Vancouver PD vs NYPD for Critical Mass: protection vs assault

Critical Mass in Vancouver is a very mellow affair. Although there are sometimes incidents, it is predominantly peaceful and generally treated with equanimity. Not so in New York City, where a police officer assaulted a cyclist on Friday:

via Dynamic Critical Mass Vancouver

Contrast this with Vancouver, where Critical Mass is escorted by two police motorcycles who pace the rear of the pack, keeping cars from crowding the cyclists. The police even block traffic to allow the riders to congregate briefly on the bridges:

Obviously a single officer does not represent the entire NYPD, nor indeed his region or country, but the contrast is as striking as the assault. These attitudes and actions do not exist in a vacuum: they reflect the direction and values of the leadership and the society at large. The relationship between Critical Mass and the police is fairly representative of impressionistic differences between the East and West coasts of North America, and of the North and South divide between Canada and the US: senseless repression and harassment vs tolerance. I consider myself rather fortunate at times to live in the North and the West.

Delicious Carbon for Sale or Trade

Although Canada's conservative "new" federal government is locked in a Bushian nightmare of climate doublespeak and bad science, the provinces are doing much better. British Columbia (where I have the privilege to reside) started its carbon tax yesterday, the first in North America. Today following bilingual talks between the Québec and Ontario cabinets (reportedly held 60% in French) were followed by an announcement of a cap-and-trade carbon emission reduction scheme much like those used in Europe, to be implemented by January 2010.

Even if the reactionary do nothing federal government and the oil-producing rednecks of Alberta (our esteemed prime minister's spiritual home) won't do it, the rest of Canada will – or at least 75% of us will. Canadian federalism works. It's a proud day here in our fair country.

Solar powered clothes dryer

About six years ago I surprised my co-workers with the news that I had constructed a solar powered clothes dryer. Most of them said something along the lines of "Wow, cool! How did you do that? How does it work?" Some raised an eyebrow and said, "so you put up a clothesline?" The determining factor was whether the person was raised in an American suburb (the most conformist, appearance-obsessed monoculture in history) where clotheslines are prohibited and as rare as backyard ore-smelters.

Ontario is passing legislation to make clotheslines legal across the province, invalidating priggish municipal regulations and homeowner covenants. They are not hard to build, and they quickly pay for themselves.

Cheerleader of the Apocalypse

Peter Watts is one of the most delightfully pessimistic authors I've ever read. His breakout novel, Starfish, gave me temporary serotonin depletion before it energized me with vicarious grim satisfaction. The cozily hopeless ambiance of inescapable doom continued in the next three books of the Rifters trilogy (yes, it is a four-book trilogy, okay?), but evolved from a self-pitying wide-eyed hopelessness into a grimly enthusiastic, squinting near-nihilism which... somehow... strangely... never failed to lose hope. It is precisely my cup of tea, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the environment, natural disasters, biology, software, and the evolution of geopolitics. Mr. Watts is Canadian, and used to work at the Vancouver Aquarium, and many of the settings are familiar: Vancouver, Toronto, Sudbury.

His stories are grounded in real bioscience – and he provides wonderful notes and references in the appendices. Some of his pessimistic predictions about the timeline for weird bioscience, climate change and various enviro-disasters has been, if anything, optimistic.

"I thought I had years before this stuff caught up with me." _{(Footnotes to ßehemoth)}

His fourth (fifth) novel, Blindsight, is a deep-space adventure with a fun take on the nature of consciousness. And vampires. Good stuff.

All four (five) of his books (and many short stories) are available for free download on his site (which is awesome, shiny, rich & deep). I have donated twice to his tip jar (which he dedicates to the care and feeding of his cats); although I bought the books the first time I read them, I subsequently gave them away, but when wanted to read them again I could, so I really appreciate that he puts them online.

