some properties in Southern France. So, that is where he headed for. That is the reason for the title "of his return". He must have arrived there and survived for some time, because the document that he wrote about his travel has survived and we can still read it, even though the end is missing. So, Namatianus gives us this chilling report. Just read this excerpt:

"I have chosen the sea, since roads by land, if on the level, are flooded by rivers; if on higher ground, are beset with rocks. Since Tuscany and since the Aurelian highway, after suffering the outrages of Goths with fire or sword, can no longer control forest with homestead or river with bridge, it is better to entrust my sails to the wayward."

Can you believe that? If there was a thing that the Romans had always been proud of were their roads. These roads had a military purpose, of course, but everybody could use them. A Roman Empire without roads is not the Roman Empire, it is something else altogether. Think of Los Angeles without highways.

Namantianus is writing in the early to mid 400s, by which point Alaric had already sacked Rome three times. In short, it was impossible to argue that things would continue as they had. And yet, it seems (based on the sparse documentary evidence) that people did, in fact, believe that things would continue as they had. After the fall of Rome and the Visigoth's ascendancy, the Senate minted coins with the words "Roma Invicta" on the back -- "Rome Unconquered".

Meanwhile, the Roman system was falling apart. Province after precious province was making deals with the invaders of one kind or another, for the simple reason that the taxes required to maintain the empire were far, far less than what the Goths wanted. By the 300s, Homer-Dixon describes the revenue system of the Roman Empire as something akin to GOSPLAN: mandatory grain confiscation at the village level, with the Empire's requirements coming before the needs of the peasantry. Unsurprisingly, we see a lot of starvation in the 300s. But this is the kind of system that powerful states resort to if change scares them more than popular backlash. (This David Frum essay [!] has a good discussion of the collapse of the Roman taxation system.)

The Roman system was complex, but increasingly fragile, and the people at the center really didn't realize it even as it was collapsing around them. But what would you have advised the Emperor to do if you had a time machine and an inclination to stop the fall of Rome? I like Ugo Bardi's point on this: you probably would have advised something that would have looked a lot like the fall of Rome: massive decentralization, shrinking the military, and letting fields lie fallow to replenish the soils. To the Emperor, Bardi argues, the choice between preventing collapse and collapse itself was really no choice at all.

So what do we advise people to do in order to stave off the collapse of modern society? Well, if you think the problem is peak oil or climate change, the efforts to prevent collapse look, to the people running this thing, a lot like collapse itself: deglobalization on a massive scale, major cuts to foreign military engagements, smaller homes with few to no cars (and the consequent massive waves of unemployment as homebuilders and carmakers are left idle) with some kind of government effort to cram down the use of fossil fuels, leaving some of the most powerful companies on Earth with nothing to do. Again, preventing collapse looks like collapse itself.

Of course, there is a difference, and now I'm going to use the US Civil War as an example: the Confederate States could have slowly phased out slavery over any arbitrary timeline they chose -- they controlled the Senate, Supreme Court, and Presidency for most of the antebellum period, so there was really nothing stopping them from making a managed transition. Instead, they insisted on preserving the odious privilege of white supremacy and the ability to own black people. So what could have been managed politically became a crisis whose result was both the bloodiest war in history up to that point, and a historical disaster for the South.

Of course, the leadership of the Confederacy actually made out okay after the dust settled: the Reconstruction was successfully beaten back, and for more than a century American historians debated how much blame the North bore for the war and its aftermath: almost all, or all. Jefferson Davis, having led bloody treason against his country, died peacefully in his sleep. His Vice-President was elected to the US Senate after the war.

Nevertheless, it's a basic point of political science that wars are negative-sum games, and I think the lesson applies more broadly to the kind of wrenching transitions that societies sometimes need to make in order to accomodate reality: if you know what the end result is going to be, you might as well concede early rather than waste years and lives fighting progress. The problem is that, on the human scale, fighting to restore the pre-Civil War white privilege was in fact a near-total victory: by 1870, 80% of southern blacks were back under some type of debt servitude. The choices that are bad for society are sometimes very very good for powerful individuals.

On a totally unrelated note, I watched Andrew Ross Sorkin on the Daily Show a few nights ago, and he pointed out that, despite having dragged the world in to a near-calamity, absolutely nothing has changed structurally on Wall Street. We are, hundreds of billions of dollars later, just as vulnerable to avarice run amok as we were before the current President was elected.

A handful of climate stuff

James Hansen is starting to look more and more prescient: in his 2007 article "Trace gases and Climate Change", he argued that previous estimate of climate sensitivity (how vulnerable the Earth's climate was to CO2 levels) understated the dangers because they failed to take in to account long-term feedbacks. He argued that a proper estimate of long-term feedbacks would add at least one degree to the 3-4 degrees of expected warming from doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. An independent British investigation has come to much the same conclusion.

Oh, how I wish President Gore had been allowed to take office.

If you'd like some depressing reading, check out the Copenhagen Diagnosis. It basically tracks with the estimate of the German report I mentioned a few weeks ago:

If global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2 °C above pre-industrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly. To stabilize climate, a decarbonized global society – with near-zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases – needs to be reached well within this century. More specifically, the average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink to well under 1 metric ton CO2 by 2050. This is 80-95% below the per-capita emissions in developed nations in 2000.

