Tag: Thinking globally

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – Part 3

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Sorry to be so slow, but life is really busy right now. We are in the middle of an election campaign, there were some family emergencies, and work has been crazy busy. On top of my evening blogging schedule, I haven’t had a lot of free time to read. Oh, to be bored for a change!

Once we got past some of the painful introductory materials, the book gains some steam as Dr. Moore outlines his storied career as a Greenpeace organizer and campaigner. The short versions is that these guys were “Type-A” with a seemingly complete lack of common sense. They thought nothing of buying an old fish boat, spending a few weeks (or months) patching the holes and getting the motor running, and sailing out in the Pacific Ocean! They dodged weather and ran directly towards trouble with the US Coast Guard, the Soviet Union, the French Navy, and Japanese whaling ships. The rented helicopters and, with a paucity of planning, flew out onto ice floes in the Atlantic to film seal hunters.

At the time, they created in Greenpeace a heroic mythos though very careful collection and distribution of pictures and film. Dr. Moore outlines how co-founder Bob Hunter developed the idea of the “Mindbomb” – that perfect combination of images and words that the media (and the media consumer) could not resist putting on the front page – a phenomenon the New Media calls “going viral”.

In essence, Greenpeace did not sail to Amchitka to stop a nuclear test, they went there to create a Mindbomb that would shift the public conversation so that more people took the idea of banning nuclear testing seriously. They didn’t race around the Russian Whaling Fleet in zodiacs to save any actual whales (in fact their efforts were clearly fruitless), they did it to create the images of a bunch of heroes racing around in big seas challenging the Great Soviet Fleet to get the pictures in the newspaper and bring light to the plight of the world’s cetaceans. Dr. Moore didn’t sit on a baby seal in Labrador to stop it from getting clubbed, he did it to get photographed being arrested for assaulting a seal, when he was the only thing between that cute little bastard getting clubbed and skinned.

I found one interesting link behind all of the campaigns Dr. Moore took part in during those early days of Greenpeace. None of them are really about environmental sustainability as we think about it today. Besides his first trip to Amchitka to call attention to nuclear testing, all of his campaigns were centred around animal rights.

Although the entire anti-whaling campaign was around protecting several species of whales that had been hunted to the brink of extinction, Dr. Moore does not talk at all about this as a sustainability issue (as we talk about shark finning or the Bluefin Tuna fishery today), he talks about the majesty of the beasts, the intelligence of the animals, and the cruelty of hunting them.

“There is no way to kill a whale in a humane manner. Among the tens of whales we witnessed being harpooned over the years, most died slowly, spouting blood and gasping desperately” [pg. 70]

” With two Zodiacs and a rough sea we tried desperately to shield the whales during the next two hours as they were gunned down one after the other. The crew watched from the deck of the James Bay as blood filled the sea around us, whales screaming and writhing in agony until all was quiet… It was a gruesome scene and ironically it worked very much in our favour.” [pg. 94]

The anti-sealing campaign was more of the same, much about saving these cute fuzzy animals, with no discussion at all about whether the hunt was sustainable, economically important, socially significant. Greenpeace flew in movie stars to create “mind bombs” in the defence of defenceless (and cute) animals. Greenpeace of 1975 is not like SPEC of 2010, it is like PETA of 2011.

Notably, this was all before the Bruntland Report, and therefore before the modern concepts of environmental sustainability had really been developed, so the ideas were not well known outside of rather obscure schools of development and economics. Suggestions of future resource depletion were usually brushed aside by claims of people being too “Malthusian” or not having enough respect for engineering (see discussion of Ehrlich vs. Borlaug in this very book, pp.56-57).

This brings us to 1984 -1986 – the Second Act in Dr. Moore’s story – when he began stepping away from Greenpeace. This was a tumultuous time, with him raising a family, getting a real job, and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. But it was also the time that Greenpeace began to campaign for sustainable development in industries that were close to Dr. Moore’s roots and his family. After all, he was the son of a rain forest logger who was setting up one of the first salmon farms on the west coast.

He claims it was the Greenpeace initiative to “Ban Chlorine” that was the final straw, as he thought it wasn’t science based thinking. Problem is, no-one in Greenpeace seems to recall them saying they want to ban all chlorine from the planet. Greenpeace did take a strong stand then (and still do now) on the spilling of organochlorines related to paper bleaching, and the use of toxic chlorine-based substances when non-chlorine-based substitutes are available. That has extended to the modern practice of using PVC in places where environmentally-less damaging alternatives are practical. Considering how much of my time I spend at my work dealing with contaminated sites featuring hard-to manage carcinogenic, mutagenic and acutely toxic chlorinated solvents organochlorines, I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask questions about whether the money we save over using the less toxic alternatives is really money saved at all.

Or maybe Greenpeace was just using the idea of “banning chlorine” as a “Mindbomb” to get a few headlines and point the media to the real issues of chlorine in our environment. “Ban Chlorine” and “Devil Element” are much more compelling than “Organochlorides in our environment increase cancers and impact marine wildlife”. It is telling that Dr. Moore’s biggest conflict when he left Greenpeace is the guy who invented the “Mindbomb”. Dr. Moore himself admits there was no way he could save the seal pup he sat on, but he wanted to be filmed losing that fight – Mindbombs were rarely science-based.

