Category Archives: Web Article Review

treehouses

There’s a treehouse hotel you can stay at in Ohio. It’s a pretty cool idea. You could pretend to be an Ewok. I wonder what the maximum density would be for a sustainable treehouse-based civilization. You could use gondolas to get around, minimizing the transportation footprint. You would still need electricity and water infrastructure, hospitals, etc. You would need food, but maybe you could rely heavily on tree nuts and fruit to provide a lot of it. And obviously, you couldn’t cut down too many trees to build the treehouses or you wouldn’t have enough trees left to build them in.

NACTO intersection design guide

The National Association of City Transportation Officials has a new guide for safe intersection design. I’m thinking about buying a few hundred printed copies and sending them to the local engineers, planners and politicians who have caused Philadelphia to fall well behind peer cities (and many cities that should not even be peer cities) in safe street infrastructure.

Pennsylvania’s Integrated List

Pennsylvania has released its DRAFT 2018 PENNSYLVANIA INTEGRATED WATER QUALITY MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT REPORT. This might seem esoteric and of interest to just a few, but it’s worthwhile to think about what U.S. water quality regulations are supposed to accomplish and how much they are actually accomplishing.

  • The authority to regulate the water quality of “navigable waters” rests with Congress, under the concept that water quality is important to interstate waters. In practice, most rivers, streams, and lakes that do not dry up at any point during a typical year are covered. There is an enormous, long-running legal fight over water bodies at the margins of this definition, such as wetlands that are connected to larger bodies of water sometimes but not all the time.
  • Congress makes the law, the EPA is required to implement them, and the EPA in most cases delegates this to state-level agencies, although it can supervise them and, in theory at least, take over at any time. This very occasionally happens.
  • State level agencies are required to map all the water bodies in the state that come under these regulations, break them up into segements, and specify the “uses”, such as type of aquatic ecosystem and type of recreation, to be protected for each and every one.
  • Then they are supposed to collect data and determine whether each and every segment is “attaining” each and every use.
  • If any segment is not attaining its use, the state is supposed to determine an exact cause.
  • If the cause is a specific pollutant, it is supposed to identify all the sources of that pollutant, how much it needs to be reduced for the use to attain, and how much each source of the pollutant is required to reduce their discharges.
  • The results of this process, called “total maximum daily load”, are not immediately enforceable. Now the numbers have to flow down into enforceable permits and other programs.

It’s all very logical and straightforward. Now here are some of the problems.

  • The federal and state agencies don’t have the funding, personnel, and expertise to do the data collection right. This means that the determinations are often done on very little data, by people of questionable expertise, and the conclusions are easy to challenge by permitted polluters with some means. “Polluters” as I use the term here are not necessarily bad actors – they are cities, towns, businesses and farmers. In short, civilization causes pollution and the idea is to control the amount and type to what the environment can assimilate.
  • When a reasonable amount of data is collected, it is usually paid for by the polluters themselves. Again, they are not necessarily bad actors. They may be perfectly ethical people who want to be regulated based on accurate information. But sometimes not, and either way there is a conflict of interest involved. Data collection is also an effective delay tactic – when data is inadequate, the problems are not well understood and the most appropriate solutions are not easy to identify, a data collection effort can be a good compromise among all parties involved and an alternative to endless legal action.
  • Even when there is a lot of data, the science is complicated, there is a lot of uncertainty, and this makes any required reductions fairly easy to challenge by those with financial means.
  • Cities and towns are required to limit stormwater pollution, but in practice stormwater pollution is generated by thousands or millions or individual property owners. Fixing this would require changing the way we build and use land. Technological solutions exist, and are not even necessarily high-tech or expensive, but there is enormous uncertainty built into current political and institutional arrangements.
  • Agriculture is almost entirely unregulated, and is an enormous source of pollution. It is controlled only through a patchwork of voluntary and incentive programs funded mostly at the state level. Some states do this better than others, but it is never adequate.
  • The concept of chemical “water quality” as we tend to think of it does not really guarantee the restoration of functioning ecosystems. The legal framework probably could be implemented in a way that would do this, but there is a critical lack of system understanding even among educated professionals, and even if a critical mass of people had that understanding, there is enormous resistance to change built into our institutions.
  • The regulatory agencies tend to go after a few big polluters, because that is how they get the most bang for their buck. Numerous small polluters, who collectively add up to most of the pollution, don’t get addressed. The big polluters are able to delay enforcement, sometimes indefinitely, through a variety of legal tactics. Third party advocacy groups get involved in lawsuits and add to the fray.