The 2-degree guardrail may still not be enough -- a warming of 2 degrees globally implies much more warming over Greenland and West Antarctica, perhaps sufficient (the authors say) to eventually melt the Greenland ice sheet and raise sea level by 6m or more.

I'll reserve judgment to see what happens in Copenhagen, but it's worth noting that even if the governments of the world meet their current commitments, they'll still be committing us to at least 3 degrees of warming, enough at the poles to put polar ice at serious, serious risk. And remember that Antarctica is already looking unstable.

Things that amuse me, pt. MMXVI

The belief, usually expressed in the comment threads in newspaper webpages, that climate change is simply an excuse by communists to confiscate and redistribute wealth.

This amuses me for so many reasons, it's difficult to count the ways. Let's start assuming that all but recent history was in fact a blank slate, and that I did in fact want to confiscate and redistribute wealth. I can think of about a dozen ways that would be easier (and more effective by far!) than organizing a decades-long conspiracy among thousands of scientists in the hopes that their claims would be taken seriously enough by political leadership to begin serious state action -- in the further hopes that the actions I desire (namely, confiscation and redistribution of wealth) would be the ones that governments actually did. Indeed, as more than one critic has pointed out, many of the "solutions" to climate change being proposed by the US amount to giveaways to the same polluters who are the cause of the problem. If this is a conspiracy, it's first American result is likely to be an own-goal.

It gets even funnier when one realizes how climate science is situated historically. As just one example, Al Gore mentions in his film and book that he learned of CO2's impacts on from Roger Revelle in the 1960s, and Revelle started his work in the 1950s. These claims are true -- Revelle began his work measuring CO2 (his colleague Dave Keeling did the actual measuring) in the 1950s, and if you'd like to see how far back the records go, you can follow this link.

(The keen eye will note three months in early 1964 with the values "-99.99". These were months that the lab at Mauna Loa was shut down due to lack of funding. In the early days, it was difficult to convince people this data would ever be useful.)

Now, if I were an academic who believed in the confiscation and redistribution of wealth in the 1950s, was there any other option available to me other than organizing a decades-long conspiracy among thousands of scientists? Instead of devoting considerable energies to a task that, frankly, sounds insane even to hear, couldn't I have found perhaps a large, heavily-armed organization devoted to precisely the redistribution of wealth I desired and started singing their praises, or merely gone to live with them?

People who actually believed in the redistribution of wealth had no problem working for the USSR when they wanted to. I know of no evidence that any of the leading lights of climate science ever did. But then, if the nutters believed in actual evidence, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

What is past is prologue

It seems like more than a few people are reacting to chatter that Bob Rae may do to Ignatieff as Ignatieff did to Dion. Backbenchers, according to Angelo Persichilli, are increasingly unhappy with Ignatieff. A number of the people mentioned in the article have disavowed any disloyalty, and Bob Rae himself has called the entire column a fiction.

It's a shame that the Walrus doesn't have it's latest issue online, because the cover article by Ron Graham about Ignatieff's courting, the Liberal Party's history since Trudeau, and the mess that the Party's made in the last year would be valuable reading. Ignatieff is in the mess he's in today in large part because of the process which brought him to power in the first place -- most crucially, he and the people around him seem to have gotten to the cusp of power without ever really considering what they'd do when they got there.

Strongly recommended -- pick it up and pay for content!

For how long?

Steve Benen writes at WaMo:

Based on estimates from the International Monetary Fund, five years from now, China's GDP is expected to grow considerably faster than America's, but by 2014, the U.S. economy is still expected to be double the size of China's.

There's a lot more the U.S. can and should do to position itself for the future, and it's going to take some real leadership (and perhaps a majority-rule Senate) to protect the country's global leadership role.

But is China the world's leading economic power? Not yet, it's not.

This is all in reaction to the news that a plurality of Americans believe China is now the world's leading economic power. In terms of "whose economy is biggest", Steve is correct that China isn't anywhere near the throne yet.

But of course, that's not the only definition of "leading". Long before it was the world's largest economy outright, the US was seeing incredible new inventions flourish in their economy while they languished in the larger but also more staid economies of the Old World. (See telephones, electricity, etc.) Of course, this also depends on whether one counts the entire British Empire as one economy, and all of this gets cloudy when trying to compare historical data.

Example: This wikipedia page (use at my own risk, I know) states that by 1870, the US economy was still smaller than that of the United Kingdom alone, and much smaller than that of the broader British Empire. But by 1870, which country would you have bet on in the next 50 years? (The Civil War was over, the expansion to the west was spreading a human wave over the Great Plains, and the US had just purchased Alaska.) Even more intriguing, Qing China was still larger economically than that of the UK or US -- which of those three had a better time of the future?

Now, it's true that a lot of interesting stuff still happens in the US, and it still has a dynamic economy. But I don't think anyone thinks that the last 2 years have been good for American dominance. And Americans could certainly be forgiven for thinking that somewhere, a baton has been passed.

The Hysteria of the Canadian left

I want to apologize in advance for using a gender-loaded term to describe the writings of a woman, but the fact is that the same words have been written by any number of Canadian men about Canadian politics since Harper was elected:

On every issue, from abortion rights to rendition for torture to fair treatment of non-white citizens who had the temerity to take a holiday and can't come home because they lost weight and don't quite look like their passport photo, Harper is determined to turn Canada into America-lite. He doesn't mean the America of Obama. He means the America of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, with its private affluence and public squalor.

