Faster

A company behind plans to open the first hotel in space says it is on target to accept its first paying guests in 2012 despite critics questioning the investment and time frame for the multi-billion dollar project.

The Barcelona-based architects of The Galactic Suite Space Resort say it will cost 3 million euro ($4.4 million) for a three-night stay at the hotel, with this price including an eight-week training course on a tropical island.

During their stay, guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and travel around the world every 80 minutes.

-- Reuters

Put quite simply, the life of [the British
 statesman in 1905] was superior [to that of the super-connected California company executive of 2016] because he was
 allowed rest and reflection, his
contemplation could seek its own level, and
 his tranquility was unaccelerated. While he
was in his time a member of a privileged
class unburdened by many practical
necessities, today most Americans have
similar resources and freedoms, and yet
they, like their contemporaries in even the
most exalted positions, have chosen a
different standard, closer to that of the [frenetic company executive].

...Requisite, I believe, for [the good life] are the discipline, values, and
clarity of vision that tend to flourish as we
grapple with necessity and to disappear
when by our ingenuity we float free of it.

-- Mark Helprin (1996)

Death and the contrarians

George Monbiot reflects on link between climate science contrarianism/denial and the psychology of vital lies, entitlement and exceptionalism.

Whether or not there is link between old age and contrarianism/denial is an open question. My guess is that there is a stronger correlation with other factors, including education attainment, pre-existing political and cultural beliefs, and immediate life experience and expectations.

On the question of how to confront the growth of contrarianism/denial in the face of even more compelling scientific evidence, one place to start could be IPPR's recent document Consumer Power: A Communications Guide for Mainstreaming Lower-Carbon Behaviour. Its checklist goes:

1. “Don’t focus on climate change"
2. “Focus on saving money now”
3. “Prevent the rebound effect” (in which people spend money saved through low-carbon behaviours on other, high-carbon practices)
4. “Talk about carbon pollution, not CO2 emissions”
5. “Satirise high-carbon behaviours”
6. “Make lower-carbon options desirable”
7. “Remember that being in control matters” (e.g. with regard to controlling personal energy costs)
8. “Make it fun”
9. “Avoid guilt and the ‘environmental’ label”
10. “Use messengers that ‘keep it real’”

But clearly we need more than that.

Eat it

Solving the other problem – the advertising that feeds our desire to acquire – might be more tricky. In an ideal world, it would be a counter-advertising campaign to make conspicuous consumption shameful.

"Advertising is an instrument for construction of people's everyday reality, so we could use the same media to construct a cultural paradigm in which conspicuous consumption is despised," [says William Rees of UBC]. "We've got to make people ashamed to be seen as a 'future eater'."

-- from Consumerism is eating the future (see also Hungry Ghosts).

Taking the waters

Jason Kotke notes a new high, or low, in designer waters:

Take Mahalo Deep Sea Water, at £20 for 71cl, which comes from "a freshwater iceberg that melted thousands of years ago and, being of different temperature and salinity to the sea water around it, sank to become a lake at the bottom of the ocean floor. The water has been collected through a 3000ft pipeline off the shores of Hawaii." According to the Daily Mail, Mahalo has a "very rounded quality on the palate" and it "would be good with shellfish."

Dialogue of the deaf

People inherently understand that if they are going to get ahead in whatever corporate culture they are involved in, they need to take on the appurtenances of what defines that culture. So if you are in a culture where spending a lot of money is a sign of success, it’s like the same thing that goes back to high school peer pressure. It’s about fitting in.

--Candace Bushnell, quoted in an article titled You Try to Live on 500K in This Town.

Rather than discussing the roles of men and women in the economic crisis, we need to explore the unbalanced world views that all of us, men and women alike, have come to accept as normal in modern, industrial society.

--Tim Malnick.

Down the dunny

Ashdenizen fisks Simon Calder and the Indy

Shameless

The moral code of these Wall Street executives corresponds to stage one of Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous stages of morality: “The concern is with what authorities permit and punish.” Morally, they are very young children.

-- George Packer

Values voters

Suddenly...the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him.

-- Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death

Clunking great metaphors for the global economy

A police chief memorably bought a sleek yellow Lamborghini, only to find he was too portly to fit in the driver's seat. "We just didn't know how to handle it all," a barefoot islander told me as he played his guitar beneath a tree.

"Hardly anyone thought of investing the money. Dollar notes were even used as toilet paper," his friend told me. "It's true," he insisted seeing my look of disbelief. "It was like every day was party day."

-- from Nauru seeks to regain lost fortunes.

Congolese are constantly pointing out that their country should be one of the richest in the world. It has huge mineral wealth, including the world's biggest reserves of cobalt and tantalum, a rare metal used in the circuitry of mobile phones and laptops. It also has rich seams of copper, diamonds, gold, manganese, uranium and zinc. And much of the country is covered with virtually intact tropical forests, thick with valuable hardwoods.