New Orleans levees are upgraded, but did not take climate change into account

A $14 billion upgrade to New Orleans’s flood protection system has been completed, as recommended following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For the U.S., this is a pretty massive and fast public works project. I haven’t delved into any technical details and am only going on this Scientific American article, but it sounds like it will not provide the level of protection originally envisioned.

The agency’s projection that the system will “no longer provide [required] risk reduction as early as 2023” illustrates the rapidly changing conditions being experienced both globally as sea levels rise faster than expected and locally as erosion wipes out protective barrier islands and marshlands in southeastern Louisiana….

Sea-level rise raises questions about whether the protective system—known officially as the Greater New Orleans Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System—should be built to a higher standard.
When Congress approved funding after Katrina, it required the system to protect against a so-called 100-year flood, which has a 1% likelihood of occurring in any year.

That’s a laudable attempt to communicate probability to the public. But if the Army Corps is really using the “100-year flood” as its design standard, and if it’s doing that because Congress prescribed it, and if they did not consider coastal erosion or adequately consider sea level rise, this may be yet another sign the U.S. is slipping behind its peer group of advanced nations. The Dutch are not doing this, they are providing a much higher level of protection to coastal population centers based on the economic value of doing so. I want to believe Congress will do the right thing and protect our coastal population centers when push comes to shove, but I am not encouraged.

Of course, if it protects from a 1-chance-in-50 event rather than a 1-chance-in-100 event, this is not nothing. Each year, and over the course of several decades or a century, your city and personal property either floods or it doesn’t. When it does, you either have practical and financial plans in place to help you bounce back, or you don’t. So good planning, good public works design, good building codes and land use controls, insurance and disaster resilience planning all matter. Some academics, professionals and bureaucrats within the U.S. might be talking about these things, but our political system is certainly not on the cutting edge when it comes to putting them into practice.

when do people travel

Here’s an interesting article in Wired (sadly, my last free one of the month – Wired is one of the few magazines I might actually consider subscribing to) about an analysis of transportation data in L.A. What’s different about it is that they used cell phone data to understand not just longer commutes and trips to and from school, but also all the short trips people take near home for errands, chores and quick shopping. A conclusion is that public transportation, at least in L.A., is much slower and less convenient for these. It makes sense. In my neighborhood, in Philadelphia, these are going to be 95% walking trips, because there is only street parking on both ends, and giving up your spot on the street would not be worth it, not to mention making your trip slow and inconvenient. So free parking on both ends is a big contributor to this, and free parking obviously requires a lot of land, and once you devote all that land to free parking, your neighborhood is no longer walkable and you can’t go back.

the latest on male birth control

Wired’s Gadget Lab, strangely enough, has an episode on male birth control. This is not a gadget, but a hormonal pill men could take. This has been a goal for many decades with little or no progress, and now it sounds like it may be within reach in the near future. Opinions will vary, but I think anything that gives us more control over our reproductive options is good for individual freedom and for society as a whole.

Game of Thrones and human extinction

Slate makes a pretty good point about Game of Thrones – the humans probably shouldn’t win, but they will. This happens in a lot of movies, of course. The bad guys are so bad that the good guys have no plausible chance, and then there is some deus ex machina that makes it all work out. Like all you have to do is throw a bucket of water on the previously invulnerable witch, and she melts. The Death Star has some ridiculous vulnerable point that can be taken out with one shot. The alien ship’s force field can be deactivated because it just happens to use Windows 95 as its operating system (Independence Day). It can be a little annoying if you feel like the authors/screenwriters were just lazy. But in the end, you can either suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story, or go watch a documentary or read a non-fiction book if you are such as deadly serious person you can’t do that.