American travellers used to shove a Canadian flag on their backpack for better treatment overseas. I'm sorry that the reverse has happened and Canadians now switch the conversation to Obama as quickly as possibly before the subject of clubbing seals arises.

We have shamed our better natures. But we Canadians will rid ourselves of Harper and rise again to be the decent and intelligent nation you Brits once patronised with such delight.

On any number of issues (hey, Afghanistan was Martin's war before it was Harper's!) it would be nice to pretend that all that is bad in this country started with Prime Minister Harper. But on the Tar Sands in particular, this is pretty galling. The Liberals spent just as much time and energy subsidizing the tar sands in their forlorn efforts to win seats outside of Edmonton. Honest Liberals (like their current leader) were once able to say "we didn't get it done" on the climate change front.

Meanwhile, if Michael Ignatieff is made Prime Minister some day, we already know how the debate around the tar sands is going to go: don't say anything too nasty about Canada's supreme environmental sin, else you risk "national unity". Those flinty, rough-hewn Albertans are so delicate that if we even criticize their main industry, they'll apparently check out of the country -- this according to the guy who wants their votes!

But even more broadly, the whole attitude of "Harper has changed this country in to something unrecognizable, and we need to change it back" is silly. In one sense, any government changes the way the country runs -- that's what governments do. But in a more fundamental sense, it's offensive. The only thing that's really happened in the last 4 years is that the Liberals haven't been able to win an election. You'll pardon me if I don't leap to associate the basic freedoms of my home with the political fortunes of the Liberal Party.

Afghanistan

I believe the law requires me to have an opinion on President Obama's increase in manpower in Afghanistan. So here goes: this is a real missed opportunity on Obama's part. The US will now have 100,000 soldiers in Vietnam -- still less than the USSR used to lose their war, and less than a quarter of what the US used to lose their war in Vietnam.

Except that, to be fair, the obvious parallel isn't either of those examples but instead the recent "success" of the surge in Iraq. But the conditions for that success are not obviously replicable in Afghanistan -- to take just one example, the Taliban are recognized even by the US military for their ability to provide useful state capacity in a way that Al Qaeda in Iraq simply were not. Therefore, one of the key elements of the Iraqi "success" may simply not avail us in Afghanistan.

Of course, I'm a mere blogger, and thus know nothing about these things. Maybe having intelligent people in command of a more thoughtful Army will make the difference. I hope it does.

Nevertheless, the last decade taught me to be deeply skeptical about the merits of grand military plans. Claims that, after losing the war in Afghanistan for 8 years, we can now win it 18 months, are highly dubious to my ears. I believe that by 2012, we'll all be wondering one of two things: a) why are we now committing ourselves to even more years in Central Asia, or b) why didn't we get out years ago?

Stupid questions, cont.

The Munk Debate was tonight, and it seems to have largely gone well for the side of scientific accuracy and good sense.  But Dave Roberts was liveblogging it with a handful of folks, including Peter Tertzakian.  At 8:31, David Roberts writes something about how if the US halved its military spending, the entire debate over whether the US could "afford" to solve climate change would be meaningless.  And at 8:32, Tertzakian writes in that

We'll be militaristic regardless of whether or not there is climate change. Let's keep this nonsense out of the debate.

Ah, nothing like having basic mathematical facts called "nonsense".

Look, if American militarism is inevitable, or the result of some deep-seeded cultural mania, then isn't it just as likely that so is massive, unsustainable consumption? Or, if we're going to wave our hands about military spending, aren't we totally fucking doomed?

To be slightly less bleak about it, there are four basic parts to the US govt. budget (not including debt payments): Social Security, Medicare, the Military, and everything else, where everything else is less than 20% of the budget -- and we need to remember, "everything else" includes a bunch of stuff that in other countries would be counted as direct military spending, such as the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons spending.

So we could try raiding "everything else" for money to fight climate change, but at best we could get only a few crumbs. We could try and raid Medicare or Social Security, but if you want a way to lose a political battle, the best is to pick a fight with old people. So that leaves military spending -- which is both the largest pool of money in the US budget if accounted for honestly, and by the way does almost nothing for the economy. We could raid the war budgets, reduce the dead weight costs of maintaining the legions, and spend it instead on retooling the economy for a world with limits.

Nonsense, say the Voices of Conventional Wisdom. We're going to want to kill people in the future, climate change or no.

Nonsense.

Well that's a stupid question

Matthew Yglesias:

I think the reaction to David Obey’s “war tax” idea is telling—nobody seems to really think there are national interests at stake that are critical enough to be worth paying slightly higher taxes for. But if a war’s not worth paying for, how can it be worth fighting?

Wars are always good, and cost nothing. Climate change mitigation, on the other hand, will be ruinously expensive, so we need to instead invest billions in CO2 sequestration and geo-engineering, which will be less expensive than not emitting CO2, even if it isn't.

Public policy in the West, for the last 30 years and for the next 30.

Too much to hope for

I keep hoping that, years from now, Tom Friedman is going to pull off a mask or something and yell, "I call it The Aristocrats!" Otherwise, all this would just be an obscenity.

That's my girl

So Vicki bought us a new set of computer speakers for the living room (we watch almost all movies and TV off the computer now) and unlike previously, the new speakers have a pretty decent amp and subwoofer. Nothing terribly impressive, but certainly more than what we had before.