-- from Mutual convenience, an article in The Economist's series on China's quest for resources.

Tuna to go

Cod have been reduced to between 1% and 3% of their natural abundance and people still want to fish them. Are we going to do the same thing with tuna?

-- Daniel Pauly of UBC quoted in Tuna fisheries facing a cod-like collapse.

(As for invasive species, Tara Grescoe says the solution is eat them.)

King Leopold's cell phone

Umicore has roots in actual mining. In the late 1800s, during the reign of King Leopold II, the firm mined copper in the African Congo and shipped it to a riverside smelter near Antwerp. Today the same property houses a sprawling, state-of-the-art $2 billion smelter and refinery. Here, metals are recovered and processed. Then they are sold, sometimes to Asia, where they are used to manufacture brand-new electronics. It’s a reshuffling of the colonial arrangement: an abundant resource is sent from richer countries to poorer ones, made into goods, then sent back.

-- from Jon Mooallem on The Afterlife of Cellphones.

Death and shopping

We must read [this book] in the context of a far broader American failing: we no longer expect the government to do its job...We have entered an age of incompetence and drastically lowered expectations. In this context, individualistic, consumerist responses actually make sense, at least as a last resort - and that is what's truly scary.

-- from a review by Chris Mooney of Shopping Our Way to Safety by Andrew Szasz

The real impact of privatization, like welfare reform, deregulation, the technological revolution, and indeed globalization itself, has been to reduce the role of the state in the affairs of its citizens: to get the state "off our backs" and "out of our lives"—a common objective of economic "reformers" everywhere—and make public policy, in Robert Reich's approving words, "business-friendly." The twentieth-century state in its "soul-engineering" guise has surely left a bad taste. It was often inefficient, sometimes repressive, occasionally genocidal. But in reducing (and implicitly discrediting) the state, in forsaking public interest for private advantage wherever possible, we have also devalued those goods and services that represent the collectivity and its shared purposes, steadily "reducing the incentive for competent and ambitious persons to join or stay in state service." And this carries a very considerable risk.

-- from a review by Tony Judt of Supercapitalism by Robert Reich

How to get ahead in advertising

George Marshall has a good class of rant about this truly horrible piece of kitsch from GE:



George says:

Well, it’s meant to be sexy but it looks to me like the poor skinny waifs are being worked to death. And how sexy can coal be? I’ll bet that whoever made this ‘ironic’ ad has never been any closer to a coal pit than his electric toaster. My grandfather worked his whole life down a pit until his back was broken in a roof collapse. His lungs rattled with phlegm and coal dust all the way to his premature death . Now that would make a sexy ad.

This is a hard core denial ad. Its aim is to undermine environmental concerns. Its core message is: “don’t believe those whingeing (ugly) greenies- coal is great and will never be banned’’.

Hate speech

My friend Paul Kingsnorth has kindly given a slot to Brendan O'Neill on his blog. So it should be clear what we think of him. But Brendan never ceases to fail to surprise, and in his latest contribution to the Guardian (Now racism is disguised as environmentalism - not available online at the time of writing) he accuses those concerned about the resumption of whaling approved by the Japanese government (and that includes me; see this) of one of the great unacceptables of our time.

But a contributor to a debate about the Japanese government decision at DotEarth wrote:

[The New York Times] Week in Review has an article on whaling in Japan that ends with, “Asking Japan to abandon this part of its culture,” the (Japan Whaling) association says, “would compare to Australians being asked to stop eating meat pies, Americans being asked to stop eating hamburgers and the English being asked to go without fish and chip.” This is totally false statement. I am a middle aged Japanese and I had whale meat once when I was about 8 years old as a sort of a “delicacy.” It tasted just like beef tenderloin so there is no reason to kill these animals for their so called unique taste. And even if it was it’s wrong. It saddens me to think that a very small minority view in Japan is holding up whale hunting and eating as some kind of sacred national ritual. Large scale commercial whaling was brought to Japan by the U.S. fishermen in the 19th century. So not only is whale meat NOT a staple food in Japan, it is not even a ancient ritual. The world should know this and we should pressure the Japanese goverment to ban this illogical, selfish and cruel practice.

The real question, therefore, is what warps people so much that they would rather encourage a greatly increased risk of the permanent eradication of a highly intelligent, unique species than face some basic truths?

That said, there are plenty of hazards for cetaceans that have nothing to do with the Japanese. Take three examples among many. The loss of krill in the waters of Antarctica is sharply reducing the food supply of some species. Noise from human activity could be having significant effects (and I count one of my best bits of radio journalism an investigation on this topic about ten years ago now). And fishing boats driving dolphins to exhaustion in order to hunt the tuna underneath them may be causing many mothers to abandon their young - the tragic downside to discoveries from an otherwise beautiful bit of science reported here: Another reason why infants need their mothers.