It seems the nuance of this argument is lost to Dr. Moore, as he again dismissively waves away any concerns about the chlorine industry or the hazards of organochlorines by creating this long-winded false dichotomy argument and telling us that chlorine is the 11th most abundant element on Earth and table salt is 2/3rds chlorine, so how can that be bad?

On page 142 he goes off on a diatribe about the wonders of chlorine that includes a huge strawman argument (“[long list of potentially toxic metals]…all have important uses in health, technology, energy production and lighting”); a non-sequitor (“we have been bombarded into thinking lead is deadly, yet many of us drive around with 30 pounds of it in the battery of our cars.”); rank hyperbole (“chlorine is the most important element for public health”); the naturalistic fallacy (“Even herbal medicine is partly based on using plants that contain chemicals that are toxic”); and a long false dichotomy I won’t bore you with here. He even decries that although he was the lone scientist in the discussion, none of the other Greenpeace crew respected his scientific prowess. He follows this by describing Renate Kroesa (who, being a chemist, would qualify as a scientist to most of us) as “fanatical”. Page 142 is one of those pages of this book that I have marginal-marked the hell out of in red ink. It is just a bad argument, poorly supported, and it leads us into the wonders of his approach to fish farming, but I will blog about that in a later post.

Dr. Moore says he is proud of his work at Greenpeace, proud enough to engage in a bit of hyperbole:

“We got many things right in the early years of the movement: We stopped the Bomb, saved the whales, and ended toxic discharge into water and air.” [Pg.141]

Um, last time I checked we still have nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation is an increasing risk in the world; whales still face serious threats from habitat loss and pollution, and are still being actively hunted by several nations; and toxic discharges in to the air and water seem to continue world wide.

However, I am not going to take away from Dr. Moore the achievements of Greenpeace during his time there. He took a rag-tag groups of hippies on a fishboat and spun it into a multi-million dollar international organization that spoke truth to power on many fronts, often powered by little more than a string and a prayer. From reading his accounts of those early years, there were more than enough internal and external forces that could have torn it apart, and too many strong personalities and personal agendas (Paul Watson, anyone?). It should not have lasted, but pretty much everything we know in 2011 about the environmental movement, the good parts and the bad, can be traced back to the early efforts of Dr. Moore and Greenpeace.

Without him, I imagine this blog would have a different name!

Becquerels and Sieverts, Oh My!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

For some reason, the Georgia Straight keeps writing articles about the radiation from the Fukushima Nuclear plant causing us harm here in British Columbia, and the massive conspiracy involving several governments and hundreds of scientists, working to cover it up.

My cynicism makes me suspect the large number of Georgia Straight advertisers selling bogus “Cleansing” and “detoxifying” services may be influencing their editorial decisions. But what is the source of my skepticism? Perhaps it is their dishonest use of technical terms, without explaining what the terms mean.

Look at this story from last week’s edition. There are many scary statistics there: 0.69 Becquerel per Litre (Bq/l) of radiation in Vancouver rainwater, 8.18 Bq/l as an average in Calgary, 13 Bq/l as a spike in Burnaby! But no-where does it put that number into context. I guess it is expected anyone will think any Becquerel in our water is a Becquerel too much!

Part of the problem with radiation is that the science and the numbers are pretty technical and are often really big or really small, so we have a hard time wrapping out minds around them in a physical sense. It is the job of “journalist” to translate this information to the public, not to fear monger by throwing out terns you know your audience doesn’t understand. So let’s talk about Becquerels.

“Becquerel” is the “metric” measure, and it is easy to visualise: 1 Bq is one atom of radioactive material decaying (and therefore releasing one “unit” of radioactivity) per second. That is the smallest possible amount of radiation per second, so we usually think in terms of millions or billions of Bq, which sometimes makes the number cumbersome. The more common unit is the Curie (Ci), which is equal to 37 billion Bq (37,000,000,000Bq = 1 Ci).

So that is the technical meaning, but what do the numbers really mean in the real world? A good way to look at them is to think about the element potassium (K). The world is full of potassium, it is the “K” in NPK, the Nitrogen-Phosphorous-Potassium ratings for fertilizers. However, a small proportion of it (about 0.012%) is a naturally radioactive isotope Potassium 40. You can’t easily separate the two without advanced lab equipment, so it is randomly mixed in with normal potassium and in all chemical terms, acts exactly like “normal” potassium. So of the ~150 grams of potassium in your bones, teeth, and cellular nuclei, about 0.018 grams is Potassium 40. Atoms are really small, so that that 0.018 grams of Potassium 40 represents about 280 quintillion atoms, that is 280,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

Radioactive atoms. In your bones. These are not “toxins” that you can cleanse yourself of, unless you cleanse yourself of all the potassium in your body, which would be very, very bad for your continued existence.

Potassium 40 has a half-life of about a billion years. So over a billion years, about half of those 280 quintillion atoms will decay, releasing a single unit of radiation each. 140 quintillion decays over 1 billion years equals about 4,400 decays per second. So the normal radiation level of a healthy human body from potassium alone is about 4,400Bq. Every second of your adult life you are exposed to 4,400 Bq of radiation from your own cells.