To kick the tires a bit, I serve up Star Trek -- the new one. Just as the Kelvin is attacked, and the living room shakes with explosions only to go silent as a body is sucked out in to space, Vicki's mouth opens:

"We need a bigger TV."

Me, mouth full of dinner: "Mbrokay!!!"

Rotten ice (slightly fresher lake chronicles)

If you want to get a decent discussion of what's going on in the Arctic, you can either read this article at the Globe or listen to this Quirks and Quarks podcast segment about it.  Basically, a lot of what looked like multi-year ice in the Arctic turns out not to be.  Instead, what we have is slush with a veneer of ice, but nothing that even slows down an icebreaker.  Unfortunately, the rotten ice looks like multi-year ice from a satellite, so nobody knows how far it has spread.

And in other cheery news, Polar Bears are resorting to late-season cannibalism, something usually unheard of in the fall and winter -- there's supposed to be plenty of hunting grounds on solid ice where the bears can catch seals. Instead, there's no ice, or ice that can't support the mass of a bear. So out of desperation, they're resorting to cannibalism.

The neat thing about global capitalism is that it creates the very metaphors you need to describe its predation.

Tab-clearing, Nov 27

• Search engines are things we use to learn.
• Most global warming has been happening in the oceans. The warming happening in the atmosphere is kind of a sideshow.
• The Globe and Mail gave Jeff Rubin a blog. Weird.
• World's largest gold marketer says we've past Peak Gold. Of course, this titanic global corporation is run by hippies and communists who hate capitalism, I'm sure.
• We don't know how to build cities anymore.
• If Argentina can whip unemployment, why can't the US? (Answer: because America doesn't know how to run a country anymore.)

If true, we're boned

This is the kind of news that makes me want to accept Jesus as my personal lord and saviour:

The East Antarctic ice sheet has been losing mass for the last three years, according to an analysis of data from a gravity-measuring satellite mission.

The scientists involved say they are "surprised" by the finding, because the giant East Antarctic sheet, unlike the west, has been thought to be stable.

Other scientists say ice loss could not yet be pinned on climate change, and uncertainties in the data are large....

Melting the East Antarctic sheet would raise sea levels by much more - about 50-60m.

But scientists have generally discounted the possibility of it happening because the region is so cold.

The Grace measurements suggest there was no net ice loss between 2002 and 2006.

But since then, East Antarctica has been losing 57 billion tonnes (Gt) per year.

If East Antarctica is becoming unstable, then there's no end to the trouble in sight for the next 100 years. Even Jim Hansen -- who, while firmly grounded in the science, is yelling about this stuff as loudly as possible -- has mostly presumed that East Antarctica would remain stable.

These analyses are very preliminary, so here's hoping that, for the first time in a while, that the bad news on the climate front is actually alarmist, instead of prescient.

In private conversations, people are sometimes unguarded -- FILM AT 11

The latest revelations about the private discussions of climate scientists are so shocking, so disturbing, I can barely bring myself to type the words.

You see, my fair readers, accredited professionals in the field of climate science don't think much of the cranks and frauds out there polluting the discourse. I know! Shocking! Even worse, they use some impolite language to express their opinions. Clearly, the entire scientific edifice of climate change will come a-tumbling down.

The whole thing makes me laugh. I've had more than a few discussions with climate scientists as I finished up my degree this year, and the idea of getting excited because of the language in the emails is hilarious. I've had a climate scientist start a sentence, referring to a prominent Canadian climate skeptic, "he's so fucking stupid..." before he remembered the recorder was on. Calling the deniers "idiots" is relatively tame, compared to what some have said to me on the record. Of course, they aren't fond of reporters either, which led to further paint-peeling uses of their substantial vocabularies.

No, really, this won't work

Matthew Yglesias sadly reiterates his belief that my country shouldn't exist:

But the case for US-Canadian political union is pretty clear. As things stand, Canadian citizens are intensely impacted by decisions taken in Washington but have no real ability to influence them. Political union would give residents of Vancouver and Toronto an opportunity to have a say in decisions that are important to their lives. What’s more, the politics of AmeriCan would be more sensible than current US politics. There’d be a lot of microeconomic efficiency gains, and bringing America’s higher per capita income together with Canada’s vast natural resources could be beneficial for everyone.

Let's take these in turn:

• Canadians actually more or less get along fine without a direct voice in American policy-making -- as do residents of Washington, DC. We make our wishes known, and we are either listened to or ignored depending on domestic US concerns. When things are going well, we do alright. When not, not. You know what really protects us from the downside of US decision making? Being a sovereign country.
• The politics of the US would, if anything, become only marginally more sane if we all started voting in your elections. Marginally, as in "margin of error". Canada has only 10% of the US population. This means, if you can do the arithmetic, that even in 2008, as his Presidency was an increasingly bitter joke, that there were twice as many Americans who believed that George W. Bush was doing a good job as there were Canadians, period. An influx of Canadian voters would shift the bars only slightly.
• America is already going to have access to Canadian natural resources, by an obscure and complicated mechanism called "paying for them". This is particularly strange, because unlike the median American voter, Matt usually seems to understand that resources can be bought and paid for on the open market, and that we don't necessarily need to use political means (including massive firepower) to secure economic goods like oil. So WTF?

