Genoa

I wonder if this book could possibly be as entertaining as this review of it:

Genoa (Paul Metcalf, Coffee House Press)

Here’s another deeply American book, reprinted this year on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Indeed, it may be the most American book I’ve seen in a long time, not counting that children’s series Rush Limbaugh writes where he travels through time to stabs redcoats. Genoa deals in seafaring, in ghosts, in mythmaking and violence. As with the Wieners collection, this was my introduction to the author, and I was glad for it. Metcalf writes through his corpse, so to speak, in the same style used and advocated by Davenport, Delany and Gass. In this novel that deep attention to the narrator’s body runs in a feedback loop with excerpts and discursions about and by Herman Melville and Christopher Columbus. The result feels shockingly au courant, as if Maggie Nelson, Eliot Weinberger or Valeria Luiselli had taken it upon themselves to gloss an Updike story.

car-free cities

The Guardian has a nice run-down on the state of car-free developments around the world:

  • “Oslo revealed plans to ban all private vehicles from the centre by 2019″
  • “Helsinki has ambitious plans to make its “mobility on demand” service so good that nobody will want to drive a car in the centre by 2025”
  • “Paris’s car-free days have successfully reduced high pollution”
  • “New cities – such as the Great City on the outskirts of Chengdu, China, and Masdar near Abu Dhabi – plan to focus on mass transit or electric cars as alternatives to gas-guzzling private cars.”
  • “Venice is often cited as the largest car-free city, but they have it easy, with canals and rivers instead of streets.”
  • “Hamburg, on the other hand, is currently making waves by enforcing an auto-ban on a number of urban roads to develop a network of route for pedestrians and bikes that link parks and open spaces together.”
  • “Madrid, too, is focusing on the city at a human level, and recently hatched a plan to pedestrianise the urban core and expel cars by 2020.”
  • “Dublin and Brussels are also toying with the idea of kicking the habit through city centre diesel-car bans, with similar ideas proposed by Liberal Democrats in London following the VW emissions scandal.”
  • “Milan is offering public transit tokens to residents for every weekday they surrender their cars”
  • “Rome is slowly progressing with parking bans.”
  • ” Copenhagen. Unsurprisingly, large swathes of the Danish capital have been closed to vehicles for decades, with bicycle infrastructure reaching into every corner.”
  • “Every week in the Colombian capital [Bogota], over 75 miles of urban roads are shut to vehicles.”
  • “In Hyderabad’s IT corridor (dubbed “Cyberabad”), a recently launched weekly car ban marks a first for Indian cities”
  • in South Korea, a Suwon neighbourhood recently trialled a full month ban in September 2013, which inspired the wealthy Sandton area of Johannesburg to hosts its own car-free experiment last month.”
  • “Portland hopes to [have] 25% of trips made on two wheels by 2030.”
  • “While modal share for cycling just scrapes an average of 2% in the US, in Davis [California] it’s 20%.”
  • “Alongside the expansion of the subway system, segregated bike lanes are slowly creeping into North America’s fifth largest city [Toronto], and there are whispers around a potential car-free street during rush hour.”

Here in Philadelphia, we’re asking if a bike lane is still a bike lane several years after the paint wore off…

ecological civilization, and the bees from The X Files

We’re entering that time of year for look-backs and trend forecasts. Trends in Ecology and Evolution journal has A Horizon Scan of Global Conservation Issues for 2016:

This paper presents the results of our seventh annual horizon scan, in which we aimed to identify issues that could have substantial effects on global biological diversity in the future, but are not currently widely well known or understood within the conservation community. Fifteen issues were identified by a team that included researchers, practitioners, professional horizon scanners, and journalists. The topics include use of managed bees as transporters of biological control agents, artificial superintelligence, electric pulse trawling, testosterone in the aquatic environment, building artificial oceanic islands, and the incorporation of ecological civilization principles into government policies in China.

I vaguely remember that The X Files was obsessed with bees as delivery devices for smallpox, or aliens, or alien smallpox…

I hadn’t heard the phrase “ecological civilization” before. When I Google it I am finding references to statements by the Chinese government and quotes from Marx and Engels (who had a lot to say about depletion of natural resources by short-sighted profit seeking entities, although they might have objected to the term “natural capital”). Here is an article from The Diplomat, a respected international news magazine based in Tokyo:

The “ecological civilization” concept first appeared in 2007, in a report to the 17th National People’s Congress. At the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee in 2013, Xi stressed that China would implement “ecological civilization reforms” – reforms to reconcile contradictions between economic development and the environment. In April this year, the plan was restated, with the release of a document outlining the acceleration of moves to establish an ecological civilization.