Notably, your body also contains about 13kg of Carbon, about 1partp er trillion of which is Carbon 14, resulting in another 3,700 Bq of exposure. You also get much smaller doses from the iodine, radium, and other trace radioactive substances in your body.

We also take in and excrete radioactive nuclides all day, and they exist (naturally) in our food, especially things like bananas that have lots of minerals (and are therefore good for you!). Banana contain enough potassium to provide about 130Bq per kilogram, and enough carbon for another 100bq.

It stands to reason that 1 kg of drinking water containing 1Bq or radiation is not going to change our environmental exposure to radiation. It is, in effect, much lower than our “Background” exposure.

This story draws some alarm over vanishingly small measurements of airborne radiation:

“The level of iodine-131 in Sidney, B.C., rose to a high of 3.63 millibecquerels per cubic metre in the air on March 20. That’s over 300 times higher than the background level of 0.01 millibecquerels per cubic metre or less.”

This also benefits from a bit of math. 3.6 mBq is 0.0036 Bq, per cubic metre of air. The average person breathes about 11,000L of air a day. That means a person breathing at Sidney would be exposed to 0.04 Bq of radiation per day. That is less than one ten-thousandth of the radiation you are exposed to from your own bones.

Now ask yourself, why does the Georgia Strait reporter never, in his multiple articles on the Fukushima incident, mention what a Becquerel is?

I would be remit to mention that Bequerel are not the entire story. The number you want to calculate when analysing environmental exposure to radiation is the Sievert: which is a measure of dose exposure. That is a relatively complicated measure to take, as it involves the medium delivering the radiation, and the media receiving it. I have already gone on way too long here, so Will not get into that in this post.

Now compare this to . this story in the Georgia Straight which jumps from Becquerel to Sieverts without putting either number in context.

But which is worse? The “Main Stream Media” have reported nothing, so people have no access to better information. Why can’t our media educate and inform?

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – part 1

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.
About a month ago, fellow New Westminster Blogger David Brett provided an intriguing review of Dr. Patrick Moore’s book “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout”. Part autobiography of one of the founders of Greenpeace, and part manifesto for a new, “sensible” environmentalism, this book is a first-person account of how Dr. Moore helped found Greenpeace, became disillusioned by it, and forged his own path towards a more pragmatic form of environmentalism. Moving away from protest, he worked to engage government, business and industry to help them become more sustainable.

As I commented to Dave at the time, being a “sensible” (and by that, I mean skeptical and science-based) environmentalist, and engagement with stakeholders (as opposed to protest) has been my goal, so Dr. Moore’s story is interesting to me. Since I reviewed the autobiography-manifesto-vanity project movie on David Suzuki last year, I will do the same with this book.

The advantage of the book is that I have it in front of me and can discuss it at length. I am currently about 4 chapters in, and have very little time to read these days, so the review may take some time and several posts.

I promised Dave that I would read with an open mind, and I have not read any other reviews than his (and the blurbs on the back of the book!), but my openness was challenged in the first chapter of the book. It just doesn’t start well.

In Chapter 1, Dr. Moore starts off by defining “sustainable development”. This is a good idea, as it is a term bandied about too much by people with little understanding of what it means. It is currently a sexy buzz phrase used by a lot of people who have never understood (or cared about) the definition.

The problem is, Dr. Moore immediately dismisses the definition used by people who work in sustainability: the standard-model definition and, unfortunately, the one most commonly ignored by people who are misusing the term. That being the definition from Brundtland Report. Dr. Moore immediately tosses it aside and replaces it with a definition that fits his needs.

Compare this:

Brundtland Report: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”

To this:

Dr. Moore: “Sustainable development requires that we continue to obtain the food, energy, and materials necessary for our civilization, and perhaps even increase these resources in developing countries, while at the same time working to reduce our negative impacts on the environment through changes in behaviour and changes in our technologies” (Pg. 14)

The second definition is fine, full of great ideas and feelings, but it is, unfortunately, not a definition of sustainability.

It is like I start my book about American actresses by describing Uma Thurman as the greatest actress of our generation. Then I decide the definition of Uma Thurman as “the star of the Kill Bill Films” is not a very good definition. Instead, I like to define Uma Thurman as “That woman from Kramer vs. Kramer and the Bridges of Madison County who has 2 Academy Awards from 16 nominations”. That definition makes my argument that Uma is the greatest actress of our time much more compelling, doesn’t it?

Although Dr. Moore’s definition contains many soft environmental ideals that we should probably strive towards (as loaded with weasel words as it is), it does not define “sustainable development” the way it is used by anyone other than Dr. Moore. At best, it is one small aspect of “sustainable development”; at worst, it is a dodge of the real issues raised by limited resources on a consumption-growth based economy. It also completely misses the point that sustainability is not an “environmental” concept any more than it is a social and economic one.

I don’t think the problem with “sustainable” is its overuse, but rather its common use in a way that does not relate to the actual definition of the word. As such, it is indistinguishable from “green” or “environmentally friendly” or “clean” or other popular marketing words. I am a believer (as are most scientists) that strict definition of terms is as important to political discussion as it is to technical discussion. Dr. Moore makes the problem of fuzzy definition worse in Chapter 1 when he invents a new definition for the term.

