EclecticLip

While downtown yesterday, I went to a local company’s [stock-promoting] presentation, something I found out about through a connect at TEDxVancouver.  While I’m unsure about this company’s business model — perhaps because I don’t know much about business models! — I attended ’cause there’s always free food at these things.    I also scored a free copy of David Bach’s “Go Green, Live Rich”, which they were handing out.  I’m not that fond of the author, given that he filled the ”Finish Rich” book series with everyday pablum, but this book’s ghostwritten, is filled with nice stock images from iStockPhoto.com, and is tweaked for Canadians, so I figured I’d give it a chance.  Plus, the price was right!

On the topic of iStockPhoto.com, while shopping at the local PriceSmart Foods at Christmas, I noticed that the boxes of “Sun Brand” Japanese mandarins, and “Pagoda Brand” Chinese mandarins use the same stock photo on the box cover!  The only difference is that Pagoda actually replicates part of the original photo twice.  Someone at one of those two companies is either very dumb, or very very clever… 

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Newsweek ran a story awhile back on how “big oil’s gone green for real”.  (Though the correct phrase would be “big oil’s gone greenwashing for real”.)

A sample looks-good-at-first-glance sentence is the following:

In fact, while companies like BP and Shell are cutting back on commercial projects in wind and solar, Big Oil is taking a closer look at how they might be used to increase efficiency internally, or to free up increasingly profitable fossil fuels, like natural gas, for commercial sale.

If going green means cutting back on alternative energy programs, George W Bush should’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize.    Increasing efficiency is something any good business does, so that’s not a real mark of improvement.  And the stated reason for pursuing natural gas is money-green, not sustainability-green.
As it turns out, this is a case of advertiser-funded media gone awry.  From ClimateProgress:

Newsweek since 2007 has sold advertising packages to the oil industry’s biggest influence group that included the right to co-host forums on energy issues, including two where members of Congress sat side-by-side on panels with the association’s president.

American Petroleum Institute ranks among advertisers that have reached a spending threshold that allows them to attach their name to a Newsweek event and have their top executive as a panel speaker…

…journalism and ethics experts decried the arrangement.

“You’re selling access,” said Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. “Newsweek is using its reputation as a great news organization to convene these officeholders to talk about public policy. Then it’s renting out a space at the table for one of its customers who would not be at the table if not for giving money to Newsweek”…

To mark this occasion, and in light of the current goings-on at Copenhagen, I put together a “Big Oil Hierarchy of Denial”, along the lines of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the Five Stages of Grief.  Sort of a guidebook to the different stages that Exxon & co have gone through, over the years.  Enjoy!

Note: the list is to be read from the bottom up. 

Finally transferred some files over from the gmail this morning…

Here, here, and here.

August 31 2009 is evidently the fifth annual Blog Day.

In light of this wonderful occasion — Blog Day’s “wood” anniversary –  here is a timely Demotivator® poster from the cheery folks at despair.com. 

For the third year in eight, European nuclear reactors are having to shut down in summer, on account of the heat.  To understate things mildly, this does not bode well for nuclear as a major power source, in a warming world!  One-third of France’s nuclear capacity is currently offline, to avoid discharging excessively warm water into nearby rivers (water contains less dissolved oxygen as it gets warmer; pumping enough hot water into a river kills marine life).

France has 19 reactors, so if visualized as a litter of identical nineteen-uplets, this is equivalent to knocking six of them offline during peak periods when everyone’s turning up the “climatiseur”.  (Another three are run full-time to enrich the uranium fuel — sadly I can’t recall my source, but it was a generally reliable contributor to The Oil Drum — so electricity for civic purposes has dropped from sixteen to ten reactors’ worth.)

Back home, Ontario’s Bruce Power reactors are sited next to Lake Huron (a much larger body of water) so shouldn’t ever suffer this kind of problem.  For lake- or ocean-side reactors, the primary hurdle to nuclear power is cost — a hurdle with which the fuel cell industry is all too familiar. 

The estimated cost of nuclear power (as calculated by companies submitting bids to build reactors in various countries) is in the 20 cents/kWh range over the reactor lifetime.  Consequently, nuclear is more expensive than pretty much everything but solar photovoltaics — and the latter are getting cheaper as production scales up.  (Each time worldwide installations double, solar gets about 20% cheaper.  And installations are doubling every 2-3 years.)
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We went on a double date on Saturday with some friends, to the Metro Vancouver landfill in Delta.  (There was an open house, and being the romantic type that I am…)  We spent a couple hours there and saw all the highlights — the mountains of garbage, the compost piles, huge machinery (sitting idle), and Teamsters (funnily enough, also sitting idle). 