Proposals include performing natural resources audits when local officials leave their posts, so as to force officials pay attention to environmental protection while in office, or be held to account when they leave. A pilot scheme will be carried out in five different locations, including Hulunbuir in Inner Mongolia. It is the first time such a trial has been proposed by the central government. It will take place in three stages: a launch this year, expansion next year, then in 2017 full audits in the trial locations, with regular audits starting from 2018. The aim is to get local officials to give greater priority to the environment, compared to the economy…

Sun Xinghua, deputy chair of the China Environmental Sciences Association’s auditing committee, told chinadialogue that “confirmation of property rights for natural resources has never been raised before.” Currently, ownership of natural resources in China is unclear. Clarification of rights and responsibilities will reduce disputes and allow for valuation of natural resources. And valuation will allow the compilation of tables of ‘natural resource debts’, removing a major obstacle to auditing of natural resources when local officials leave their posts.

That’s a pretty interesting idea – calculating a politician’s “debt to nature” based on policies they have chosen. You could even do that for, say, an entire legislature and display that number next to economic output statistics for their time in office.

the Paris agreement

There is plenty of media coverage on the Paris agreement by people more knowledgeable than me. Even though I’m not an expert, I like to skim the actual document and try to pull out a few key points myself, just like I do with the IPCC reports. I had to get all the way to page 21 to find what looks to me like the two most important provisions:

  • Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change

  • In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out in Article 2, Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.

The first paragraph (sentence? nobody does a run-on sentence like the United Nations) is notable because it appears to be a commitment among most of the nations of the world to a more aggressive target than the 2 degrees C that seemed all but abandoned just recently. The second paragraph is nice because it conveys clearly that the goal is not just for emissions to stop growing. They have to be rolled back to a level where they are not actually adding to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It seems like that would almost certainly have to mean an end to fossil fuel burning, unless carbon is being captured on a large scale.

A more pessimistic way of looking at it though is that the “second half of this century” ends in 2099, and this wording seems like it would let things keep getting worse until then, and then let them stay at whatever bad level they are at.

I suspect that technology is likely to make fossil fuels obsolete well before 2099, and if so these targets will require no action to achieve. If we are still around in 2099, we will probably have new opportunities and problems that are well beyond our wildest imaginations now.

not time to worry about Trump

I’ve been asking whether Trump is using a fascist playbook and we should be worried, but here are a couple articles that say no, it is not time to worry. Both point out that the share of media coverage a candidate gets does not have much to do with the proportion of voters that actually support them. Alternet says that more likely voters support Bernie Sanders than Donald Trump, although the latter gets 23 times more media attention:

The Tyndall Report, which tracks coverage on nightly network newscasts, found that Trump has hogged more than a quarter of all presidential race coverage — and more than the entire Democratic field combined.

Hillary Clinton — who enjoys the most voter support, by far, of any candidate in either party — had received the second-most network news coverage.

Sanders, who is supported by more voters than Trump, has received just 10 minutes of network airtime throughout the entire campaign — which translates to 1/23 of Trump’s campaign coverage.

Nate Silver tries to break it down some more. One interesting data analysis he has done shows that at this point in the last two elections, only 8-16% of all Google searches that would eventually be made related to the primaries had been made. So let’s hope that means that only the crazies on the fringe are paying attention at this point.

more on Robert Paxton

Recently I was musing about the U.S., Donald Trump, and fascism. I suggested that the U.S. has a fairly rigid social order favoring and enforced by traditional political, bureaucratic, business and professional elites. We also have a grassroots movement based on rhetoric of national, religious, and to some extent racial unity, and fearful of outsiders. Here is Robert Paxton’s definition of fascism in his 1998 paper The Five Stages of Fascism:

Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.

So fascism is not just a social order cynically maintained by and for the interests of traditional elites. It is somewhat the opposite – a grassroots movement based on a myth of national, religious or racial purity and unity. The grassroots believe the rhetoric while the elites probably do not, but both are interested in maintaining the social order. The danger arises when the traditional elites cynically choose to join forces with the grassroots fascists, because they do not feel strong enough to maintain the existing social order on their own. Together, the two groups are strong enough to come to power where neither could on its own, but once in power the traditional elites may lose control, particularly under war or crisis conditions.

So ironically, it is at a moment when liberal elements in society are making some progress against the entrenched elites that we may be most vulnerable to a right-wing grassroots movement arising. The Tea Party’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, and Donald Trump’s attempts to use that rhetoric to rise to power, would seem to fit the bill. It is ironic that a modern American fascism would use rhetoric of freedom and democracy to undermine freedom and democracy, but that is our national unifying myth so it makes some sense.

abandoning Lake Powell


Lake Powell is on the Colorado upstream of the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, controlled by Glen Canyon Dam. Lake Mead is downstream of the Grand Canyon, controlled by Hoover Dam. With the decade-plus drought affecting the basin, there is actually talk of bypassing Glen Canyon Dam and just letting Lake Powell drain into Lake Mead.