New West Doc Fest – Day 2

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

It was quite the full day! Besides taking tickets, helping promote the NWEP at the booth, and visiting with folks, I still got to see most of the films, although I did not get to spend as much time in the Q&A sessions as I would have liked.

The day began with a short called “The Most Livable City”, which talked about one of those little social development topics most people just don’t think of – where to the City’s homeless, and those living in run-down decrepit SROs, go to get a drink of water? The City has few operating fountains in the summer, and even fewer in the winter. Public washroom facilities are few and far between. Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer raises the point that the City has purposely removed these types of things to discourage drug use… how’s that working out?

The main morning feature was “Tapped” – about the bottled water industry. A topic I have mentioned here in the past. If I was to review the movie (um… which I guess I am doing), it was about 20% new and quite interesting information (in the States, the bottled water industry is regulated by the FDA, unless the water is bottled in the same state it is consumed. Since most of it is filtered city water sold locally, more than 80% of the bottled water industry is completely unregulated), 60% was info well known to anyone who has been awake for the last decade (billions of discarded PET bottles are mucking up marine ecosystems around the entire Pacific Ocean; buying bottled water is a ridiculous consumer choice, 2000x the cost of safer tap water), and 20% is unfortunate hyperbole (PET is made using a substance in the same family as benzene, which causes cancer! well, if the same family you mean aromatic hydrocarbons, you are right, but PET does not cause cancer, and no-one seems to be concerned about all the benzene we are consuming every day breathing car exhaust).

In the end, the message was on track, and if they drifted occasionally into hyperbole, it may be a cause for people to do their own research. Like most exposes of Corporate America, the best moments were the “caught-ya” moments when the corporate spokesflak realizes he is in over his head when says something like “There has never been a bottled water recall in America”, or “We are not in competition with tap water”, then are confronted with their own press releases that say the exact opposite. The lingering camera on the silenced spokesflak is always good for a chuckle.

I think the movie “65_redroses” is well known to most New West folks. Although I was familiar with Eva Markvoort’s story, I had never seen the movie. If you have not seen it, you should, mostly because the filmmakers did an excellent job accentuating the positive side of organ donation and how this young woman gained her life back through science, through good luck, and through the immense support she received from friends, family and strangers. In the end, they do not dwell on the sadness of the end, but on the hope and happiness of the brief life Eva had.

Before 65_Redroses was a short, “Corona Station”, also about love and loss. Beyond being a humorous theme, the short is remarkably well filmed, easy to forget these are film students!

The “Vanishing of the Bees” is a very smart and insightful look at Colony Collapse Disorder, and issue impacting commercial honey bees across the world. Although the movie emphasises the strongly suspected link between systemic pesticide use and CCD, it also explores how the way we manage bees is likely the main issue, with the systemic pesticides one very large hammer in drawer full of other nasty tools. We ship bees around in the backs of trucks from mono-culture crop to mono-culture crop, even in the bellied of airliners from Australia to California, completely messing with their natural rhythms. We keep them in massive crowded populations, one beekeeper managing 40,000 hives, where parasites and diseases can prosper. We artificially inseminate the queens (yes, they show the not-so-romantic procedure!), then kill them off after the eggs are laid and replace then with surrogates. We take their honey and feed them refined sugars. When hives start to die off, we split them in half and introduce new queens (in cages to keep the bees from killing the interloper), potentially spreading diseases around. All this to keep a pollinating population alive for the fruit and nut industries, as the market for honey production has been eroded by cheaper imports (often containing “honey blends” with corn syrup or lactose syrup).

With all this stacked up against them, it would be more shocking if 30% of the bees weren’t dying off! Although the film starts with gloom and doom, it is clear that the scientists, policy makers (in Europe at least), and the farmers are starting to realize what the issues are, and are working towards reforming the way the beekeeping industry is managed.

On the topic of pollinators, don’t get me started on mosquitoes and larvicides.

The final film, “H2Oil” I had seen before. All I can say is that the way Canada has mis-handled the Athabasca Tar/Oil Sands is criminal, no less than an act of war against our own country. If anyone can see how a nation responsibly manages a dumb-luck oil find, look at the case of Norway. Then ask yourself, how have the Tar/Oil sands benefited you? How does the rapid expansion and export of raw bitumen and the linking of the Canadian dollar to the cost of oil help any other sector of Canada’s economy?

I was unfortunately too busy to sit in on the post-film chat with local MPs Fin Donnelly and Peter Julian. If someone out there in blogland wants to write up a quick review, please let me know!

The Doc Fest itself was seamlessly run. The NWEP basically provided volunteer time and a little logistic support (our budget could not have bought our members tickets!), but it was Andrew Murray and the ladies from the Green Ideas Network who did most of the heavy lifting. Tireless volunteer Kathleen did a bunch of fundraising, and found a wide range of sponsors, all interested in building this community – they need to be thanked, and supported!

The good news is that for a first year- they pulled it off. Everything went smoothly, the films were on time, the extra entertainment (musicians, poets, artists) were entertaining, the venue worked out great. The early report is that the fest broke even with a little bit of a profit, to be reinvested in next year’s show. The foundations have been laid, and next year will be bigger and better.

