I should admit here I have not been a Segway believer. Ever since I saw Will Arnett straddle one on Arrested Development I have not been able to understand any possible use of the machine other than comic prop. I realize now that this was slightly unfair.
A British MP just defied possible arrest to lead a charge of Segwayists through London, trying to get the Department of Transportation in England to clarify whether they’re legal to drive on roads or not. He points out that in a dense urban area, they go faster than the average speed cars are able to move in traffic, and emit virtually nothing.
I guess my confusion is still this: They go 12 mph. Doesn’t a bicycle go that fast? But I guess if you don’t want to get your suit sweaty… I forget that people still go to offices in suits.
Image: flickr/RobotSkirts
Steve Jobs emphasized in a presentation today that the new iPod Nano is the “cleanest” ever; it contains lower levels of arsenic and other toxic substances, and it’s composed of “easily recyclable” materials.
This is nice, and represents part of Apple’s response to Greenpeace’s longstanding complaints against its mediocre enviro record. (This is one of their anti-Apple posters). But it does raise a couple questions: first of all, isn’t the most impactful thing about iPods that they keep coming out with new models? So that you don’t hold on to your expensive piece of electronics for more than a year?
Second, containing “easily recyclable materials” isn’t the same as “recyclable.” I don’t know about the recycling chart in your city, but in mine, chrome things don’t appear to go into the blue bin. Somewhere at MIT, consciencious students may be disassembling iPods before they throw them out, dividing their components into tiny recyclable and non-recyclable piles. But I bet most of those easily recyclable materials aren’t getting recycled. Unless they’re being passed on to parents, homeless people, etc when a new model comes out.
Image: Greenpeace
As much as I love Prince Charles and his slow-food inclinations, I do have to admit the opposition has some pretty persuasive arguments. David King, a huge British scientist, just made a speech saying the West’s reluctance to bring genetically modified farming and other modes of “high-intensity” agriculture contributes to the continent’s 700,000 deaths from starvation every year.
It’s not clear, though, exactly how King squares his desire to help feed Africa through high-tech, ultra-efficient farming with his advocacy for carbon emissions cuts. (King is known for saying climate change is a greater threat than terrorism). The reason to like organic farming isn’t that it fits in better with a particular lifestyle; it’s that it’s comparatively low-emissions. If catastrophic temperature increases do take place, poor countries are going to be the ones who suffer the most from famine and disease.
So, yes, if the problem is that we’re not bringing genetically-modified crops to hungry Africa because they give us the heebie-jeebies, that is nigh-homicidally crazy. But if we’re trying not to industrialize their farming too rapidly in order to save them from pestilence and heat down the road, that’s more like a tough call.
Image: flickr/DavidDennis
There is much speculation about how Obama should go after Sarah Palin. If he goes after her resume—she was mayor of a town of 7,000, then the governor of a state of 680,000—that leaves him open to the absurd but potentially effective argument that these credentials are superior to those of a senator. If he goes after her evident backwardness or unusually conservative religious beliefs, the gun/bikini photo, the never traveled anywhere thing—well, we know how the clinging to guns and religion thing went over.
It seems to me you say, she thinks the melting of arctic ice isn’t caused by humans. She thinks polar bears aren’t endangered. She doesn’t think Exxon should have to pay up. All those non-radical conservatives in Colorado, Ohio, and Nevada care about this. (See this recap of her record so far). It’s not a personal attack, and it’s not just a reiteration of the tired McCain administration = Bush administration charge.
It’s just a way of making the effects of her ignorance concrete. She’s not just a smiling hick in a bathing suit holding a gun by a pool. She’s a smiling hick in a bathing suit standing on a melting iceberg.
Image: flickr/Chesi – Fotos CC
A commentary in the Guardian suggests today that we should face the reality that maybe none of the emissions control policies we’re trying to implement will do anything to stop catastrophic irreversible global warming. But facing this reality need not involve suicide, moving to Quebec City, etc.
Geo-thermal engineering, apparently, is a possible answer of last resort. Scientists everywhere agree it’s really risky, but if we had to we could potentially shoot vast quantities of certain chemical agents into the atmosphere to reflect back the sun. No, not immediately comforting. But one of the plans involves a series of yachts crossing the world. Which is at least glamorous.
Image: flickr/radiant guy
A California scientist and cement obsessive has started to churn out cement that doesn’t emit much carbon. Since we’re not going to stop the world’s population from expanding (realistically, any time soon) we should pave paradise the nice way.
The big questions, as always, are: how much, how fast how cheap? Cement Guy claims cheaper than the normal cement. And that making it in bulk is no problem. And that its manufacturing process can actually absorb emissions from polluters like coal power plants.
Cement accounts for about five percent of the carbon emissions in the world — eliminating its contribution to global warming would be the equivalent of eliminating America. Or almost eliminating China.
What a weird twist of fate that would be: if the way to make the world greener were to make it look more like one the post-industrial backdrops in the Halo games.
Image: flickr/billjacobus1
My favorite quote from the Slow Food Nation conference this weekend came from Wendall Berry (poet, essayist, farmer, panelist).
He held up a copy of a San Francisco Chronicle piece that said the best advertisement for the Slow Food movement was the pleasure of carefully preparing and lingering over a meal, and then described what the article got wrong. The following account of what he said is from the Journal:
[Berry] said the reporter described pleasure, as it relates to the Slow Food movement, in a limited view — that the description treated pleasure as a specialty, “a form of idleness,” which leaves out the possibility that good work could also be pleasurable… By limiting the ideas behind Slow Food to just “tasteful consumption,” Mr. Berry argued, the movement is limited in its growth.
If the Slow Food movement is going to catch on outside the upper-middle class, it’s going to be a movement about making people want to farm and distribute food locally. Not making them want to drive to consulting gigs in the city, come home, put on Graceland, and cook said locally farmed and distributed food and sit around talking/blogging/referencing David Sedaris. We need more farmers, working less efficiently, in the sense of using less fossil-fuel burning, soil-eroding methods. (See my lionization of Prince Charles, who is admirably blighted with nostalgia for agrarian England.)
Image: Slowfoodnation.org