Clean out Canada's mailboxes

Canada Post has an easy service to eliminate junk mail: fill in a form, put it in your mailbox, and Canada Post will put a pretty red dot on your mailbox and refrain from stuffing your box with unread crap. Obviously Canada Post doesn't want to promote this service, as they make a lot of money on it, and they're a "for-profit" government corporation (Margaret Thatcher would be proud). To fill the gap some nice creative types started the Red Dot Campaign to encourage Canadians to reduce waste by eliminating this avalanche of painted pulp. What a beautiful example of citizen activism. I've been printing a few copies of the enrollment form and putting them in the mail room, where people have been snapping them up. Hopefully soon we won't have fifty Best Buy flyers drifting across the floor of the mail room every week.

NYTimes ♥ GM

The New York Times ran an article today about GM's enormous fuel-cell behemoth, a hydrogen-powered SUV.

Like other fuel-cell cars, the Equinox generates electricity from a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, with no smog-forming emissions or greenhouse gases.

Of course, they don't mention where the hydrogen comes from: fossil fuels, notably natural gas, which is burned:

CH₄ + O₂ -> CO₂ + 2H₂

That means that carbon dioxide, CO₂, a greenhouse gas, is emitted to produce the fuel. (The other common source is coal, which is much worse.) The car doesn't emit it – that's taken care of already. And, as a matter of fact, the somewhat inefficient intermediate step of going to hydrogen means that this car burns 30% more fuel than a vehicle that runs directly on natural gas. But you won't see that anywhere in the article, since the Times is too busy making mouth love to a major advertiser.

Granted, hydrogen could be produced through solar or wind power. Someday, maybe, when and if government decides to subsidize that instead of petroleum extraction. It just isn't currently. But to read the Times, you'd think these things were powered by environmentally beneficial fairy sparkles.

Critical Mass

I participated in Critical Mass this evening: a bike ride where approximately 1,800 people take over the city streets. It was a lot of fun, with a great sense of community and wonderful, safe views of the city. It's the only way to see the city by bicycle in total confidence, and without polluting.

Some drivers were inconvenienced, and often lost their tempers because cars were blocked from the street. However, the street was actually being used more by the bicyclists than it was by cars, as the actual human density and throughput was much higher. There is the conception that the road belongs to cars – something that you'll never see in statute, but you certainly notice when you're riding in traffic next to a stressed-out yuppie drinking coffee and talking on his cell phone when he suddenly decides to take a blind right turn, or when you get forced off the road by a twit in a wide-body pickup truck.

Louie rode in the basket in front of me. He was adored by all that noticed him (he's awfully small). Adolfo didn't join me this time, but says he wants to come along next time. He took the picture and video from our balcony as we rode by. The crowd was interesting: freaks and geeks, students and professionals, bike nerds, unicyclists, dope fiends, earth-firsters, ecofeminists, anti-globalization weenies, dreadlocked redheads, and the occasional granny, adolescent, and urban planner.


The police keep their distance, and the only time I saw them was when we had stopped for our victory rally at the middle of the Lions' Gate Bridge. A young man shimmied up one of the cables and hung one-handed from a metal spar, and then climbed back down. The fuzz talked to him briefly. There is no central organization to a Critical Mass event, and everybody takes turn "corking" (blocking intersections) and helping with breakdowns, defusing altercations, and clearing the way for emergency vehicles. It's one of the most interesting social movements that I've come in contact with, and I hope it lives up to its name some day with a critical mass of cyclists on the roads to take back our cities from the plague of automobiles.

Less gas, more ass

The World Naked Bike Ride is June 9. The event is to call attention to the way we are all indecently exposed to automobile emissions, and how cyclists are vulnerable to vehicular homicide on a daily basis. The Vancouver ride starts at Sunset Beach (Beach and Bute) at 1pm.

Greenscaping gets a free pass

A polluter bribes a wildlife group to provide PR cover, then pays a newspaper to treat it as great news.