New West Doc Fest – Day 1

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

Tonight was the first night of the First Annual New West Doc Fest.

The turn out was pretty good, including the Mayor and Councillors Cote, Williams, and Harper. After a bit of mingling with the sultry tones of the Redrick Sultan Jazz Trio, the main event began.

There were three short films before the feature documentary of the night.

The first was “Meathead”, a strangely funny 3-minute short made by students at Pull Focus Film School. It was strangely funny, because you could see most of the jokes coming, but the actor managed to sell the punchlines with a turn of expression that made you laugh. Quick, irreverent, with a message, student film-making at it’s best.

Two documentary shorts were on the subject of the proposed Enbridge oil pipeline to Kitimat. The animated talk-piece “Cetaceans of the Great Bear” told of the threat to cetaceans represented by increased tanker traffic. Although the animation and graphic treatments were at times quite compelling, the message came across a little too strident and wrapped in over-the-top rhetoric to be effective as a message to anyone but the true believer. Let’s just say Dave Brett might not approve. The second, “Oil in Eden” is a little richer in actual content, and tells a much more complete story about the reasons for the oil pipeline, the potential risks, and the groups (especially first nations) who are against the idea.

The main feature was “Burning Water”, a story about a couple of farmers in the outskirts of Calgary with the little problem of flammable drinking water. Although the trailer makes it look like this is about a pissed-off farmer who won’t take it any more, the reality of the story is much more nuanced. This is because of the approach the owners of Valhalla Farm, Fiona and John Lauridsen, take to the issue.

Their problems started when energy giant Encana created a few “coal bed methane” gas wells on their property using “hydraulic fracturing”. Fiona takes a rational approach of asking Encana to do something about it, until Encana determined it wasn’t their fault. She ten takes the rational approach of going to the Government, who do something worse than doing nothing: they are actively indifferent to her plight. John takes the non-confrontational approach of just dealing with it and trying to move on, much to Fiona’s frustration, until he finally decides to strike back at Encana in a rather humorous way.

What makes this more than a simple David-vs-Goliath story is the fact the town in which the Lauridsens live relies on grant money from Encana for their community theatre (a major economic driver), their library, their parks. The Lauridsens even rely on EnCana for non-farm income: from the land-use settlement for the wells and Fiona for her part-time job in the community theatre. They are acutely aware that Encana is an important part of their economy; they just want to be able to continue living on their farm, seemingly made unliveable by Encana’s activity. In the end, all they want is Encana to respect their issue, and Encana, for their own reasons, cannot.

Unfortunately, the story arc is left unfinished, we don’t really know what the solution is, nor are we left with a hint of what the solution will be. But you are not left with the feeling that Fiona’s simple dream of living on her Prairie Valhalla is a sustainable one.

The Doc was followed by a brief but informative Q&A session with the Pembina Institute’s Matt Horne. It seemed the only positive way forward was to assure that we compel our government to develop and enforce a regulatory regime that protects the environment, to counter the forces behind run-away exploration and development of oil and gas, especially in BC’s north-east. However, between BC’s inability to modernize it’s Water Act, the weakness of our groundwater regulation, the fact the Oil and Gas Commission can overrule any BC law, and our current government’s commitment to “reduce red tape” for resource extraction, I am not left filled with confidence.

But hey, tomorrow’s four documentary films have a chance to lift my spirits!

Doc Fest this Weekend!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Whoo Hoo!
New Westminster is having it’s first film fest this coming weekend.

Through the efforts of the indefatigable Andrew Murray, the NWEP is working with the Green Ideas Network to bring the first annual New West Doc Fest.

Although this is the freshman year for the event, the line-up of Documentaries, Shorts, and special Events are pretty spectacular, and Douglas College is providing a great venue.

Many of the films have a “Green / Sustainability” theme, but this is not really an “environmentalist” event. There are films on various topics that will interest many people for different reasons.

I think the biggest draw will be a Saturday showing of 65_RedRoses, the story of New Westminster’s own Eva Markvoort, whose inspirational struggle with Cystic Fibrosis became an international story. The Screening will be followed by a Q&A with Eva’s friend and one of the Directors of the film, Nimisha Mukerji. It should be a thought-provoking and inspirational afternoon for everyone.

Friday Night will feature a showing of Burning Water, about some farmers in Alberta who are having a small problem with the flammability of their drinking water:

Yikes!

There will be a panel discussion after the film with Matt Horne from the Pembina Institute.

There will be three more feature-length documentaries on the weekend, one on the subject of Bottled Water (might be of interest to our current Board of Education Candidates?), one on the mysterious issues affecting honey bees in North America, and the third on the topic of the Athabaska Oil Sands and their impacts on the ground and surface water supply of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Each Film will have a Q&A session after, including with a couple of Members of Parliament after one film!

Plus, just like when you were a kid, there will be shorts shown before each full-length Doc, all made by students at Pull Focus Film School. There will be other events happening over the weekend in the lobby, and at the films.

