the real problem is the cars

Yes, the real problem is the cars but do you really think they will be eliminated?


Well, no I don’t. I think we are going to pretend that we can get away with half-assing our mitigation and don’t have to make radical adjustments to our way of life, and that decision will end us.

Fuck, we cannot even get consensus on public health measures in a “relatively minor” pandemic.

However one of two things will certainly happen. We will take the minimum steps necessary to keep this planet habitable or we won’t.

Although “eliminated” is the wrong idea. Having a car is not the problem. Building societies that are dependent on cars, so that you can’t go anywhere or do anything without driving, is the problem. Many people in the Netherlands have cars. They just don’t continually need them for everything. And because of that, driving in the Netherlands is way way better than here.

It is unfortunate that a failure to make fundamental changes in our culture and society has already baked a certain level of catastrophe into the coming decades. That is already unavoidable.

Either way, car-dependent culture will either end as a function of a movement toward more sustainable development and management, or it will end because civilization collapses. We get to choose. But there is no third option however comforting the pretense may seem.

So far we have chosen very very poorly.

We could maybe start mitigating?

Earlier this year there was a landslide that blocked the Chilcotin River. The land slid because wildfires in 2016 killed all the trees on the steep slopes beside the river. Without the trees and their roots to stabilize the soil, it slipped.

The first disaster happened 8 years ago. But then the second disaster happened this year. Eight years is not enough time for a forest, to reestablish. And this is going to become increasingly a problem.

As climate change increases the severity and crucially the frequency of dangerous weather events, the time between events will become shorter and shorter. In the case of serious damage to woodlands that period will rapidly become too short for any recovery to ever occur.

The trees that were downed in North Carolina and Tennessee by Helene, they might have a chance to regrow before the are exposed to a similar event, but as the the climate worsens the odds of local ecosystems having time to recover will just keep getting worse.

We should at least be aware that areas that get burned over or wiped by floods, they are very likely never to get a chance to recover in the next several decades, being hit over and over by similar events.

And while to some extent the consequences of our worse-than-no-progress on mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions so far has baked in a certain degree of future peril, there is no time like the present to start doing something effective to actually replace the largest part of our fossil-fuel dependence with an actual source of large quantities of low-carbon energy.

Low Flow Toilets

You will probably immediately think of precious-water conservation. But that is in no way how we got low-flow toilets. In an age of ever-growing Conservative economics philosophy municipalities with increasing populations were facing a demand for more water. But that would have required spending on public utilities, which would have jeopardized ideological tax cuts. So the solution was that more people needing more water infrastructure investment would just have to do with less.

Which was tricky. Because, if you have even a very basic understanding of wastewater management, you will understand that solid waste is carried through the system by the volume of water flushed with it. Less water, less push.

And so, in the subsequent years and decades after this superficially “Green” conservation measure was enacted, the very same municipalities found themselves spending large sums of money on, for example, replacing or relining sewer laterals which were failing as a result of low water flow.

And the critical lesson here was that more people need more resources. That just telling each individual to make do with less, that does not work.

And so it is with every existential problem we face today. Be it a crisis in energy or resources, sustaining a higher population will always increase the demand we make on this finite system we live in. And unless you are blind, you ought to see that we are depleting this world at a rapidly increasing rate which is not sustainable. And fundamentally, at the base of that is the number of people we are multiplying our individual need for resources by.

People do not want to deal with population. No, that is not it. People are actively aggressive toward anyone discussing overpopulation. It is a taboo subject. “More people good!” is the orthodoxy. But no matter how you want to believe otherwise, THAT is not going to work out.

Four OH Onederground!!!

Firstly, building another highway UNDER the 410 would be a geotechnical and logistical nightmare. Try to think about all the buried services and such that would be cut and need replacement. Such a project could disrupt and make traffic much worse for decades. More than that, it would be a construction nightmare for anyone or any business along the route the whole time.