One option involves filling Lake Mead first. This would allow Upper Basin water to flow past Glen Canyon Dam for storage in Lake Mead. A legal analysis published in The Water Report, issue 112, concluded that the plan doesn’t violate the Compact, because the counting point for Upper Basin water deliveries could be moved downstream, from Lees Ferry to Hoover Dam. Another option is to release water through Glen Canyon Dam’s river outlet works at 3,374-foot elevation. There’s also the option of drilling bypass tunnels — as former Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy once suggested.

Upper Basin officials say that losing generation at Glen Canyon would cause a “spike” in electric power prices, raising rates by as much as 500 percent. This is highly unlikely. Glen Canyon Dam’s power may be marketed to 174 Southwestern utilities and providers, yet it contributes less than 1 percent of the total capacity of the Western power grid. There are also alternative power sources available.

If Glen Canyon Dam went offline, gas-fired power plants could instantly meet the demand at a similar cost. In fact, given Lake Powell’s recent decline, the dam has already been producing only 60 percent of its generating capacity. Yet no electricity rate “spikes” have occurred.

 

self-parking cars

This article in Governing makes the case that a big impact of self-driving cars will be on the amount of land used for parking:

First, self-driving cars need less room to self-park, making it possible to squeeze more cars into a garage — up to 60 percent more, according to Audi. Second, parking garages would no longer have to be located downtown — drivers and their passengers could exit the vehicles in the city and the cars would self-drive to the garages on the downtown’s periphery. Third, with garages capable of storing more cars, cities wouldn’t need to devote so much space for curbside parking, freeing up valuable land for public transit, pedestrians and bicyclists, and reducing the congestion that comes from drivers searching for a place to park…

Self-driving technology can park a car so precisely that lanes with a width of three meters are adequate, leaving just 10 centimeters of space between the mirrors of parked cars, according to Audi. By packing more cars into less space, the company says that the amount of parking can be reduced by as much as 60 to 80 percent in some cases.

U.S. Fascism?

Is it even remotely possible that the U.S. could go down a Fascist path? I don’t know. Let’s first ask if the U.S. unequivocally qualifies as a democracy. If you set the lowest possible bar, democracy could just mean that government leaders are nominally chosen by majority vote, and there is therefore a process for non-violent change of government. We pass that test. A better definition though, in my view, would be that there is a process for choosing government policies that represent a consensus among most of the people, and that represent a compromise reflecting the interests of most of the people. We clearly do not have this. We clearly have policies that represent the interests of a relatively small class of political and business elites, and we have an entrenched political party system that presents almost insurmountable obstacles to anyone who might seriously challenge that social order. It would take widespread violence or civil disobedience to do that, which is the opposite of a functioning democratic political system. So we have a fairly rigid social order enforced by traditional elites.

If our definition of fascism involves jack boots and arm bands and cattle cars, clearly we are not even close, thank goodness. But could we be headed there? What is a registry database for a small minority religious group, if not a modern version of the armband? Robert Paxton’s stages of fascism start with a sense of victim-hood, nationalism based on religion or ethnicity, anger, and some external or internal enemy to blame. We seem to have these ingredients, at least among the angry white men supporting Donald Trump. Next comes a charismatic leader. I don’t find Donald charismatic, but some people clearly do. Next comes acceptance of the extremists by the conservative establishment because they are not strong enough to govern on their own. I don’t think we are there yet, but we did have the recent capitulation of the more moderate conservative elements in Congress to the Tea Party extremists. After these stages come the assumption of power and exercise of power. That is hard to imagine, but we will find out by this time next year.

I still think Donald Trump is a clown. An amoral attention-seeking clown at best, a Fascist clown at worst. It is reassuring that demographics continue to shift so that angry white men can’t just always get their way, no matter how loud and menacing they are. But I am getting just a bit worried. More geopolitical turbulence or random acts of violence in the next year could shift more people into a scared, angry state of mind where they are more open to the extremist rhetoric.

bacteria vs. cancer

Here’s a bizarre article in New Yorker about curing a terminal brain tumor by purposely causing a serious but treatable brain infection.

The tumor had spread to his brain stem and was shortly expected to kill him. Muizelaar cut out as much of the tumor as possible. But before he replaced the “bone flap”—the section of skull that is removed to allow access to the brain—he soaked it for an hour in a solution teeming with Enterobacter aerogenes, a common fecal bacterium. Then he reattached it to Egan’s skull, using tiny metal plates and screws. Muizelaar hoped that inside Egan’s brain an infection was brewing…

For four weeks, Egan lay in intensive care, most of the time in a coma. Then, on the afternoon of November 10th, Muizelaar learned that a scan of Egan’s brain had failed to pick up the distinctive signature of glioblastoma. The pattern on the scan suggested that the tumor had been replaced by an abscess—an infection—precisely as the surgeons had intended. “A brain abscess can be treated, a glioblastoma cannot,” Muizelaar told me.

I almost called this post “shit for brains”, then I grew up just a little bit.