Montreal's environmental rip-off

Montreal has this widely hailed scheme where you can rent bikes to travel about town. I think London is considering using the same scheme. The bikes are called Bixi, and they're kind of public bikes. The idea is great. There's plenty (I will get back to that one) locations (bike-racks) all over Montreal where you slot in your credit card and you can use the bikes. The idea is that you use them for short trips, quasi from bike-rack to bike-rack. You pay for the time that you use them. That's all dandy, until you realize that there's no bike-racks in lots of places. So, while working in Montreal last week I duly used the Bixi. Well, after a 15 minute ride I ended up where I had to go (by no means an off-the-beaten track location) and, surprise surprise, there were no bike-racks anywhere close by. In other words, I had no bike-rack to return my Bixi to, and had to keep on paying until my work meeting was over and I was able to return to where I picked it up. The result was a bill of 39.50 $. For that I could have rented a car for a full day or probably used a comfy limousine service forth and back. It's been a complete and utter waste of time and money! I suspect the rip-off scheme is hugely profitable for the city of Montreal.

So, here's my advice to Montreal, THINK prior to instituting such schemes. I for one won't touch your green bike scheme ever again. Let the buyer beware!

Drill baby drill

Bad news for Mr Obama. Just after selling the American public out to private health insurance companies he's caved in to another demand from neocons. He issued licenses to drill at the US coasts for oil. Self-sufficiency is the magic word here, and you can't blame the US for trying. What boggles the mind, however, is that these oil drilling platforms do not even have safety mechanisms that seal the borehole in case there's a catastrophic accident. Incompetence on a grand scale! Or is it just another exercise in terms of environmental corner cutting that these oil companies are so well-known for.

The environmental disaster that is at the moment unfolding in the USA is painful to watch. How can it be that in the 12st century they drill in highly fragile marine environments without having most basic safety switch-off's in place? I am the first to admit that I am not an expert in these matters, but it seems obvious to me that you should not get a permission to drill for oil in such an environment unless you are able to ensure that there's no major spill in case something goes wrong.

Post scriptum May 03 2010: Turns out that the platform had a so-called blowout-preventer to prevent the disaster that happened. A German news agency has investigated these so-called blowout-preventers. There are at least 171 known cases where they failed to do their job. It's a bit of a misnomer then to call them blowout-preventers, isn't it? Makes you wonder why drill baby drill President Obama notices only now that there's a problem and he wants to investigate...

A step closer toward our species' demise

For awhile there was some hope that as a species we might be able to survive a tad bit longer. Courtesy of the world economic crisis car production went down dramatically, oil consumption plunged to new lows - good news all round, in other words. Unfortunately, in that sparsely populated country called India some company called Tata has decided to do something about this. It has just brought to market the world's cheapest car. Ain't that fantastic news? It's hailed on the news as a great great success story. India, instead of building appropriate and efficient public transport systems (should be an economic walk in the park, seeing the population density in that country!), is getting a billion small cars to clog up its already choked-up streets. Hurray, we're well back on the road to our permanent exit. Indeed, economic growth is predicted to return in a couple of months. Sorted!

Ode to Via Rail

There's great news in Canada. That miserable excuse for an airline, Air Canada, is closing quite a few of its bases. Terrible enough for its employees, but no doubt the chickens come home to roost for an organisation that has made offensively bad customer service the hallmark of its operations. These days there's plenty of desperate airlines out there and customers don't have to put up with Air Canada's nonsense. I wonder how many Canadians, quietly or not so quietly, are pro-actively boycotting Air Canada (as I do) after one too many bad experiences.

Anyway, compare that to Via Rail, that delightful Canadian rail company. I love Via Rail to bits. Mind you, the trains are not what us spoiled Europeans expect in terms of high-tech and speed, but they take you faster to your destination than a trip in the car, the food is nice, service usually impeccable, and they're remarkably frequently on time. Unlike Air Canada, which these days thinks nothing of cancelling your long-haul flight a few hours before your departure, using 'Act of God' as its rationale for not reimbursing you for additional expenses and inconvenience, Via staff here in Kingston were hugely apologetic for a 10 min delay of a Toronto - Montreal train. - 10 min... that's nothing.

