Rants – Page 3 – a sibilant intake of breath

“2030 Emissions Reduction Plan: Canada’s Next Steps for Clean Air and a Strong Economy”

The Trudeau government’s latest climate change announcement is a plan to cut emissions by 40% by 2030.

The plan also aims to cut oil and gas sector emissions from 191 megatonnes to 110 megatonnes, though the government says it won’t reduce production “not driven by declines in global demand.”

Whether out of political calculation, the influence of the industry, or a simple lack of understanding, this announcement perpetuates the idea that “emissions” can be cut in a meaningful and sustainable way while continuing to expand fossil fuel production. This conforms with earlier analysis of how Trudeau promises action to the public while at the same time comforting business with promises that not much will change.

As long as Canadian politicians are too afraid to acknowledge that avoiding catastrophic climate change requires abolishing fossil fuels we will keep getting plans predicated on the nonsense that we can solve the problem without addressing its chemical causes. It’s fair enough at this point to attribute some of the blame to Canadian voters, who keep proving by their electoral choices that they want the government to express concern about climate change while not even meaningfully slowing down the pace at which we’re making it worse.

It also doesn’t help that the plan’s title sounds exactly like something the Harper government would have created. Climate change isn’t an issue of how “clean” the air is, and setting up clean air beside “strong economy” sticks to the narrative that good policy is about trading one against the other. That’s at best a distorted way of thinking about a fossil fuel dependency which threatens to undermine the very basis of human civilization. For people used to playing for only political stakes, gambling with the future of the whole species is outside of their training and conventional mindsets.

COVID-19 in spring 2022

As Toronto, Canada, and the rest of the world are dismantling their public health protection measures (masks are now mostly voluntary in Ontario) it seems like people’s frustration has gotten ahead of the reality that there will be further waves and variants, in part because of unequitable and insufficient vaccine distriubution globally and also partly because of the voluntarily unvaccinated who keep the virus circulating.

Based on conversations with friends and media from there the situation in China is drastically different. Tower blocks get routinely locked down by people in masks and full-body protective suits. Expatriots are afraid that they will test positive and be forced into an isolation facility.

Even if people would accept them, I wouldn’t say the Chinese tactics are necessary or attractive to emulate. Based on the reporting I have seen, their motives are more political than public spirited: declining to use more effective foreign vaccines out of nationalism, and insisting on “COVID zero” as an attempt to demonstrate the superirity of Chinese authoritarianism over chaotic democratic politics.

It’s obvious but worth repeating that the virus is unaffected by our emotions of exhaustion, frustration, and wanting the epidemic to be over. Measures including vaccine mandates and masking have always been justifiable mechanisms to slow the spread of disease and protect those with compromised immune systems and who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons.

As so often, I wish people had a bit more fellow-feeling and less entitlement around what they should be able to do and to refuse. Politicians and members of the public desperate for ‘normality’ are delaying it by their intransience.

Between all the global forces at work today — from climate change and nuclear proliferation to loss of public trust in all institutions — I can’t help worrying that we’ll never see pre-COVID “normal” again. We may all be bound up in a developing crisis of profound global instability, where systems disrupted from the old normal trend into a new equilibrium instead of back to what we’ve grown to consider normal. Five or ten years from now, we might marvel about how normal and stable the pandemic times were.

The antivax insurrection

For weeks or months last January, my ability to focus and be productive was sharply impaired by constant fear about what would happen in the United States.

Now it’s the less frightening but far more personal anguish about what will come of the ongoing alt right insurrection in Ottawa.

It’s painful because of what it implies about the future of Canadian politics, and because I know friends in Ottawa are being harmed. Even more, it demonstrates human beings’ deeply maladaptive tendency to amplify societal disruption through radicalization into conspiracy theories and sociopathic behaviour.

The only solution to our global challenges is to respond to disruption with cooperation while continually updating our understanding of the world on the basis of solid scientific knowledge. The path from here is there is not visible.

Always tired

I don’t know exactly why, but the insomnia which has been my normal state of life for as long as I can remember has given over to what’s more like never-ending tiredness: going to bed tired, waking up tired, spending all day tired.

It may be from the loss of academic and social non-dissertation activities that give structure and variety to life, or just from the exhaustion of watching wave after pandemic wave crest and break while we collectively flounder. No doubt it comes partly from the rage of seeing the way in which we’re destroying our world, and yet our politics simply side-steps the issue as voters and lobbyists wedded to the status quo keep us cycling between political parties and leaders that match up their inadequate ambition with unserious implementation.