You can get tickets on-line right now, or at the door. I highly recommend the Festival Pass to make sure you don’t miss any of the extras – all the cool kids are getting them. For only $20, you get to see a gaggle of great documentaries, and you can support a new initiative in New Westminster so it can grow in the future. And hold onto that pass, 20 years from now, you will be able to tell your kids you were there when it all started.

Emma Maersk

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

Hunter S Thompson was one of my favourite authors. He probably understood politics better than any other writer of his generation, and through that insight, he became remarkably and hilariously cynical. This cynicism could only be expressed through the use of Gonzo Journalism; a genre he did not name, although he invented it, and he, alone, mastered it.

People talk about Gonzo Journalism being about the writer being “immersed” in the story, and writing without objectivity (both characteristics of all journalism, although most journalists don’t want to admit it). But I see it as including one other thing: a vicious disregard for accuracy in order to get to the actual truth. Things don’t have to be factual to be true. In “Fear and Loathing in Elko” , He chronicled a drunken, murderous trip through northern Nevada with Judge Clarence Thomas and two hookers. He wasn’t suggesting this was a true story, but he was able, through the story, tell some truths about the Judge that he couldn’t say within the confines of “objective journalism”.

But that was then. Now, Hunter is dead, politics are beyond cynicism, and instead of journalism, we have the internet.

Recently, I received a chain e-mail that got me thinking about truth and accuracy. I think there is a message in here, I think the author is trying to say something, but the actual information is so far from an objective analysis of reality, that it must be meta-gonzo.

Here it is in it’s entirety, complete with pictures, lurid formatting, and quixotic syntax.

From:
Sent: September-23-11 12:55 AM
To:  Undisclosed Recipients
Subject: Fw: MAERSK LINE

Subject: FW: MAERSK LINE

Be Sure to read the ending…………………….

See the editorial under the last picture.. That says it all!

The Emma Maersk, part of a Danish shipping line, is shown in the photos below.

What a ship….no wonder ‘Made in ‘ is displacing North American made goods big time. This monster transports goods across the Pacific in just 5 days!!
This is one of three ships presently in service, with another two ships commissioned to be completed in 2012.

These ships were commissioned by Wal-Mart to get all their goods and stuff from China . They hold an incredible 15,000 containers and have a 207 foot deck beam!!
The full crew is just 13 people on a ship longer than a US Aircraft Carrier (which has a crew of 5,000). With it’s 207′ beam it is too big to fit through the Panama or Suez Canals …

It is strictly transpacific. Cruise speed: 31 knots..

The goods arrive 4 days before the typical container ship (18-20 knots) on a China-to-California run. 91% of Walmart products are made in China . So this behemoth is hugely competitive even when carrying perishable goods.
The ship was built in five sections. The sections floated together and then welded.

The command bridge is higher than a 10-story building and has 11 cargo crane rigs that can operate simultaneously unloading the entire ship in less than two hours.


Additional info:


Country of origin – Denmark
Length – 1,302 ft
Width – 207 ft
Net cargo – 123,200 tons
Engine – 14 cylinders in-line diesel engine (110,000 BHP)
Cruise Speed – 31 knots
Cargo capacity – 15,000 TEU (1 TEU = 20 cubic feet)
Crew – 13 people !
First Trip – Sept. 08, 2006
Construction cost – US $145,000,000+

Silicone painting applied to the ship bottom reduces water resistance and saves 317,000 gallons of diesel per year.

Editorial Comment!

A recent documentary in late March, 2010 on the History Channel noted that all of these containers are shipped back to China , EMPTY. Yep, that’s right.
We send nothing back on these ships. What does that tell you about the current financial state of this country? Just keep buying those imported goods (mostly gadgets) until you run out of money.


Then you may wonder what the cause of unemployment (maybe even your job) in the U.S. and Canada might be????


‘Nuff said ??


This message, if any, surely deserves forwarding, doesn’t it ?

(end transmission)
 As is my wont, I am going to go through this point by point.

Paragraph 1: Correct. This is a photo of the Emma Maersk, a large container ship of the Danish Shipping company Maersk.

Paragraph 2: Wrong on every point of fact. The Emma Maersk has never transported goods across the Pacific. It’s regular run is between southeast Asia and Rotterdam, making the Pacific the long way around by far. The Emma Mearsk’s maximum speed is 25knots, and it cruises at around 20knots, making the hypothetical crossing of the Pacific (say, 5144 miles from Tokyo to San Francisco), not a 5-day journey, but more than 9 days. Add a couple of days if you want to go to China. This is in fact one of 8 (not three) “E-Maersk” ships of the same size in service since the 8th was commissioned in 2008.

Paragraph 3: Only mostly wrong. These ships were not “commissioned” by WalMart, nor does the Emma Maersk even travel to North America. The ship carries between 11,000 and 15,000 containers (depending on how you measure them), and the ship’s beam is 185 feet.

Paragraph 4: Getting Better. The minimum crew is 13, although there is capacity for 17 more people. The ship is indeed longer than any American aircraft carrier ever built, and an aircraft carrier typically has 5,000 crew members (notably, the Emma Maersk’s compliment does not require a lot of aircraft pilots or mechanics). The Emma Maersk is indeed too wide and too long to pass through the Panama Canal, but it not only can pass through the Suez, it has regularly passed through the Suez many times since it first did so on it’s maiden voyage.

