Category: Environment

The other day, I replaced the washers on the hot and cold taps of a laundry tub. They were wearing out, they needed replacing.

Anyone might think that was a water conservation measure. After all, when I was growing up there was considerable attention being paid to dripping taps and such. It is super easy to find huge claims of water waste from a dripping tap.

And here’s the thing. I am not negligent, so the tap was not dripping much. But, in order to replace the washers I had to turn off the water supply, and drain the pipes. In order to repressurize the system I had to run all the hot and cold taps to purge the air. In doing so, I certainly flushed more water down the drain than the tap would have dripped over some very long period.

But I replaced the washers, because they needed to be replaced. Not to immediately conserve water. In fact the replacement wasted quite a few litres.

So many of our affectations of environmentalism are like this. We pretend that we are saving a penny when we are spending a dollar. It would be more effective if we actually took the logistical steps we know we should to actually move closer to sustainability.

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 they 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.

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.

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.”

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.

A service guy the other day informed me that the future of energy was heat pumps and natural gas. Setting aside that we need to stop burning natural gas, and pretending for the sake of the argument that heat pumps are gonna be useful for large numbers of households in urban areas, not contesting either idea. It turned out, he corrected me, that what he meant by “heat pump” was in fact an air heat exchanger.

And not being the quickest wit on Earth, I regret not having thought fast enough to reply that where he was standing, next to the hot water heater, thirty years ago he would have had to be careful not to very painfully hit his head, which I did several times, on a great big air heat exchanger.

We called it “the monster.” It was absolute shit and I feel certain consumed more joules of electricity than it saved in heat. At some point in the 90s I think, maybe later, I finally disconnected the stupid thing, lowering it carefully to the floor with ropes and pulleys, it was heavy. When the stupid Godzilla intestines that connected it were also removed it was a day of celebration.

There are still some legacy damages to the house from that dumb chapter. Zero out of ten. Would not recommend.