Tying in a tunnel with the above lanes would require much much larger interchanges where there were connections. This would require taking land, much of it in use, away from surrounding homes, businesses and industry. Remember this mega-farce would be cut right through a dense cityscape.

A many kilometres long tunnel would be a hazard when any accident happened in it. If it is meant to be a super-express, then exits would have to be widely spaced. Have fun sitting in a 14 km backup for four hours, underground.

But here is the real thing. Induced traffic demand is, at this point, well understood. Although obviously not by DoFo. No matter how many lanes you add to the 401, be they beside above under or bypassing the existing lanes, this can NEVER reduce congestion. That never works. That never has worked, which if you drive, you must have actually noticed. No highway expansion in our history has not made traffic worse. It is inevitable. DoFo, in a spectacular display of ignorant stupidity, is just showing us that he doesn’t know anything about transportation planning, or doesn’t care (which may be more likely) and is also not capable of listening to his own experts.

And OMG the cost. Based on the Big Dig (Boston) a 401 tunnel, if it were ever completed, would cost something like $29 billion. But it almost certainly would not be completed because the project would take so long and be so problematic, that a subsequent government would certainly cancel the folly. But in the mean time I suppose, it would be a giant quid pro quo cash-cow for OPC donors.

And here it the real bugger of the matter. Even if the cost did not skyrocket above my estimate, that amount of investment in transit around Toronto WOULD improve traffic congestion significantly.

And as every sensible person looks at this delusional fantasy bullshit and says, “what the fuck,” there are a legion of chair-leg chewing gullible short-sighted ignorant deplorables, sitting in traffic, shouting the old lie, “Hell ya! Just one more lane will fix it.”

Renaming shit instead of fixing shit.

There is a road around somewhere called Stephenson Rd. “George Stephenson was an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer during the Industrial Revolution.” One could argue, that what Stephenson did, kicked off the series of events that is at the heart of our climate emergency and the current ongoing mass extinction.

Literally the industrial revolution and the steam engine started what may, within decades now, bring down civilization, kill and displace, maybe not in that order, billions of people, and wipe out most species. Surely, this is the person in human history who did the worst thing…

We had better rename Stephenson Rd, “Happy Sunshine Flowers Of The Truth Of The People Who Love Life” Road, in some obscure language. Cause that is the move that will avert a climate disaster.

ROM

There is a fundamental problem with, “Ontario philanthropists are world-class supporters of educational landmarks like Royal Ontario Museum.”—Save Ontario’s Science Centre

First of all, philanthropy is a symptom of social dysfunction where for anything good to happen, we have to rely on the fickle charity of the rich to bless this or that project or needy individual on a whim. Robust social services and investments for all Canadians are replaced with begging for scraps. This is aristocracy, not democracy.

Secondly, the people rich enough to be philanthropic at the level that pays for the kind of thing that happened to the ROM, they are the same people who are “Conservative” party donors. They are the people who put the corrupt government in power that undermines public services and privatizes community assets to create profit opportunities for those same rich donors. They are the real estate profiteers who are snapping at the land the OSC is in the way of. They got rich enough to be able to play at philanthropy through the very mechanism that makes that philanthropy seem like a remedy to the lack of investment in social programs that their political sock puppets perpetuate.

And thirdly… OMG! The ROM rebuild that resulted in those lopsided black pyramids was a rich family’s folly that made itself ridiculous at every turn. The design was not fit for purpose. It wastes so much space. Somehow they started to build it without considering that the design would have allowed light to damage objects on display, so on the fly during construction they had to replace many of the windows with opaque panels. They literally had not considered if that “space” was suitable for housing the ROM collection.

If you have ever been visiting the ROM when a wave of “philanthropists” is showing up at your museum for a gala, and been part of the crowd of peasants being herded out of the building, while the aristocracy arrive to claim their space, then you have had an object lesson in who principally benefits from “world-class,” 🤦🏽‍♂️ tax deductible, philanthropic investment.

The Good

People will stridently defend their Sunday-school version of Christianity the Good. My mum was raised in the Salvation army surrounded by genocidal missionary zeal. She became a United Church Sunday school teacher. She taught us about how great and good Christianity and Christians are.