Maybe more than anything my own exhaustion reflects how everyone else seems to have been eroded and abraded: turning inward, turning silent. Maintaining any kind of social connection has jumped in difficulty, even though I suspect that most people could work to reduce their feelings of isolation and hopelessness by cultivating community in the ways which are possible without close physical presence.

I feel like I need something to lay down a boundary in time — or make one day or week seem different from another — to get back to a tempo of thesis work that will let me get the thing done before the university cuts me off irretrievably at the end of the year. And yet nothing of the sort is possible. I can’t reset the location, content, or cast of characters in my days, and so life feels like April 2020 made eternal.

I know it’s one of our worst human habits to develop the pattern of entitlement and resentment: growing to feel entitled to whatever good things we have happened to get, internalizing the notion that we have them as the result of merit or a just universe, and then cursing the injustice of losing it. The habit of mind we need to cultivate is that “nothing here is promised, not one day.” If we’ve ever had the good luck to experience something positive, we should see it as an unwarranted boon from a universe that is indifferent to all our notions of deserving or fairness, and if we should lose it we should hang on to the gratitude for having ever had it.

We’re all going to lose more than we can guess — maybe everything — as the full consequences of our fossil fuel civilization work their way through the planetary system. If our collective response to loss continues to be anger, resentment, and turning against each other, it’s hard to see how we will achieve the cooperation that has the sole prospect of saving us.

Grinching

It’s a tough, strange time right now because of COVID.

Despite the predictable (and predicted) health consequences, governments are not willing to introduce restrictions which would help control this awful wave. They know that the politics of shutting down Christmas would be awful, both for enraged households that feel like they deserve for the pandemic to be over and for businesses that rely crucially on this period for profitability.

Then when it comes to adherence to the restrictions, almost everyone seems to see them as too onerous for themselves personally, given the ways they would prefer to spend their time. Everyone seems to have some nonsense rationalization about how someone else is doing worse things so their choices are fine, or that the omicron variant is nothing to worry about so we should let it spread. And so, inadequate policies become even more inadequate as implemented.

Having not travelled ‘home’ to Vancouver since 2010, I am used to lonely Christmases. I normally feel alienated from the population because their choices show that they prioritize their own entertainment and travel over protecting the Earth. That alienation is magnified this year, with people unwilling to even protect themselves.

I don’t know how we get away from a mindset where people feel such entitlement and lack of responsibility to others, but it’s one that is imperilling us on multiple fronts.

Back in libraries

To do my part in reducing the reproduction rate of COVID-19, since March 2020 I have been avoiding indoor spaces and largely only going out for grocery walking and exercise walks.

I had stepped into a few U of T libraries to pick up and return books, but tonight was the first time I have gone in and read for several hours since pre-pandemic. Three surprise nice features:

Being at Gerstein and Robarts made me feel like a student again, not just an ex-student with a very long incomplete overdue assignment
The legibility of books under these lights is a reminder of how dim the lighting fixtures are in my current Byq Bepuneq Ubzrf apartment in North York (along with the flimsy plumbing fixtures, cheap locks, woeful lack of insulation, and notably inefficient furnace and AC unit)
Seeing people wearing masks properly and voluntarily — because it’s the rule and because it makes sense — is heartening when so many in Toronto do a terrible job (useless clear hard masks, masks around chins, and loudmouths demanding service unmasked in shops and usually getting it because nobody wants to confront them)

As part of completing 50 page drafts of my political opportunities, mobilizing structures, repertoires, and framing chapters I am going to try reviewing and prioritizing the contents of paper printouts in these libraries during the short time ahead.

Covid in fall 2021

It has been sad and frustrating to see so many Torontonians putting their personal enjoyment before public health and ahead of suppressing the viral reproduction rate of the pandemic.

A reckless and deluded few are ‘protesting’ by pushing into mall food courts without wearing masks or providing proof of vaccination. Far more are eating unmasked inside restaurants, traveling to and through crowded places for the sake of recreation, abusing staff and public servants who try to enforce the rules, and generally asserting the importance of their own preferences over the public welfare.

Many Torontonians have followed the recommended precautions and gone further. These splits within our society seem demonstrative of a culture that emphasizes individual consumer choice as the chief influence on behaviour and which accepts a huge degree of entitlement about what people are allowed to do regardless of the ongoing conditions or likely consequences. It’s scary to ask whether we have the culture or the sensibilities necessary to overcome the most threatening challenges to humanity as a whole.