Some of the trucks were basically steamrollers with spiky knobs on the wheels; the vehicular equivalent of high heels, I suppose.  The knobs concentrate the weight of the vehicle, compressing the mountains of trash.  (And there are several mountains.)

There were maybe a dozen booths set up — like a small farmer’s market — where one could pick up materials from BC Hydro PowerSmart, local composting or wildlife groups.  Unlike any farmer’s market I’d been to though, they had volunteers grilling up hot dogs and burgers (free ones!).  There was pop, but no bottled water, funnily enough. 

There were also some falconers — falcons are brought in occasionally to scare away seagulls; some contractors even train the falcons not just to intimidate, but to kill.  With that in mind, I asked if the falcons could be used against Canada geese; but it seems the latter don’t scare easily.  I believe the falconer’s words were “oh, no - they’d probably kill [falcon’s name which I’ve forgotten]”.  Frankly, I’d've thought a pirate with a falcon would have gotten more props than pirates with parrots, but what do I know?  I’d've thought the frilly, puffy-sleeved shirts didn’t convey menace very well, either. 

I did ask Metro Vancouver Wastewater Treatment if they had open houses; sadly, they don’t.  I’ll have to book a private appointment.  They did say that they can tell when each period of a playoff game ends, ’cause everyone gets up and uses the washroom at once.

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As for the Eat! Vancouver show, all the usual suspects were there — Freedom 55, Club Intrawest (time-shares), Tourism Barbados…

As is now the custom at these shows, they handed out reusable plastic bags at the entrance, this time from Bosa Foods.  Puzzlingly, my resuable bag contained a disposable plastic bag in which the freebies were placed.  (My two co-show goers’ bags were disposables-free.)  Given how popular these are as handouts, one wonders how many reusable (but unused) plastic bags now line the continent’s closets and pantries.  Marc Jaccard, who studies the effectiveness of climate legislation at SFU, points out that most people have unused compact fluorescent lights in their closets, because — like him — they bought more than they could install.  The underlying point is that these devices don’t save energy (or in the case of the bags, plastic) unless they’re actually used.

The folks from Liberation BC (an animal welfare group) were there; from them I learned that the SPCA actually has a certificate program to identify livestock producers who treat the animals less cruelly.  They were seated beside a local pork farmer, and seemed politely resigned to their situation’s irony.  The fellow sells sausages at the local farm markets, so presumably doesn’t use factory farming techniques, which are fairly capital intensive.

They also pointed me to the Rabbit River Farms booth, home of BC’s first SPCA-approved eggs.  Looking at the surprisingly richly-hued contents of the egg basket they’d brought, I realized that I’d come to assume that not only did eggs only come in white or brown, but that they only came in one specific shade each of white or brown.  The baskets contained eggs which were Small, Medium and Large, and a few half again as large, euphemistically referred to as “Ouch”.  Apparently, as hens get older they produce fewer but bigger eggs.  Sort of like Beethoven with his symphonies, I guess.

The folks from Island Farms were there too, with samples of cantaloupe-flavoured ice cream, which comes in containers labelled with bigger Chinese characters than Western.  Melon-flavoured ice cream is pretty big in Japan, so I suppose they’re targeting Asian tastes.  Avalon Dairy was there also.  The purveyors of bottled milk had developed an Omega-3 enriched milk product, sold as Vitala.  (Before I continue, I can’t help commenting that the impact of making and transporting glass bottles is almost certainly larger than the impact of a landfilled-after-one-use Tetra Pak.  It’s a case where a twentieth-century packaging solution is better than the older nineteenth-century one.)

But I digress.  Vitala milk is Omega-3 enriched.  I asked whether they feed the cows a high-flax diet (a trick used by some companies to make eggs’ yolks a deeper yellow, and allow Omega-3 claims to be made) — and that was true.  But there was more.  Their diet is tuna-enriched.  (Our cat doesn’t even get a tuna-enriched diet!  Well, not all that often.)  Tuna, which sits near the top of the marine food web, reduced to a bovine nutritional supplement…  (”Mercury-fortified”!    )

While the cows get factory dregs (the “mechanically separated meat” equivalent of the fish-food industry) the predator-to-prey ratio is like a pyramid: you need a lot at the bottom of the food web to support a few at the top.  (Hmm… not unlike manager-employee ratios, come to think of it…)  Taking the top levels down to the base of another pyramid is astonishingly inefficient; it’d be like growing wildebeest to feed lions to fatten giraffes.

