Rants – Page 31 – a sibilant intake of breath

The Age of Stupid

The Age of Stupid is a poignant and timely film, based around the conceit of sending a warning to people today through fictional retrospective, based on real climatic science and the consequences of continued inaction. It forcefully conveys the point that climate change is the overwhelming moral and political issue of this era. If we deal with it, other things will have importance; if we allow runaway climate change to occur, it will eclipse any other failures. The film is a good example of climate change art, and should especially be watched by those who basically accept the science of climate change but don’t feel the level of motivation necessary to produce real change. It’s not about using fewer plastic bags – it’s about pushing for a new energy basis for human civilization. We need to take personal responsibility – and agitate for systemic change – in ways that go beyond the symbolic and the trivial.

The film makes a number of key points in a convincing and accessible way. Climate change must be managed internationally in a way that respects the importance of poverty reduction in the developing world, as well as the vital point that the pattern of fossil fuel-fired development followed in the West cannot be repeated (contraction and convergence). It stresses how lags in the climate system mean we need to take decisive action long before the full consequences of our choices become visible. On one critical point, the film is both clear and correct: we simply cannot burn all the remaining fossil fuels. There is a maximum level, corresponding at the very most to the lower threshold of runaway climate change. We need to work out what that amount is, and then find a way to divide it among all of humanity, cutting to zero before we exceed it.

The film also stresses how air travel really cannot be part of a sustainable future, when one long flight represents three years’ worth of of acceptable total emissions for a single person, at the levels that need to become ordinary within the next few decades. Especially in the states where per capita emissions are highest (and where the deepest and fastest cuts must be made), we all need to be moving towards lives that do not include such extravagances.

The film also effectively conveys how foolish ‘Not in My Backyard’ (NIMBY) resistance to renewable energy projects really is. People who resist wind farms because they fear their views would be spoiled are completely failing to understand the scale of the challenge we face. While the film doesn’t make the point, the same might be said of those who have a knee-jerk hostile response to big dams, nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, etc. Indeed, it seems inevitable that people fifty years from now would watch this film with interest – either deservingly patting themselves on the back for having achieved a historic transition to zero-carbon energy, or ruefully kicking themselves after being reminded that the consequences of humanity’s selfishness and failure of think at scale were predictable in 2008.

One neat little detail capped off the presentation for me. During a montage showing a succession of years, overlaid with sound and video describing runaway climate change emerging and taking hold, someone around 2030 is quoted asking whether climate change is really happening or not. It is truly frustrating that the understanding of climatic science within the general population is so poor, and has been so effectively confused by the status quo lobby and the failure of individuals to show imagination and empathy.

The Age of Stupid didn’t leave me any more confident that humanity will be able to deal with this problem, but it did re-affirm my commitment to pushing for a sustainable outcome. That would be one that forever replaces the energy basis of our global society, shifting from one based on dwindling hydrocarbons – the by-products of which are wrecking the climate – to one that we can maintain forever.

Greenspun on recent Wall Street profits

Philip Greenspun – founder of Photo.net – has written an interesting post on one way in which big American banks are bilking the taxpayer: specifically, by borrowing money at 0% interest and then plowing it into short-term bonds yielding 2-3%. By using leverage, they can effectively earn even more. Since the bonds being purchased are mostly US Treasuries, this is an especially egregious way of generating private profits at public expense. Having been told that the banks are earning their billion-dollar profits ‘trading,’ Greenspun asks:

“For someone to make money trading, there has to be someone on the other side of every trade who is losing money. Where does each bank find someone who can lose $1 billion every month?”

No prizes for guessing that the losing party is taxpayers and citizens at large.

Greenspun has written previously on investment (including why managed mutual funds are often effectively scams).

In any case, this seems like yet more evidence that banks ought to be seriously busted down to size. It would be refreshing if they could stand or fail on their own merits, rather than propped up in vampiric form because of the systemic risk they create in the financial system.

Why I dislike videos and voicemail

Of all the ways in which information can be presented, videos and voicemail messages are among the most inflexible. While they can be quite good when you are fully interested in the subject matter and have the time to engage with them, they lack vital characteristics of written text. Notably, they cannot be easily skimmed to determine the degree to which they are relevant and interesting. They also cannot be searched for keywords, or automatically filtered on the basis of content. Whereas my emails are subjected to dozens of filtering rules that permit me to understand the content of many messages at a glance, no such approach is possible with videos or voicemail. Furthermore, they cannot be easily integrated into other activities, since they often require both audio equipment and privacy.

As such, I tend to set them aside (often for days or even weeks) and then go through all of them at once. As a result of this, they are an unusually poor way to elicit a prompt response from me. In order to make people more aware of this preference, I added a little coda to my outgoing voicemail message, suggesting that those wanting a quick response should try email instead.