Let me propose an equally logical act on Yglesias' part: he should join the Republican party. For most of his life, Republicans have dominated either the Congress or Presidency, or both. The GOP, then, is an institution of incredible political importance and as a Democrat, he has no real input on their policy-making decisions. I think we can all agree that he's unlikely to join the Party of No anytime soon, though. If he thinks about the reasons for why that's so, he might stumble upon the reason why Canadians might view the idea of a political union with the US as a bad idea.

Writing the headline while it's still relevant

Liberals and NDP statistically tied!  (Just barely: the AR poll has a MoE of 3.1%, the IR poll has the same.

Won't last, but as it happens I'm reading The Strange Death of Liberal England. Kind of eerie.

The American impulse to misunderstand things continues unabated

Steve Benen, who actually is a smart yankee, writes:

Offered a very good deal, Iran nevertheless continues to be uncooperative.

Except that the deal Iran is being offered isn't very good at all. Following the link, we get a NY Times article which says:

CAIRO — Iran’s foreign minister said this week that his government would not ship its stockpile of low-enriched uranium out of the country, making him the highest ranking official so far to declare that Iran would renege on a deal aimed at defusing a confrontation with the West over its nuclear program.

“We will definitely not send our 3.5-percent-enriched uranium out of the country,” Manouchehr Mottaki, the foreign minister, told the semiofficial ISNA news agency in remarks reported Wednesday.

One of the things that is missing here is the fact that, under all relevant international laws, Iran has the unquestioned right to uranium enrichment. It is, quite literally, as firmly rooted in international treaties as the right to vote. (This is a political science joke, sort of.) As far as international law is concerned, asking Iran to give up the right to enrich uranium is like asking America to give up the right to vote. This was put in print decades ago as part of the 1950s "Atoms for Peace" plan put forward by the US government of the time. Say it with me one more time: Iran has the right to Uranium enrichment. This fact is well known in Iran, and the Iranian opposition -- remember, the "good guys" from the protests earlier this year -- are actually quite fond of their country's nuclear program:

But in Tehran, where officials insist their nuclear program is for civilian purposes only, the deal was attacked from across the political spectrum. When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seemed to suggest it was acceptable, he was criticized from all sides, even by the reformists he long called too soft on the West.

The point of "Atoms for Peace" was to take some of the scary edge off of nuclear technology, and spread "peaceful" nuclear technology throughout the developing world, because there was no possible way that could go wrong. But an inherent part of that was to allow countries that were recovering from World War II -- and those recovering from colonialism -- to enrich natural Uranium to the point where it would be useful for power production. In standard reactors, this is somewhere less than 20% U235, but the important point is that the technology that allows a nation to enrich Uranium to power-producing quality (protected by international treaty!) is the same technology that allows them to make weapons-grade material. This is why Japan is both entirely within the legal limits of nuclear technology and never more than 18 months away from having a bomb in hand. (The above is grossly simplified because it's late and this is a blog.)

Moreover, if we're going to have a global trade in nuclear power, Iran has to have a right to uranium enrichment. Otherwise, we're just proving countries like Iran and India correct when they say that non-proliferation is just a thin cover for keeping advanced technology as the exclusive preserve for white countries.

The other alternative would be for us to get rid of nuclear power altogether, because the enrichment needed for nuclear power is not fundamentally different from that needed for nuclear weapons. But that's probably too radical a step: we're so much fonder of treating symptoms than causes.

A brief story

So because of our recent move, Vicki and I have had to buy a new router and re-arrange the connections between our computers. Where her computer was once wired to the router directly, my computer used a USB wireless adapter to connect to our network. That's basically switched now, so I had to install the USB adapter's drivers on her computer -- because Windows or the adapter manufacturer, for some reason, have totally missed the whole "plug and play" thing that USB accessories are normally so good at.

This led me to three separate attempts to install the driver properly on Vicki's desktop, which had a three-or-four year old install of XP on it. None of these worked. I suggested that we finally reformat her HD and reinstall Windows XP, something that we'd been meaning to do for months now. Except that the registered, original XP install disks I have no longer work properly, so we end up with a partial install of XP that refuses to authorize. How do we authorize? By getting the desktop to talk to the Internet -- something it refuses to do wired or wirelessly.

So, because I didn't want Vicki to have to endure any more time with a Microsoft-induced boat anchor than necessary, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 (which I've been using on my laptop) as a stopgap measure. In contrast to XP's procedure of 1) Pray it works 2) Swear a lot when it doesn't, the procedure with Karmic Koala was, well, what it should be with an OS install in 2009:

1) Select "install". Answer a few questions, none more advanced than selecting one of three partition options.

2) OS installs.

3) Plug in wireless adapter.

4) Mirabile dictu, the wireless adapter works from the moment you plug it in, find the network correctly, and prompts for the password. [This strengthens my belief that the problem was on the MS end, not the USB manufacturer end.]

Now, this is unfair to Windows XP because I'm comparing a 2009 OS to a 2001 one. Fine, but Microsoft has always had the resources to make an OS that works well. I take the fact that most people who've used it tell me that Windows 7 is actually quite good an indication that Microsoft is actually taking the threat of users abandoning them seriously as Apple becomes more of a threat, not that MS has suddenly achieved what was impossible before.