Texas’ bounty-based heartbeat law

America’s unravelling continues, with the Supreme Court declining 5-4 to hear an emergency appeal of Texas’ bizarre and cruel fetal heartbeat anti-abortion law.

Laurence Tribe has written about what the law’s bounty system will do:

It wasn’t just Roe that died at midnight on 1 September with barely a whimper, let alone a bang. It was the principle that nobody’s constitutional rights should be put on sale for purchase by anyone who can find an informant or helper to turn in whoever might be trying to exercise those rights.

That, after all, is how the new Texas law works. Its perverse structure, which delegates to private individuals anywhere a power the state of Texas is forbidden to exercise itself until Roe is overruled, punishes even the slightest form of assistance to desperate pregnant women. Doctors, family members, insurance companies, even Uber drivers, are all at risk if they help a woman in need. And the risk is magnified by the offer of a big fat financial reward for whoever successfully nabs a person guilty of facilitating an abortion once a heartbeat can be detected, typically six weeks after a woman’s last period, well before most women even know they are pregnant. There is not even an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. No law remotely like this has ever been allowed to go into effect.

The prospect of hefty bounties will breed a system of profit-seeking, Soviet-style informing on friends and neighbors. These vigilantes will sue medical distributors of IUDs and morning-after pills, as well as insurance companies. These companies, in turn, will stop offering reproductive healthcare in Texas. As of a minute before midnight on 31 August, clinics in Texas were already turning patients away out of fear. Even if the law is eventually struck down, many will probably close anyway.

Worse still, if women try to escape the state to access abortion services, their families will be on the hook for offering even the smallest aid. If friends or family of a woman hoping to terminate her pregnancy drive her across state lines, or help her organize money for a plane or bus ticket, they could be liable for “aiding and abetting” a now-banned abortion, even if the procedure itself takes place outside Texas.

Adding insult to injury, if a young woman asks for money for a bus ticket, or a ride to the airport, friends and parents fearful of liability might vigorously interrogate her about her intentions. This nightmarish state of affairs burdens yet another fundamental constitutional privilege: the right to interstate travel, recognized by the supreme court in 1999 as a core privilege of federal citizenship.

It’s a heartless and unfeeling religious morality that sees this kind of harassment as desirable. The Supreme Court’s conduct will also further erode its own position as a unifying public institution and legitimate arbiter of constitutional grievances. When people lose faith in unifying institutions — and in the perception that there are legitimate avenues for pursuing their interests — it threatens complete breakdown in the country’s self-understanding as one polity, and further progression into settling questions of policy and law by force rather than through reason and democratic debate.

Greyhound shutting down in Canada

After shutting down everywhere in Canada except Ontario and Quebec in 2018, Greyhound is now shutting down in Canada completely, aside from some routes across the border by the American company (Toronto to Buffalo and NYC; Montreal to Boston and NYC; Vancouver to Seattle).

When the government is so keen to help out those who drive or fly, I can’t understand why they are willing to let intercity bus services come to an end. Particularly given the safety concerns about hitchhiking or traveling informally in remote areas, I think it would make sense for the government to take over intercity bus services as a nationalized entity if there is no commercial operator willing to do it. With passenger train services as slow, expensive, and infrequent as they are in Canada, there ought to be an option for people unable to afford flying or unwilling to use such an emissions-intensive form of transport.

Eye direction and pilfering group photos

Along with people trying to light enormous spaces with tiny on-camera flashes, a photographic peeve of mine is when I’m working as a paid or official photographer, have put together a large group shot, and then one or more people sneak up behind to try to take it themselves with their cell phone.

The inevitable result is that a good fraction of the people will be looking at them, not me, thus giving the photo a confused and jumbled look because of how sensitive we are to the direction in which people’s eyes are pointing.

You can see some evidence of what I mean in this shot, though I put in a significant effort to draw people’s attention to my lens and shoo away the amateurs (who are always so wounded and pained about being denied, perhaps especially after being told why there is a good reason for it). Here is one where I made sure it did not happen, and you can see the unity of gazes which is generally desirable in a shot of a large group.

If you want a copy of a group shot being done by a professional, please wait until they are done and politely ask where it will be posted or if they will send it to you. That way, you won’t spoil the official record through the process of creating your own low resolution cell phone derivative which nobody will see.