I read in Wednesday's Metro^* that Land Rover built their four millionth vehicle and donated it to the Born Free Foundation (a wildlife nonprofit). This was reported as straight news, right from the teat of the press release, apparently with no other sources, and presented with no other context. The vehicle in question will be used as a "'Rapid Response Rescue' vehicle for deployment across the UK and Europe". Whatever that means – sounds like a lot of driving around.

So allow me to do the "newspaper's"^** job by providing additional context. In the fifty-seven years that Land Rover has been producing its four million vehicles, the climate of this planet has changed dramatically, and the ongoing holocene extinction event has eliminated between 20,000 and 2,000,000 species in that same time. The four million vehicles that Land Rover has produced will vent 228 megatonnes (2.28x10¹¹ kg) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (conservatively speaking, as that figure is for average vehicles that run for 240 Mm, and Range Rover sells heavier-than-average vehicles with poorer-than-average fuel efficiency). That single car "donated" will itself vent 57 tonnes of CO₂. As any reporter or editor should know, CO₂ is a greenhouse gas which is demonstrably causing mass extinction. So how can it be that a nonprofit that aims to be a Lorax sells out endangered species... for a free car? And why doesn't the "newspaper" call attention to this screaming contradiction?

It is obvious that Born Free likely has more than a passing interest in the corporate wellbeing of Range Rover. It is also clear that Range Rover wishes to position itself as a supplier of choice to environmentally sensitive gas-guzzler drivers everywhere (tread lightly indeed). So there are lots of troubling aspects to this deal, and the "newspaper" is kind enough to preserve our peace of mind by not questioning them. Even if one were to presume innocence and claim that the "newspaper" is simply incompetent doesn't explain this episode completely.

Which raises the deeper question: why would a "newspaper" present such a piece of bald PR as a news story? Ford (owner of Range Rover) advertises^*** in the publication, and the press release was handed to the editor by the PR department of the dealership/manufacturer and told to run it, which the "newspaper" did unquestioningly. Their reasons for printing this press release nearly verbatim are obvious and two-fold: publishers are beholden to advertisers, and publishers are notoriously lazy about producing articles.

So why the outrage? News media is in bed with advertisers – like, wow. But I call attention to this particular case because it exemplifies how the news media, "environmental organizations" and polluters are colluding to the detriment of our living environment and the destruction of the very things they depend upon to survive: paying customers. The results of the supremacy of short-term corporate profit and damn-the-consequences growth, coupled with a compliant and quiescent public and subservient news media, is a hellishly clear path to destruction.

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*^Powers, Lindsay. "Four million and counting: Land Rover gives animal welfare a helping hand" Metro News Vancouver, 2007-05-16, p 13.

**^Why am I using "scare quotes" around the word "newspaper"? Because the "newspaper" in question is freely distributed and not taken very seriously, although the circulation is pretty good for these publications. They are an attempt by the failing newspaper industry to maintain some sort of advertising market as they are eaten alive by television and internet news infotainment. The "scare quotes" denote my contempt for this source of "news" as biased and unprofessional, with the article as a case-in-point. But because they have the word "news" in the title, people confuse it with a professional news reporting organ, which plainly it is not since professional news reporting organizations have standards of journalistic professionalism about disclosing conflicts of interest.

***^In this issue there are no actual Ford ads that look like paid advertisements, though there is a Ford vehicle on the cover, and four glowing articles that mention or feature Ford vehicles.

Wal-Mart goes green

Though I do hope Wal-Mart will follow through on this, I can't help but remember Wal-Mart's "Bring it home to the USA" campaign, with which the company wrapped itself in the flag and positioned itself as the place to shop in order to support domestic manufacturing jobs. You may notice that the company got over that -- and the numbers show that even when it advertised itself that way, it never actually delivered. My hope is that the economics of sustainable development truly make sense for the company, because otherwise Wal-Mart will jettison its green initative the same way it ditched its Buy American campaign.