Sadly, I can't convince Vicki to go without XP for too long -- too many MS-specific apps that she needs -- but it will be enough for now.

And generally, I can say that I've now used Ubuntu for the last two years almost continuously, including some pretty heavy use to finish my Masters, and found there was little that I couldn't do on it except of course play Windows games. And the one moment of total digital failure -- when my desktop ate all the data on my USB drive, including two months of interview tapes -- was the result of XP, not Ubuntu.

There are still kinks to it -- it doesn't talk well with my big-screen TV -- so that's really the only reason any of my computers have XP on them still. That and my desire to keep killing Nazis/Soviets/Insert bad guy here.

However did the Americans get to the North Pole without asking our permission?

You know, for a bunch of people who've spent the last few weeks talking about the former governor of Alaska, I'm really surprised that Canadian journalists keep jumping at these little stunts:

The recent surfacing of a U.S. submarine near the North Pole and an increase in military activity in the Arctic this year should send a warning to the Canadian government that other nations are serious about boosting their presence in the resource-rich region, says a specialist on Canada’s northern security....

It is unclear exactly what route the USS Texas took during its voyage, whether it transited through Canadian waters or whether Canada was told in advance about the visit.

I have absolutely no personal knowledge of this event, or any of the other surfacings of US nuclear subs in the recent past, but I'll guarantee you that none of them transited Canadian waters to get to the North Pole, if for no other reason than because submarine crews -- being incapable of seeing where they're going -- don't like to enter narrow passages choked with ice if they don't have to. The Texas stayed well clear of Canadian waters, because the US happens to own this little piece of land called "Alaska" and can make a direct run to the North Pole from there.

Which brings me to another point, which is that we should all really calm down about the whole Northwest Passage dealie. In short, it won't be nearly as exciting as some are hoping if and when it clears, and that's due in part to the fact that -- unlike the Russians -- Canada has never really invested heavily in its northern tier. Take it away, Gwynne Dyer:

The problem for Canada is that all the routes for a Northwest Passage involve shallow and/or narrow straits between various islands in the country’s Arctic archipelago, and the prevailing winds and currents in the Arctic Ocean tend to push whatever loose sea ice there is into those straits. It is unlikely that cargo ships that are not double-hulled and strengthened against ice will ever get insurance for the passage at an affordable price.

Whereas the Northeast Passage is mostly open water (once the ice retreats from the Russian coast), and there is already a major infrastructure of ports and nuclear-powered ice-breakers in the region. If the distances are roughly comparable, shippers will prefer the Northeast Passage every time – and the distances ARE comparable.

Just look at the Arctic Ocean on a globe, rather than in the familiar flat-earth Mercator projection. It is instantly obvious that the distance is the same whether shipping between Europe and East Asia crosses the Arctic Ocean by running along the Russia’s Arctic coast (the Northeast Passage) or weaving between Canada’s Arctic islands (the Northwest Passage).

The same is true for cargo travelling between Europe and the west coast of North America. The Northwest Passage will never be commercially viable.

Emphasis mine. If there's anything to be done in the Arctic because of the receding ice, it will be for purely domestic Canadian reasons, not because the Northwest Passage offers new commercial opportunities.

Which makes me a little sad, as a Canadian...

2012

I'd say "spoiler" alert, but if you're capable of being surprised by the outcomes of a Roland Emmerich plot, you really ought to be reading this blog with two helpers and a drool cup.

The ads for this movie have the phrase, "We were warned" emblazoned across them, and no joke: be warned, this is exactly the movie you think it is. But for all that, it's really not bad. There are bad parts to it, but overall I actually enjoyed it.

The science is atrocious, the writing is ridiculous, but the thing that has stayed with me -- and has kept me crabby -- is a moment late in the film, when they're unveiling the enormous arks that will preserve a remnant of humanity when the global crisis passes. The President's Chief of Staff exclaims, "Leave it China! Nobody thought we could do it in time."

Grrrr. Actually, America used to be capable of big things too. America used to be able to build the Hoover Dam. America used to be able to invent the Atomic Bomb. America used to be able to do the impossible and land a man on the moon.

You want a sign of hegemonic decline? Even in her fantasies, America is too tired to stand up anymore.

This always works out well for us. Except for all the times it hasn't.

One of the developing plot points about Prime Minister Harper's trip to Asia this week is whether, or more likely when, we'll sign a civilian nuclear deal with the subcontinent. There's really nothing left for Canada to gain by staying out of India's market, except for us to make a point about non-proliferation.

Is it a point worth making? Nobody asked me, but it's worth pointing out that the Indians screwed Canada the first time we helped them out with a nuclear reactor, promising to adhere to all sorts of safeguards and not use the resulting nuclear materials to develop a bomb. India's first nuclear explosion used, you guessed it, material derived from that reactor.

Now, countries don't make decisions this way and never have. Canada will almost certainly sign a deal with India because, frankly, we want a piece of the action and the US, EU, and France have all already beaten us to it. There's no embargo, no isolation of India to maintain. But I can't help but feel like we're throwing out lot in with those who have basically killed any realistic chance of nuclear non-proliferation.[1]

The flip side to this is that opening up India to the boys at AECL is another sop to Canada's struggling nuclear industry. This would be the crown corporation that, with every break and every subsidy thrown its way by the Province of Ontario, still couldn't build a reactor that the government would dare build. So wonderful for us -- in order to keep "jobs in Canada", we have to prop up a company that, uh, can't build new projects in Canada anymore.