Paragraph 5: Wrong and wrong. It has never travelled the trans-Pacific route, and it certainly cannot cruise at 31 knots.

Paragraph 6: Wrong when relevant. The Emma moves at the same speed as a “typical” container ship, around 20 knots. It does not go from China to California, never has. Where WalMart makes it’s goods is a non-sequitor. Although I cannot comment on competitiveness, some argue the MSC-class container ships, though smaller, are actually more efficient in container handling, even if they may use a little more fuel. Notably, perishables are usually carried in refrigerated containers, much like on other container ships. The Emma Maersk has capacity for 1000 reefer containers.

Paragraph 7: Unconfirmed. I can find no record of this modular construction technique, except various references to this e-mail chain.

Paragraph 6: I’ll give you a C-. That crew superstructure looks to be about 10 stories high, but the ship actually does not contain any cranes whatsoever. The 11 cranes shown in the picture are actually attached to and controlled from the shore. However, unloading the entire ship in 2 hours would require each of the 11 cranes, working in concert, to unload a container every 6 seconds, non-stop. Highly unlikely.

Additional Info:

Country of Origin: Correct!
Length: Correct!
Width: Wrong! (184 feet)
Net Cargo: Wrong! (55,400 Net Tonnes)
Engine: Almost! (109,000 hp from the main engine, plus 40,000hp from 5 auxiliaries).
Cruise Speed: Wrong! (20 knots cruise, 25 knots max)
Cargo Capacity: Almost! (14,770 TEU, which are not = 20 cubic feet)
Crew: Correct!
First trip: Correct!
Construction Cost: Pretty close!

So for a the Speed Round, the score is 55% correct. That’s a pass!

Next paragraph: Sort of. The silicone-based paint actually increases efficiency by preventing barnacle problems without the use of more toxic anti-fouling paints. It is expected to reduce fuel use by 1200 tonnes, which works out to 320,000gallons. Close enough for the internet! Of course, this ship does not burn diesel, it burns bunker fuel.

On the Editorial Content:
Well, the historicity of History Channel documentaries aside, it seems rather unlikely that a ship would carry 14,000 empty containers across the ocean. Believe it or not, the United States is still the second largest manufacturer in the world, producing almost 20% of the world’s manufactured goods. They are also the largest exporter of recycling materials to China. But all this is irrelevant, as the Emma Maersk does not run goods between China and North America!


Ugh.


Well, to take a page from Hunter, who cares about the truth and the statistics? Is the message one to be concerned about?. This ship still the largest ship in the world, and it moves a whole lotta shit from point A (developing country manufacturing inexpensive goods with low wages and lax environmental standards) to point B (post-industrial country with high wages, high environmental standards) to serve and consumers willing to ignore it all just to buy some new stuff).

This message seems to be cloaked in standard anti-China protectionist rhetoric (“China is stealing our Jobs!”). It fails to note, however, that China, and Maersk as a shipping company, are just doing what we in North America and Europe are asking for. We are the ones demanding a plentiful supply of cheap goods. We are the ones deciding to buy 10 pairs of underwear at WalMart for $5, and not one pair of high-quality underwear from Truro, Nova Scotia for $10. That the WalMart gonch fall apart faster than the plastic bag they are packaged in is irrelevant to us.

Here is my editorial comment:

Perhaps a more interesting point is the billions of dollars our Provincial Government is spending, right here in BC, to build Canada’s “Pacific Gateway”. Considering that 2% of our exports and almost 10% of our imports are traded with China (by far the largest trade deficit we have with any trading partner), isn’t Pacific Gateway essentially a giant subsidy to Chinese manufacturers over domestic or US manufacturers? I can understand why you might want to buy WalMart underwear, but why does our Federal Government want us to?

Carbon Credits revisited

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

This looks like good news.

I already went on about the ham-fisted way our Provincial government has forced Cities to become “Carbon neutral”, mostly by using property taxes to purchase carbon offsets and line the pockets of profitable multi-nationals.

But it’s not just eco-terrorist left wing lunatics like me saying this system is messed up. Those socialists in the Vancouver Business Press are also asking questions. In the August 23-30 edition of Business in Vancouver (issue 1139), there is a great piece called “Smoke and Mirrors” about how this system is corrupt at its core. It is well worth the read, only to hear the Surrey School Board, Marc Jaccard (the SFU scientist who shared the IPCC’s Nobel Prize for characterizing Climate change risk), John Cummins, and the BC School Trustees all agreeing with left-wing eco-terrorists like me.

Alas, if that is the system we have, how can we make it work for us? Here is where Jane Sterk of the BC Green party hits the nail right on the head. She suggests TransLink can fill its ongoing “funding gap” by selling carbon credits to the Pacific Carbon Trust. This is brilliant.

As Sterk suggests in the press release, every one of the 210 Million + transit riders per year , every person riding a bus, riding a SkyTrain, riding the West Coast Express, or riding the Sea Bus is producing less CO2e per km than a person in a car. TransLink provides the service that allows that carbon reduction. TransLink already has stats around transit use, all they need to do is get an energy economist to provide the number of Tonnes of carbon reduction per annum, and TransLink can negotiate a fat check from the PCT. Instead of our municipal and school tax dollars going to Encana, or Lafarge, they go back to us in the form of improved transportation service.

