climate change policy, science, and activism; photography; cartography and mapmaking
Matters of money
Yesterday night, Toronto350.org formally presented our fossil fuel divestment brief to a representative of the Office of the President at the University of Toronto. I have a few photos of the event.
The lecture was recorded from a couple of different angles, and we will but putting together a good quality video soon.
Dimitri Lascaris – the laywer who will be delivering the Toronto350.org fossil fuel divestment lecture to President Gertler on Thursday – was interviewed on the Green Majority radio program.
As part of campus engagement, Toronto350.org organized a divestment dance party tonight. I have some photos on Flickr.
A recent article in The Economist discussed the likely impacts of technological development on jobs, with an emphasis on which jobs are especially vulnerable to being replaced with hardware or software automation.
The article included a chart listing some of the jobs projected to be most and least vulnerable, respectively:
Some bad news for both people working for telemarketing firms and everyone with a telephone is that the telemarketers of the future are expected to be robots.
More disruptive, in terms of people’s career planning, is the set of presently white collar jobs potentially at risk to automation: accountants and auditors, technical writers, and real estate agents are all identified as being at risk. Pharmacists can probably be added to that list.
For now, dentists, athletic trainers, and clergy remain safe from being replaced by software or robots.
An international effort is being made today to fight back against internet surveillance.
If you wish to take part, I suggest doing so by downloading a version of the GNU Privacy Guard for your operating system, in order to encrypt your emails. Gpg4Win is for Windows, while GPGTools is for Mac OS.
Downloading the TOR Browser Bundle is also a good idea.
Lastly, you may want to learn how to use your operating system’s built-in disk encryption: BitLocker for Windows and FileVault for Mac OS.
None of this is likely to protect you from the NSA / CSEC / GCHQ, but it will make ubiquitous surveillance a bit harder to enforce.
350.org is looking to hire a Canadian organizer. I hope some exceptionally qualified and energetic candidates apply.
As a decision gets made one way or another on the Keystone XL pipeline, attention will shift toward other ways of keeping as much as possible of Canada’s massive stock of fossil fuels safely underground.
Yesterday, a friend and I visited Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada, a new privately-run aquarium located beside the CN Tower in Toronto. I have uploaded some of the photos already, with more to come.
It’s certainly a spectacle, both in terms of the species on display and the layout of the facility. A big portion consists of tunnels of plexiglass through large underwater habitats, allowing visitors to see many species arrayed around them at once.
I am, however, left somewhat divided about how to feel about the place. Their website says that they have a “Comprehensive Environmental Purchasing Policy”, but it remains the case that the facility is an artificial hotspot of biodiversity, drawn together from around the world and presented for the entertainment and education of paying guests.
I’m open to the argument that people need to see nature and biodiversity in order to value them, and the aquarium does make some allusions to the harm humanity is doing to the global ocean through over-fishing, pollution, and climate change. It’s plausible that some aquarium guests will come away from the experience with a greater appreciation for marine biodiversity, and perhaps a greater willingness to play a role in protecting it.
At the same time, there is a degree to which the aquarium is nature in a box for the privileged. The habitats are full of artificial coral and kelp, and ecological themes are mentioned more than emphasized in the surrounding documentation. The “[p]olicy banning staff use of plastic water bottles on site” seems inadequate compared with the main environmental impacts of the facility, both in terms of the acquisition of so many species – some explicitly labelled as endangered – and in terms of the huge power and water usage the facility clearly requires.
The aquarium was full of beauty and biological novelty and I was grateful to go. I would encourage others to do so as well, though it is probably worth thinking about what such places imply for the human relationship with the rest of nature, as well as the contrast between the energy and expense we are willing to devote to showcasing the diversity of life, at the same time as our large-scale choices are rapidly causing that diversity to diminish in the wild.
Especially in comparison with energy conservation, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear power, much of the debate about renewable energy as a climate change solution concerns cost. Which forms are most and least affordable? How do they compare to other energy options? How should intermittancy and energy storage issues be incorporated?
Another set of questions concerns the rate and scale of deployment. How much of the carbon challenge can renewables address, and how quickly can they do so relative to the timescales necessary to stabilize emissions safely?
If individuals have limited attention spans, so must organizations. The notion of policy agendas recognizes the “bottleneck” that exists in the agenda that any policy-making body addresses (Cobb & Elder 1972). These attention processes are not simply related to task environments — problems can go for long periods of time without attracting the attention of policy makers (Rochefort & Cobb 1994). A whole style of politics emerges as actors must strive to cope with the limits in the attentiveness of policy makers — basically trying to attract allies to their favored problems and solutions. This style of politics depends on connections driven by time-dependent and often emotional attention processes rather than a deliberate search for solutions (Cohen et al 1972, March & Olsen 1989, Kingdon 1996, Baumgartner & Jones 1993).
Because attention processes are time dependent and policy contexts change temporally, connections between problems and solutions have time dependency built into them. As an important consequence, policy systems dominated by boundedly rational decision makers will at best reach local rather than global optima. Because of the time dependence of attentional processes, all policy processes will display considerable path dependence (March 1994).
– Jones, Bryan D. “Bounded Rationality.” Annual Political Science Review. 1999. 2:297-321.
Unfortunately, the climate-change-induced melting of the north polar icecap is making it easier to drill for oil and gas in the arctic. Large amounts of fossil fuels are expected to be found in the region, adding to the world’s already dangerously large supplies.
The enthusiasm of companies and governments to exploit unconventional sources of fossil fuels is starkly at odds with the reality that we can only control climate change if we choose not to exploit such reserves – while rapidly scaling back production of conventional oil, gas, and coal.