Three strikes rules for internet piracy

The British ISP TalkTalk has been working to show why banning people from the internet, based on unproven allegations of piracy, is a bad idea. Specifically, they have highlighted how many people still use WEP to protect their wireless networks from use by strangers, despite the fact that WEP encryption is easily compromised. That means it is easy for someone to use software tools to access a nearby network and then use it for illegal purposes. My own experience with wireless networks has demonstrated that people really will use them for criminal purposes if they can gain access.

Beyond that, the idea of cutting people off on the basis of three accusations alone runs fundamentally contrary to the presumption of innocence in our system of justice. It would inevitably be abused by copyright holders, and it would inevitably lead to innocent people being cut off from the internet, an increasingly vital part of life for almost everyone. Indeed, Finland recently declared broadband access a right.

To me, the fact that laws like this may well emerge in France, the UK, and elsewhere seems like another example of just how badly broken our intellectual property (IP) systems are, and how badly skewed they are towards protecting the rights of IP owners rather than the public at large. We would be a lot better off if patents were granted more selectively, if licensing of them was mandatory, if copyright was less well defended and expired sooner, and if fair use rights were more effectively legally enshrined. Here’s hoping ‘pirate parties’ continue to proliferate, pushing back the IP laws that have become so unfairly weighted towards those who own the content.

After all, it needs to be remembered that there is nothing libertarian or natural about IP protection. Rather, content owners are having their property claims enforced by the mechanisms of the state. The justification for this is supposed to be that doing so serves the public interest; if that is no longer the case, the laws ought to be watered down or scrapped.

Patio heaters

The photo above illustrates part of why Canada has greenhouse gas emissions of about 24 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person per year (about three times as much as Sweden). It also shows the extent to which we take the easy energy embedded in fossil fuels for granted: gas powered heaters, running in Ottawa in October, to warm a patio with nobody on it.

I doubt renewable energy will ever become cheap enough for this kind of excess to make sense.

More misrepresentation of climate science

A YouTube user called greenman3610 sometimes puts up videos in a series called the ‘climate change crock of the week.’ One that he put up recently is illustrative of how scientific information about climate change is misrepresented in the media.

The initial remarks concerned how there is always random variation around the overall warming trend being caused by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. The featured later media discussion suggests that the original speaker has now abandoned the view that greenhouse gasses cause warming – something that is blatantly contradicted by the original transcript.

The fact that such misrepresentation occurs is depressing for two reasons. First, it shows how low the ethical and journalistic of at least some media outlets have become. Second, it reveals the extent to which people in general are too ignorant of climatic science to identify which claims are credible and which are absurd.

Thankfully, sources like DeSmogBlog and RealClimate put a lot of effort into rebutting faulty arguments that find purchase in the media.

Sick of getting hosed by the Bank of Montreal

I’ve been with BMO since I got overwhelmingly annoyed with TD, but it has now reached the point where it is not worth continuing with them. The banks that blew up the global financial system through their own reckless behaviour are now trying to work their way back to gross profitability by raising their fees. Specifically, BMO is raising the amount you need to lend them, interest free, in order to avoid a monthly banking fee from $1,500 to $2,000. This is probably just the first such escalation. Plus, even with that interest-free loan to them, I would often get fees for performing tasks like moving money between my own accounts online ($0.50 a pop, if you go beyond your monthly ‘transaction’ limit).

So, I am going to ditch BMO and give President’s Choice Financial a try. Basic banking is a simple service for me: just somewhere to receive paycheques into and release rent cheques from. All my investing is done elsewhere (partly at ING Direct, which also has a no-fee approach). The fact that PC Financial offers free cheques, free bill payments, and accounts with no monthly fees is alluring enough even before I consider the interest you could earn on $2,000 annually.

[Update: 8 October 2009] I offered BMO the chance to make a deal and avoid losing a customer. On the phone, they told me that only in-branch managers could do that. When I spoke to one today, she said the only option they had was to switch to a cheaper plan (setting $1000 aside) with only ten transactions per month. In the end, she seemed to agree that switching to PC Financial made the most sense, given that they have no fees and there is interest otherwise to be earned on the money BMO wants you to set aside.

Unfortunately, opening a PC Financial account requires either a driver’s license or a passport. I will therefore need to wait for my renewed passport to arrive, before I can do so.

[Update: 25 November 2009] My PC accounts are now fully up and running, and I cashed out and closed my BMO accounts. Surprisingly, the bank didn’t even ask for ID before handing me the bills and closing my account. They did charge me $8 in pro rated service fees for November – probably one of the more expensive $8 the bank ever collected, since I think they spend a lot more than that to attract a customer.

Pondering smartphones II

At the end of June, I pondered smartphones for the first time and decided on the Nokia E71 (preliminary review here). Since then, I have witnessed mine sicken and die, getting progressively buggier. Bugs aside, I have also found the phone much less useful than I expected before getting it. The web browsing experience is poor; blogging from it is impossible; the audio quality is lower than with my cheap old phone; and the email capabilities that were my primary motivation for buying it were always finicky, awkward, and temperamental. The media capabilities were never a major concern of mine, but it is fair to note that the media player and camera are both rather poor.