[1] People shouldn't think I'm blaming India for the end of the era of non-proliferation: India has always stated, rather forthrightly, that it thinks any attempt to keep developing countries from having the bomb while western countries maintain their nuclear forces is unacceptable. That doesn't mean we have to sell to them.

Tab-clearing, Armistice edition

...because if it was "Remembrance edition", I'd have gotten to these before now.

• Is the IEA downplaying the risk of peak oil due to US pressure? (Probably.)
• Everyone hates traffic and public transit in Toronto and other cities. You know what would solve that? Making cycling harder and more expensive.
• The only way -- only way at all -- to put cities on a sustainable fiscal footing is to let them raise their own revenue from some kind of non-property basis, like income or sales taxes. The Province of Ontario has once again ruled out the sensible.
• I really liked this Paul Wells post.
• Robert Kaplan remains a moron.

Things I wish I'd written

Here. Read the whole thing -- the payoff comes at the end.

I knew him, Horatio

A man of infinite jest.

When I met Bernie Stewart, he was already in his 50s and had never had any use for a computer, and literally didn't know how to turn one on. As you can read in the obit linked above, by the time he finally retired he had built a strong small business out of computer repairs.

The reason, as far as I can tell, that a man born at the outset of World War II decided to get in to computers late, was that he became addicted to solitaire. So while it may be the biggest destroyer of productivity since the invention of alcohol, in at least one case Microsoft Windows Solitaire was actually responsible for an increase in productivity.

The fact that flight simulators had gotten shockingly good by the late 1990s, and Bernie had been grounded ever since his first heart attack, probably didn't hurt either.

Anyway, Bernie's the reason I have a great deal of scorn for people who claim to be too old, or too confused, or too whatever for computers. He started from nothing and within a few years was running laps around his teachers, figuratively speaking. His curiosity and good humour saw computers as just something new to learn, a perspective I wish more people would bring to all the areas of their lives.

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.

Shut up, that's why

Antonin Scalia, religious scholar:

He looks particularly queasy when Peter Eliasberg—the ACLU lawyer whose client objects to crosses on government land—suggests partway through the morning that perhaps a less controversial World War I memorial might consist of "a statue of a soldier which would honor all of the people who fought for America in World War I and not just the Christians."

"The cross doesn't honor non-Christians who fought in the war?" Scalia asks, stunned.

"A cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity, and it signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins," replies Eliasberg, whose father and grandfather are both Jewish war veterans.

"It's erected as a war memorial!" replies Scalia. "I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. The cross is the most common symbol of … of … of the resting place of the dead."

Eliasberg dares to correct him: "The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of Christians. I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew."

"I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead the cross honors are the Christian war dead," thunders Scalia. "I think that's an outrageous conclusion!"

Silly lawyer. Whether they believed in Jesus or not, they died for him. Because that's what Jesus was all about. Other people dying on his behalf.

To think that a justice of the Supreme Court needs to have it explained to him -- a Catholic -- that a cross is a Christian symbol, and really exclusively so. The narcissism of the American right still manages to shock me, every once in a while.

Products and services, reviewed

--The Saga of the Seven Suns, by Kevin J Anderson. I wouldn't go so far as to recommend these books. That would be a bit much. But IF you have an unquenchable love of spaceships, things that go zoom, and aliens, then this series is decent fodder. But not much more than that -- pretty mediocre SF, really, though never bad enough to make me put it down. And it manages, in seven books, to tell a less interesting story than Dan Simmons told in one. Still, there's some gold in there if you're willing to pan through to get it.

--Rubicon, By Tom Holland. As I said in my post a while back about the Roman Republic, this book is excellent. Insanely readable and well-written, Holland manages to convey the end of the Republic with all the relevance that it has for the modern era too. But two things really sold me on it. One, it was recommended at Balloon-Juice with a hillarious quote. Two, Holland's introduction to the book describes the problems that face a modern historian really eloquently:

Even the narrative of great events and exceptional men, however magnificent it may appear, is in truth a mutilated ruin, like an aqueduct on the Campagna, arches striding, and then, abruptly, fields.

Holland's narrative comes across with a rare mix of power and humility.

Man, it feels nice to read for pleasure again.

Woof

Lordy. When I wrote -- not even a full week ago -- that I wondered if it was possible for a Liberal leader to go south of 25% in the polls, I didn't actually think we'd get terribly close to it. In all honesty, I actually assumed 27% was the floor for Liberal support -- and further assumed that the 27% was an outlier.

Apparently, I was wrong.

Again, obsessing over every poll is a waste of time -- albeit an amusing one -- but those of us who would like to see Prime Minister Harper be joined by the prefix "former" can be forgiven for wondering when, exactly, the Liberal comeback will start. If 308.com is right, then the Conservatives are now in majority territory, just barely.

One interesting note from the poll is that the news is at least as bad for the NDP as it is for the Liberals. Some have described the trend as the NDP voters switching to Conservatives, but outside of a few areas I don't think that's literally true. Instead, what's probably happening is that conservative Liberals, eager to back a winning horse (and one whom they agree with anyway) are bolting from the party, and the decline in Liberal fortunes is forcing NDP supporters to consider voting strategically, especially in Ontario where the NDP support is still mostly old enough to remember Mike Harris.