I’ve been contacting folks from various sectors in the past couple months to get a better understanding of what authentic sustainability implies.  Having started correspondences with folks in manufacturing, I recently turned to mining.  And so it was that I had lunch last week with a friend of a friend — or technically, an acquaintance of an acquaintance — with the purpose of learning about the environmental considerations (or lack thereof) in mining nowadays.  Somewhere along the way, we got sidetracked and at one point wound up discussing the difficulties early Mahayana Buddhist missionairies had translating their sutras from Sanskrit to Chinese, given that the former is an alphabetic Indo-European language and the latter, pictographic Sino-Tibetan.  I can only imagine how much they struggled with chopsticks…

Turns out he’d majored in Sanskrit and minored in (classical) Chinese back in the day.  As you might imagine, he had noooooo idea about technical matters, but gave me the names of several folks who do know that stuff, to follow up with.  He paid for lunch too, which was great; though if he’d told me in advance, I’d've ordered dessert. 

I did find out that a mid-nineties American poll ranked mining companies even lower than tobacco companies in public perception — and that was fifteen years of environmental devastation ago!  Also, Rio Tinto Alcan (generally regarded as one of the world’s most progressive miners nowadays, they even got kudos from Jared Diamond in Collapse) takes its name from a region in southern Spain, where mining has gone on since Gilgamesh wrestled Enkidu in ancient Sumeria.  (In fairness to Enkidu, Gilgamesh was an unwelcome wedding crasher.)  The Tinto River is so acidic that after the medieval Arabs discovered sulfuric acid, they named the Tinto the “river of vitriol” in its honour.  Extremophile microbes are actually responsible for the acidity, which drops the river pH down to 2.0 — three times as acidic as Coca-Cola!  (Coke has a pH of 2.5, but pH being a logarithmic measure, a pH change of 1 unit represents a tenfold acidity difference, and 0.5 units a roughly threefold difference.)

That said, we who recoil most at scabrous mine sites — open sores on the world’s natural splendour — are generally the greatest recipients of their bounty, through our laptops, iPods, autos — even our electrical wiring and indoor plumbing.  To misquote Al Gore, it’s an irritating truth.

Last weekend, we ventured to Salt Spring Island.  Though Canadian, it has strong American ties, having been a haven for American peaceniks in the 1960’s … but also a refuge for African-Americans escaping racism in 1850’s California.  Many Hawaiians also settled there in the 1800’s, all of which means it’d be the perfect site for a future Obama family reunion. 

Aya didn’t want to fly in a float plane, so we took the ferry.  We made landfall seven hours and five minutes after leaving the apartment, clocking up an average speed trip of… nine-point-five km per hour, or half the speed of the guy who won the Vancouver Marathon the other week.  On the bright side, I got to catch up on some reading — so much so, that I ran out of book before I ran out of time.

We stayed in Ganges, which, as befits any small town (the town centre could easily fit inside Metrotown) has some quirk in its character.  For one, our hotel had an attached farm.  No roosters, though, to our relief.    The Salt Spring Saturday market, which looked much the same as any other, except for the preponderance of hemp products on sale.  We perused the Italian deli, whose magazine collection included a few copies of Bakers’ Journal (”official magazine of the BC Baking Industry” or some such), and sticking with the Italian theme, one of the soap shops sold bath crystals as “body gelato” — a clever rebranding.  Maybe not as ingenious as when Marlboro’s went from women’s cigarette (”Mild as May”) to cowboy’s cancer-stick (”Marlboro Country”) but clever none the less.  Oh, and blue used to be a baby girl colour, too. 

The teenaged attendant at one of the tea retailers helped us select a couple blends they’d discovered at the World Tea Expo, held every year in that world-reknown tea capital, Vegas.  He then turned his attention back to what appeared to be Star Wars: Force Unleashed, dispatching some foes with bloodlusting gusto.