Viewers have known from the beginning that humanity is facing an existential threat from the army of undead known as the White Walkers, but the show’s characters have discovered the looming crisis only gradually, and they’ve been slow to reckon with the little they do know. Now, with the Night King’s masses marching south from the sundered Wall, there’s no doubt that the threat is real. And yet, with only five episodes of Game of Thrones remaining, the human race is resolutely failing to rise to the occasion. Jon Snow’s attempt to form an alliance with Daenerys Targaryen has created dissension instead of unity, with some northern houses deserting the cause and others, like poor little Lord Umber’s, left unprepared and undersupplied. Despite having pledged her troops, Cersei is merely lying in wait, hoping that the rival armies weaken each other enough for her to conquer whatever remains.

So there you have it. I don’t really think Game of Thrones is primarily a climate change allegory. It mashes together a lot of different things as good authors (especially fantasy and science fiction authors) tend to do. Early on, I thought it was a realistic depiction of social conditions in a medieval, feudal society, examining what it was like for various groups to live there, with just enough fantasy and soft porn thrown in to keep people hooked. Mythologically, there are definitely some King Arthur ties. Zoroastrians have a seven-fold god and fire temples, and the Celts have tree spirits. Most religions have some sort of apocalypse scenario, and in many it is part of a cycle that repeats.

What do I think is going to happen? We may never find out what George R.R. Martin originally had in mind, any more than Disney’s Star Wars ending is likely to match whatever George Lucas had in mind. This is not a particularly bold prediction, but I predict the Deus Ex Machina is going to involve dragons and fire in some way. The humans will have all but lost, and then the fire god will step in and cleanse the land in some way so the cycle can begin again.

Robert Skidelski

Robert Skidelski reminds us that, if a critical mass of people is ever going to enjoy the good life, at least two things have to happen. First, the wealth we are creating has to be shared and not just horded by an elite few. And second, we have to learn to distinguish what we need from what we want, and put some limits on the latter rather than let advertisers and other brainwashers always convince us that we want more and more.

There is little echo in this narrative of the older view that machines offer emancipation from work, opening up a vista of active leisure – a theme going back to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle envisaged a future in which “mechanical slaves” did the work of actual slaves, leaving citizens free for higher pursuits. John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes comforted their readers with the thought that capitalism, by generating the income and wealth needed to abolish poverty, would abolish itself, freeing mankind, as Keynes put it, to live “wisely and agreeably and well.”

Likewise, in his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde claimed that with machinery doing all the “ugly, horrible, uninteresting work,” humans will have “delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvelous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else.” And Bertrand Russell extolled the benefitsof extending leisure from an aristocracy to the whole population…

But the concept of growing abundance, articulated by Keynes and others, has been over-ridden by economists’ commitment to inherent scarcity. People’s wants, they say, are insatiable, so they will never have enough. Supply will always lag behind demand, mandating continuous improvements in efficiency and technology. This will be true even if there is enough to feed, clothe, and house the whole world. Poised between the profusion of their wants and the paucity of their means, humans have no option but to continue to “work for hire” in whatever jobs the market provides. So the day of abundance, when they can choose between work and leisure, will never arrive. They must “race with the machines” forever and ever.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Kurzgesast – In a Nutshell is a site with short videos on all sorts of futuristic topics. Here is one on the Dyson Sphere. It talks about a seemingly-plausible approach to a Dyson swarm where small, cheap solar satellites are used to beam solar energy to factories on Mercury, which is used along with materials on Mercury itself to make more satellites and more factories to make satellites in an exponential manner. Sounds good except for the possibility of a runaway exponential system redirecting increasing amounts of solar generation in new directions, and the ethics of possibly disassembling an entire planet into construction materials.