Well, now he's sure to win 200 seats

The only thing I'm going to say about Stephen Harper's little piano ditty is that, when I see the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada playing the Beatles all I can think of is this:

If you want more intelligent commentary, I endorse Andrew Potter's comments here.

Totally random question

I saw a university syllabus recently (for a course in third year) that, as part of an essay assignment, expressly forbade the use of sources other than the three (!) textbooks required by the instructor. This is totally foreign to my understanding of what a university paper should be, especially one for a later year.

So, because I know at least a few practising academics read this thing, some questions, coming from a total and honest lack of understanding:

1) Why would an instructor make a requirement like this?

2) Is it common to have a three-source paper in Ontario universities?

My assumption is that a professor might do this because larger class sizes have meant papers need to necessarily get smaller just to be marked. I entered University right before the double cohort, and pecking around it seems like first year students at Carleton have to produce much smaller papers (1/2 length) than I did in first year, but they're at least required to have outside sources.

So, input anyone?

Converging on zero

David Olive's take on the fall of the House of Asper is, I think, spot-on: an obsessive quest for convergence (which turned out to be disastrous everywhere it was tried, as intelligent observers realized years ago) and a reckless collection of vanity projects doomed CanWest. The only thing I think Olive underplays is the purchase of Alliance-Atlantis. While there's no one thing that you can point to and say, "that was what killed CanWest", the purchase of AA is the single biggest source of debt on the company's books.

This is an all-too-common sentiment among CanWest's supporters, and it's kind of funny:

"There is no doubt that in this environment, CanWest had too much debt," Asper said. A seismic understatement. "However, you should not confuse operational excellence with our balance-sheet issues."

As if there's a bright line between the operational side of the company and the balance sheet. The debt was piled on to the company expecting "operational excellence" -- massive profits extracted via efficiency and reduced consumer choice. You can't say the company has too much debt without saying what "too much" means, in this case: the company isn't making enough money. In turn, the company isn't making enough money because... not enough people are reading the newspapers and watching the TV channels.

It's not fair to say that CanWest is doing much worse than any other network -- indeed, BBM data suggests that CanWest is doing pretty well in terms of nightly viewership, thanks to its heavy spending on US programming -- its just that competitors like CTV or, yes, CBC either didn't get in to the convergence game or got out of it much, much earlier before doubling down on the stupid.

And you all caught the bit about CBC and the National Post sharing content, right? If the Public Broadcaster had reached a similar deal with either the Globe or Star, wouldn't we expect the Post to describe the agreement as... welfare? A government handout to a business that's failing in the market?

Okay, so a lot of this is schadenfreude on my part. But I lost all respect for the NatPo when they reprinted Jonah Goldberg's "Bomb Canada" screed in 2002, which was tasteless and should have been beyond the pale even for the Post. Goldberg, you'll recall, was saying that the US should slap Canada around to man us up -- nevermind that Canadian soldiers were already fighting with the US in Afghanistan, and we had already suffered casualties... at the hands of the US Air Force.

It's official

Michael Ignatieff: welcome to the Dion Zone.

Interestingly, the Coderre Contretemps seems to have really hurt Liberal fortunes... in Atlantic Canada. In Quebec, the voters have made their displeasure known... by punishing the Conservatives. Canadian politics is weird.

The big question is, has Ignatieff found the basement yet? Or is it possible for a Liberal leader to go below, say, 25% in national polls?

Stay tuned!

BONUS CRUELTY UPDATE: Alternately, we can now say that Michael Ignatieff is about as appealing to the electorate as Alan Keyes, 2004 -- what was once called the crazification factor. But let me give my Liberal friends a freebie here: Jack Layton is as bad as three Ralph Naders!

*silent tear*

I know we'll all have a quiet little moment of mourning when the Aspers lose control of Canwest. Truly, no family has done more to elevate Canadian discourse than this clan, and it's a shame that something as petty as "obligations to shareholders" could humble such upstanding believers in free markets.

Politics is a skill, and a hard one at that

Jim Travers writes one of the clearest, most brutal explanations for why the Liberals find themselves floundering in the polls:

Three times they failed to stare at themselves while looking for a leader. Three times Liberals opted for expediency over renewal.

In each case the party was so consumed with crowning a winner that it ignored red flags waving. It was so sure in 2003 that Paul Martin would sweep the country that it didn't stop to consider shaky leadership campaign performances that forecast his dithering as prime minister. It was so sure in 2006 that voters would soon dump Stephen Harper that it spared itself the tough choice between Ignatieff and Bob Rae by compromising on the obviously inept Stéphane Dion. It was so sure in December that Ignatieff was the new saviour that it aborted a leadership contest that would have hardened the winner and might have exposed the organizational and policy weaknesses now plaguing the party.

I find myself in the odd position of being kinder to the Liberal Party than a columnist for the Toronto Star, but I don't think Dion was anyone's decision -- I really think the party establishment assumed Ignatieff would win in Montreal, 2006, and was as shocked as anyone when Dion pulled out a squeaker.

That said, the entire column is worth reading. The last sentence should be seared in the the eyes of the Liberal leadership:

But should Ignatieff fail, blame will rest squarely on deluded Liberals who persuaded themselves that returning to power was inevitable and no more demanding than a beauty pageant.

via.