A few years back, some enterprising souls at the Chamber of Commerce came up with the idea of issuing a local currency, featuring the work of area artists.  So the Salt Spring Island Monetary Fund was formed, and issued a series of bills backed 80% by Canadian dollars and 20% by gold.  Essentially gift certificates, they figure it’s kept millions of dollars on the island, as tourists bring the bills back as novelties to show their friends, and never wind up spending them on the island.  I only got $10 worth, myself. 

Demand for the $50 and $100 Salt Spring Dollar bills comes almost exclusively from numismatists, or coin-collectors (correction: rich coin-collectors).  The SSIMF recently released a $50 half-ounce silver coin with a killer (whale) design, all the better to exploit those rubes (correction: wealthy rubes).     At today’s prices, that’s an entire eight dollars of silver.  Adding in two bucks of processing and other costs — surely an overestimate — and the SSIMF’s profit margin is a sweet 400%.

Ninety-plus-percent of businesses on the island accept the bills — even the banks (!) — meaning it’s a fully functioning local currency.  You can presumably use it on the island’s two taxicabs, and bus service.  (The latter consists of a bus.)  But lest any of you entrepreneurial types perceive a business opportunity in photocopying knock-off Salt Spring Island Dollar bills, they do in fact have holograms and the like.

The EPIA’s recent estimate that solar PV installations grew 129% from 2007 to 2008 is excellent news.

While growth is likely to be stunted in 2009 (due in part to the collapse of the Spanish economy, last year’s biggest market) this is the kind of trend that should warm greens’ hearts, and not the planet.  One factor which works to solar’s advantage is the recent collapse in polysilicon prices back to “normal” levels — which will improve silicon-photovoltaics’ cost-competitiveness, even as some companies’ profit margins will be squeezed.

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While wind energy is cost-competitive with fossil fuels, the rule of thumb is that it can’t be used for more than about 20% of the grid, due to its intermittent nature.  Basically, to accomodate large amounts of wind, you need to be able to turn other sources of power on or off instantaneously — to account for situations where the wind dies down or comes up suddenly.  That means hydro (which accounts for about 20% of worldwide power generation; quelle coincidence!).

While solar is also intermittent, a big advantage it carries over wind is that it only provides energy during peak usage hours (from morning to evening).  Which generally makes it easier to tie into the grid.  While wind energy production will continue to overshadow (heh) solar electricity for a few years — generation capacity is currently about 120 GW to 5 GW — solar’s ease of grid tie-in should help it surpass wind perhaps a decade from now.

For now, the next milestone for solar will be to outpace nuclear; in 2007 new nuclear generation capacity was about 2 GW.  Solar installations in 2008 were about 3 GW peak, which normalizes to about 1 GW (since solar doesn’t provide energy at night, and provides a lower-than-peak amount of power in the morning and evening).

Joseph Campbell identified the hero’s journey (or in his words, the monomyth) in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about sixty years ago.  One would presume other students of mythology came to much the same conclusion at some point in the past few millenia, but didn’t have the good fortune to live in an era of cheap communications media where their ideas could get widely recognized.

In a sentence, the hero undergoes a three-fold adventure of departure - initiation - return.  The formula was closely followed by the Star Wars and Matrix franchises, and virtually every TV or movie writer I’ve spoken to has brought the hero’s journey up in conversation, unprompted.

Which got me wondering what the heroine’s journey is: most of the above stories are targeted to men.  There’s no Wikipedia entry for the topic, yet.

When I think of the literature-targeted-to-women that I’ve read, the books by Jane Austen jump foremost to mind.  But whereas heroes from Gilgamesh onwards have tried to grow into their destined roles…  Jane Austen’s heroines (at least from Pride and Prejudice and Emma) found husbands.

When speaking with a female writer friend recently, she pointed out that Harlequin Romances are pretty much the world’s best-selling fiction genre; they sell 130 million books per year.  Harlequin the company (a Canadian one, no less!) has six imprints for its female readers, and the Harlequin brand itself includes:

• Harlequin Romance (the flagship line)
• Harlequin American Romance (for small-town readers)
• …and Harlequin NASCAR.  Yes, that’s not a typo.

Whatever the archetypal heroine’s journey is, I’m sure it’s captured somewhere in the Harlequin literary formulae.  And if there are cultures around the world with strongly different heroine mythology-types… once suspects that Harlequin’s cultural juggernaut will supercede those other traditions within decades of entering that particular literary market.