P.S.30 Nov: Kenny Young writes to say www.whalesrevenge.com is trying to get a million people to sign a petition to stop whaling. At the time of writing more than 555,000 people have signed the petition.

Swede and low carbon

Jack Guest writes to say that a trailer for the feature-length preview of A Convenient Truth: A film about the world getting better has just been released. You can see it here on YouTube.

The trailer strikes me as having at least these two messages: 1) the answer is for everyone to be more like Sweden, plus flex-fuel cars; 2) you don't have to be some posh-sounding bloke to go out and do this for yourself, and you can be happy while doing it.

In a piece about Sweden which I wrote for Director (July 06), Roger Levett says:

It would be perfectly possible for any rich, sophisticated country to reduce net greenhouse emissions to zero over 20 or 25 years. Given what we now know about the global climate, this is the only sensible course. Anything else is suicide for our civilisation, if not for our species, although quite possibly that, too.

Vis-a-vis flex fuel cars, and therefore biofuels, Bacon Butty makes a useful addition to recent commentary:

Instead of asking how to reduce transport emissions from road fuel substitution, we should be asking how to make use of land to tackle climate change in the most effective way possible. In coming up with the biofuels targets, policy-makers have asked, and answered, the wrong question.

See too Biofuels bonanza facing 'crash', Indonesia Says It May Take Until 2014 to End Illegal Logging and Vanishing forests a counterpoint to Indonesia's climate crusade, which all take us back to How to destroy a planet.

'Tell him he's dreaming'

Call me cynical, but this catchprase from the 1997 Australian film The Castle came to mind in response to comment on a previous post on this site asking why more isn't done to encourage people to take big steps towards a low carbon transformation of their lives. Perhaps my cyncism, if that's what it is, is just a passing moment from reading that both 'debauchism' and 'disapora' tourism will be served by, for example, the hundreds of new jets on order from Boeing and Airbus.

Tread Schizo

At the time of writing, The Guardian's Treadlightly site boasts that "3,712 readers have pledged to save a total of 5.33 tonnes of CO2". The Treadlightly home page also carries an ad for "South Africa: unforgettable scenery at Table Bay".

A return flight to Cape Town (12,021 Miles) for one person accounts for 2.82 tonnes (according to one popular carbon calculator). So if just two people among the 3,172 who have so far pledged to "tread lightly" with The Guardian reward themselves with a holiday (a success rate for the advertisers of just over 0.063%), all the emissions saved by the other 3,170 and then some, will be cancelled out.

The front page of this morning's Guardian print edition prominently displayed news of a BEMA award to the newspaper for, among other things, "inspir[ing] readers to alter their lifestyles".

Not denial, but short-termism

Much is made of irrationality and unwillingness of people in wealthy countries to change destructive consumption patterns. Hands are wrung over 'denial'.

And there plenty of is evidence that many if not most are willing to ignore evidence and cling to demonstrably false beliefs rather than face up to difficult realities, such as the need to reduce emissions rapidly. Paranoid conspiracy theories can be one of the ways in which people try to impose order on unpredictable events (see The Lure of the Conspiracy Theory).

But even in the most tooth-and-claw societies, people sometimes recognise the need for laws and government (see James Galbraith) that 'save' us from our own shorter term and more destructive desires, and the unethical businesses that feed the craving and so help create circumstances in which short-sighted behaviours are rewarded. Here are two examples.

In Fuel for thought James Surowiecki suggests that:

In calling for a law requiring better gas mileage in our cars...[U.S.] voters are really saying that they’re unhappy with the collective result of the choices they make as buyers. Sometimes, they know, we need to save ourselves from ourselves.

And in Obviation Not Generation (part of the Heat and Light NS supplement), Roger Levett suggested that:

[U.K. consumers taking advantage of absurdly cheap flights] had no trouble distinguishing sensible, individual action to exploit available opportunities from the question of whether those opportunities ought to be available.

[P.S. If this report in Mother Jones is right, it sounds as if John Edwards 'gets' this more than other candidates for the U.S. Democratic presidential candidacy. See also The Economist's profile of Edwards.]

Christopher Hitchens is a twat

In his excellent review of Allan Brandt's The Cigarette Century, Robert N. Proctor reminds us that every year five million people die prematurely from smoking and the number will grow to about ten million in the next two decades. A hundred million people died prematurely as a result of smoking in the 20th century and ten times that will die in the present century if trends continue.

It was not until the 1990s that manufacturers admitted any real harms caused by smoking. Part of this about-face was dictated by a change in legal strategy, which by this time had recentered around the argument that 'everyone has always known' that smoking is bad for you--so people have only themselves to blame for whatever diseases they contract from the habit.

What a disappointment after this to come across Christopher Hitchens, opposing a ban on smoking in public places -- or keeping an end of the swimming pool for peeing in.

See also Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait (scroll down for image of 65,000 cigarettes, denoting the number of US teenagers who become addicted every month).