Today, my dead phone was revived by the Fido store in Ottawa’s ByWard Market – eliminating all my saved notes to myself (foolish to save anything in local memory!), settings, and applications. The generic OS they installed lacks some of what my phone came with initially, and it still won’t pair with Bluetooth devices. The people at the shop say that the matter of any further repairs is between me and Nokia, and I should be glad that they didn’t charge me for flashing the phone.

As such, I see myself with three options:

Give the E71 another try, in hopes that the bugs are mostly gone and I will learn to live with its limitations as a device.
Get an iPhone, with the annoyance of a three year contract.
Abandon smartphones altogether and get a basic GSM phone with the capability of making calls and sending text messages only.

The choice is complicated by the apparent defectiveness of the E71. It wouldn’t really be ethical to sell it to someone else in this state. Given that, and my displeasure at the prospect of an exclusive contract and locked phone (or spending $700 on an unlocked iPhone), option two is basically out for now.

In some ways, option three is actually the most appealing right now. Smartphones may simply be more trouble (and expense) than they are worth. Perhaps waiting for a few more generations of devices to pass by makes the most sense. That said, given that I have a phone that I cannot really sell, I will probably continue with option one.

If I could send advice back in time to myself in June, I would probably say: “Wait a few more years before going for a smartphone, and if you must get one now, go with Apple’s offering.”

Peak fish

Daniel Pauly, of the UBC Fisheries Centre, has a sad but compelling article in The New Republic. The basic message is a familiar one: governments have allowed, and even encouraged, the wholesale destruction of marine fisheries by industrial fishing fleets. While they contribute less to GDP than hair salons, they have gained disproportionate power and given license to literally smash some of the world’s most productive and important ecosystems.

Pauly argues that we are reaching the end of the line:

The jig, however, is nearly up. In 1950, the newly constituted Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimated that, globally, we were catching about 20 million metric tons of fish (cod, mackerel, tuna, etc.) and invertebrates (lobster, squid, clams, etc.). That catch peaked at 90 million tons per year in the late 1980s, and it has been declining ever since. Much like Madoff’s infamous operation, which required a constant influx of new investments to generate “revenue” for past investors, the global fishing-industrial complex has required a constant influx of new stocks to continue operation. Instead of restricting its catches so that fish can reproduce and maintain their populations, the industry has simply fished until a stock is depleted and then moved on to new or deeper waters, and to smaller and stranger fish. And, just as a Ponzi scheme will collapse once the pool of potential investors has been drained, so too will the fishing industry collapse as the oceans are drained of life.

He cites a study published in Science which argued that by 2048, all the world’s commercial fisheries will have collapsed, and will be producing less than 10% of what they were at their peaks.

Sometimes, it is utterly disgusting to see how humans behave. The fishers who are destroying their own future and a resource that could serve human needs indefinitely; the governments that are so happy to be corrupted in exchange for jobs and political support; the general public that is indifferent to the origin of the seafood they eat.

It’s all quite enough to feed the lingering feeling that seems pervasive in the modern world: that the emergence of humanity as Earth’s dominant species has largely been for the worse, and that the world might be better off without us.

Are coalitions Canada’s future?

With consolidation having gone as far as it can on the right, and with continuing weakness within the Liberal Party, Canada doesn’t seem likely to see an end to minority governments soon. In other states where majorities are rare, the most common governing dynamic seems to be that of coalitions, such as you see in Germany and elsewhere. As such, I find it a bit odd that Canadian political parties have been so vociferously opposed to them, with both Harper and Ignatieff renouncing and denouncing them. The alternatives before us seem to be independent minority governments constantly making ad hoc deals to avoid no confidence votes or more durable alliances between major and minor parties. The latter option seems rather more politically mature, even if it will involve changes in how governance in Canada is carried out.

On a separate but related note, the Canadian political process is an exceedingly blunt instrument. Our elections only make it possible to convey a tiny amount of data – which candidate in your riding you prefer – and extrapolate from that the composition of parliament, the selection of the prime minister, and all sorts of assumptions about what Canadians want and what they have rejected. Opinion polls do provide some guidance, though they are not always well designed or interpreted, and they can be easy to manipulate by crafting questions strategically.

While Stephane Dion had some good and genuinely progressive ideas – most notably, shifting taxation from income towards greenhouse gas emissions – there isn’t much inspiring stuff in the current platforms of any of the parties. Given that, perhaps even a coalition government would simply continue to muddle along with some changes in tone, but few in substance. Perhaps if the Liberals showed a bit of courage and took a position on a big issue such as the deficit, an election would be a more meaningful prospect. For instance, given that the deficit is largely the result of the stimulus that was supposedly required to correct for the explosion of the markets, it would seem sensible that corporations should carry most of the burden of paying it off.