Christian Churches ran residential schools until 1969. The United Church publicly admitted that their residential schools were evil in August 1986, when I was 22 and long past tolerating church. The last residential school in Canada was closed in 1997, when I was 33. By then I think my mum had stopped going to church, she had certainly stopped teaching Sunday school.

I was being “taught” in Sunday school while children were being tormented and killed by priests and nuns and ministers and Christian school administrations. My mum was a 50 year old Sunday School teacher when Churches had been filling the mass graves her entire life. And it went on.

It was near the turn of the century when it was in the news a lot when I first talked to my mum about the atrocities of the Canadian Indian residential school system. And she said outright that that could not be true. That could not have happened. It could not have happened because she believed the Sunday-school version of Christianity the Good that she had learned and then taught.

It is a lie.

Low hanging fruit.

fElon tRump had a little incoherent rant about windmills, what did you expect? I am quite certain he no more understands wind energy than he apparently does anything else. But the problem is that in a very general sense, with all possible generosity, he was not wrong. Wind-power is, and will be, a delusional fantasy that has been the cornerstone of NO PROGRESS on depreciating fossil fuel for THIRTY-TWO YEARS. Picking on windmills is low hanging fruit that has been planted right there by, potentially, well meaning Greenish dreamers. And people who do not want Reich-wing christian evangelical extremism should not have left it hanging for the Orange Turd to point at and declare that we can’t have an energy transition.

But we could have an energy transition. It is the thing both tRump and Robert Habeck are obstructing. We could depreciate much of our fossil fuel dependence if we were committed to building an economical source of large amounts of electricity with a minimal footprint. And that revolution would be a nuclear energy transition.

It is genuinely the case that civilization may not survive, in any very recognizable form in another century, unless moderate, sensible people seize that golden apple and call it their own.

Warning: If three goddesses approach you, DO NOT give any one of them your golden apple.

Traffic, not the low spark of high-healed boys.

I would make sense, on local, primarily residential streets, to set the speed to 30… except…

There is a clear contradiction between signing a road or street at a low speed and designing that same road or street or stroad for a much higher speed. Because we have built car-centric car-dependent communities, most people are driving on straight wide multi-lane roads that are clearly designed for much higher speeds than they are posted. So posting them at a slower speed is simply wrong.

And the fact that almost everyone is exceeding low posted limits, in line with the design speed of roadways is an acknowledgement that posting lower limits on high-speed roads is not a solution. Nor is appalling automated enforcement, which should anger any sensible democratic person who doesn’t think they should have a predator-prey relationship with their government.

If you want slower speeds, inevitably you have to design the road or street or community for the speed you want people to drive at.

In the Netherlands there are hardly any speed-limit signs, or stop signs for that matter. Because they have redesigned the actual road/street space to the speed specifications that people should be driving at.

Reality

History is amazing cool stuff. And it can be quite interesting and insightful to learn about ancient philosophical and mythological thought. It can inform your understanding of why some peoples did some things. For instance the concept of Karma was used to justify the caste system.

And I can easily forgive historic people, who could not know better, their cosmological myths.

Prior to the deciphering of the first Rosetta stone people had no way of knowing any actual Egyptian ancient history because no one could read hieroglyphic or Demotic scripts. But many decades of archaeology and translation have given us a real history of Egypt that precludes the biblical account. Exodus is an entire fiction. And while in 1799 it was reasonable for a person to “believe” that account, we have known better since about the 1840s. Today such belief is wilful ignorance.

And I enjoy listening to programs about, for instance, Greek philosophy or Karma. But I find it genuinely disturbing, especially in our current bizarre emergent threatening christian nationalist political context, when at the end of a discussion about a bunch of interesting but entirely made-up beliefs, well educated persons, who have presumably successfully defended original research and a doctoral thesis, then go on to talk about a load of made-up nonsense as if it is somehow still relevant, or worse, truth.