But let’s not stop there What about AirCare? According to
a recent study, one of the side benefits of the AirCare inspection program is a reduction in GHG emissions, as much as 1.1% of the total emissions of the Lower Mainland. This works out to enough offsets to run the entire AirCare program, saving drivers money. Or the money can go right back into TransLink general revenue.

Of course, the better alternative would just be to fund transit appropriately, without having to resort to ridiculous paper-shuffling exercises like the Pacific Carbon Trust. If we took the Province’s carbon tax and specifically earmarked it for carbon-reduction initiatives (like the Evergreen Line), then we wouldn’t need to go the long way around.

The Reported Death of AGW

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I don’t know if you have heard. It is all over the internets. Climate change is dead. Over. Kaput. Finito. History.

Some may suggest, in contrast to the Twain quote, that reports of the death of Anthropogenic Global Warming may be greatly exaggerated, but it seems pretty official this time, as it is being reported by no greater authority than Rex Murphy.

This is really no surprise. Since Rex returned to serious drinking a few years ago, he has been leading the charge of climate change deniers in the mainstream Canadian Media. We all expect knee-biters like Ezra Levant to be in the denier camp, but when Rex the Verbose declares climate change a hoax, there must be something to it.

However, if one reads his piece beyond the headline and first paragraph, and delves into the content (admittedly not the strength of the National Post on-line audience) you notice he doesn’t make a single point about AGW or about the science of the climate, doesn’t mention the ever-expanding pile of scientific data measuring the direct and indirect impacts of human-caused warming of the planet. Instead, the article is yet another silly attack on Al Gore, who according to the Right End of the Internets, has recently come publicly “unhinged” and become a raving lunatic.

All because of this recording.

Maybe I am unhinged, because when I hear this recording, it sounds completely rational to me. He sounds significantly more hinged than pretty much any other politician in the United States on this issue; Democrat, Republican, or otherwise.

Yes, he uses the word bullshit repeatedly, but he uses it completely in context. When someone says volcanoes put out more CO2 than humans, that is bullshit. Demonstrated bullshit that was proven to be false decades ago, as any intelligent person can prove to themselves with a little math in few minutes. When deniers say it is sunspots causing the recently observed changes, that is demonstrably, clearly, and unambiguously bullshit. Same with saying CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, or that climate it isn’t warming, or whatever old debunked bullshit they are recycling this week. Al Gore is not a scientist, is not a climate expert, but he is an accomplished politician, and politicians do recognize one thing better than most: Bullshit. This guy worked with Bill Clinton and lost an election to Carl Rove, I would say he is a world expert on the topic of political bullshit.

What I hear here is not a person “unhinged”, I hear a guy speaking truthfully, and somewhat exasperated that seemingly intelligent people like Rex Murphy fail to acknowledge the emperor’s nudity.

Much like Al, I just don’t see where Rex is on this issue. I am a firm believer in Hanlon’s Razor, but the other side of that razor says if you cannot find the incompetence, your only resort is to assume malice. I don’t think Rex is incompetent. But I also don’t believe that he can write a 900-word piece declaring the death of AGW without once mentioning that the planet isn’t warming or that the scientists were wrong. Instead, he writes a lot of vague phrases about how the public relations battle has been lost. Or, alternately, Rex and the people on his side of this issue have won the PR battle. They successfully piled on the bullshit so high that they won a PR battle over the truth.

And this is why Al and I are using words like Bullshit in otherwise polite company. What else can we do, when reality has lost a public relations battle?

Who really wins when reality loses a popularity contest?

I can’t help but feel Many years from now we will look back at this moment and wonder what the hell we were thinking. Only 35 years after the world agreed to end of all atmospheric nuclear testing, only 25 years after the Montreal Protocol saved the ozone layer, how can a small number of PR hacks funded by a few of the largest corporations on earth, publicly deny reality, and get the majority of people to agree?

This may be all fine and dandy for Rex. The worst impacts of climate change, the negative feedback of the stupid decisions we make now, will only be felt after Rex’s cirrhotic liver has failed and his pickled corpse is stinking up the churchyard on Carbonear.

But wasn’t journalism supposed to be about facts?

Jack

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

A leader inspires people to follow.

A leader sees a destination and charts a course, and isn’t afraid to change course when a shorter or superior path the destination is found.

A leader is clear about what he stands for, and makes an eloquent case for his position.

A leader brings out the best in the people around him, not by forging them in the Leader’s image, but by allowing every individual’s strengths to rise, and providing them the tools they need to contribute their best, to make the team stronger.

A leader attracts opposition, faces it head-on, and becomes stronger through it.

A leader does not move forward by holding others back.

A leader, by force of personality, causes us to question what we are doing as individuals towards the causes we believe in.

Love him or loathe him (few seemed indifferent!), today Canada lost a Leader in every sense of the word. But as he set a course, he inspired us to act, it is now up to us to carry forward. Leaders leave us stronger with their legacy, and in that sense, we rarely know their power until they are gone.

In the days, weeks and years ahead, let’s remember his final message to Canadians:

“Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”