The only nasty thing Via Rail has done recently is to replace a delightful red wine (Ontario produced at that) that came in little glass bottles with overseas made Tetra Pak products. Now, if that's done for environmental reasons, let's get some facts straight: transporting wine all the way from Spain to Canada is probably environmentally worse than using Ontario made produce. Also, 90% of bottles these days are being reccycled in Canada, while much less of the Tetra Pack stuff is finding its way into recycling schemes. In short: it is doubtful that the 'green' Tetra Pack scheme Via has come up with works.

However, unlike Air Canada, which happily SELLS you stinking hamburgers on long distance flights, Via Rail offers sandwiches these days that even have your 1:5 portion of veggies included. Good on ya Via. The other thing about Via is hat their frequent traveller points system actually works. I called them the other day and asked that some of my accumulated miles be used for a free trip to Montreal. No problem, did it on the phone in less than 5 min. Try the same with Air Canada frequent flyer miles. Almost certainly you won't be going where you'd like to go. But then, that's even true if you buy a ticket from that outfit. Guess what, Via didn't even levy fuel, taxes, looking-at-train and touching-seat surcharges on my free trip, as Air Canada would have done.

So, people, use the train whenever you can. It's environmentally friendlier than any other alternative that we have currently and you don't have to put up with the kind of crap airlines like Air Canada heap on you.

Ooops, our oil reserves are finite - what a surprise

Quite funny, the Green movement has told us (well, at the time I was a very active part of it) some 20 years ago that we're running out of oil, and that - among other things - we need to reconsider our predominant modes of transport (a 1 ton vehicle to transport a 70kg body to the supermarket around the corner; academics like myself flying frequently to a far-flung corner of the world to give a 15-20 min presentation that could have been presented just as well by audio-videolink - but hey, what else do we have to feel good about ourselves :-).

It goes without saying we Greenies were variously called tree-huggers, stupid, romantic, naive or a combination of these things. Well, we were right, of course, our resources on this planet are very much finite (hence the idea that we need continuing economic growth to be happy is so remarkably and so obviously silly, yet it drives everything that we do).

So, fast forward to mid 2008. The oil price has reached breathtaking heights, and while we should be mostly concerned about the impact this will have on the affordability of food products, if you watch TV (presumably on your giant flat screen TV, which happens to have replaced ovens in many homes because they're emanating so much heat) you will be forgiven for thinking that the oil price issue is really about airline survival and the Hummer (the ridiculous GM car still produced for the Homer Simpson types of the real world - reportedly men with really really small penises). There is some good news, though, airlines shut down plenty of planes; here is hoping that Air Canada might fall by the wayside altogether, but things are not looking promising because the airline has long since begun to treat its customers particularly badly, so it might survive longer than some of its better behaved competitors.

There's also some huha about GM shutting down car factories in various countries. The truth is, of course, that this is a small reason for celebrations as it will bring us closer to keeping much-needed energy reserves for longer. Of course, for some bizarre reason, those in power (let's call them our 'representatives') do not seem to bother about putting efficient public transport systems in place. I live currently a lot of the time in Kingston, a medium-sized city in Ontario. The public transport system does arguably not even deserve the name system. The bus stops don't display information as to the route of the buses that happen to stop there on the odd occasion, indeed, even information about when buses can be expected to stop there (it's called a timetable in Europe) is not on display. Surely it can't surprise then that people take their giant American car out for a ride to the supermarket. So, decades after we knew we couldn't go on like we did, we chose collectively to stick our head in the sand and voted for GM's Hummer, Chrysler's 300C (incidentally a car driven by Barack Obama the supposedly so clever US Senator trying to become the next President of the USA), and my all-time favourite car, the Maserati Sedan.

Ok, I'm getting off my soap box now. Guess all I'm saying is, ask yourself more often what the impact of your action on the environment and future generations is. If your action is incompatible with a high-quality environment and existing future generations of people, don't do it unless you really have no choice (slight inconvenience isn't the same as saying that you really have no choice).

Conflict of interest declaration: I can't drive, so decent public transport would make a big difference to my life.

Fuel vs Food - what's more important?

Interesting (if that's the right word) development. Critics of the green movement have long criticised the Green's single-minded pre-occupation with the environment. It seemed highly problematic to expect folks in developing countries to ratchet up their environmental standards if that meant a significant slowing down of economic development (with all the benefits this brings for human advancement in terms of jobs, education and health care).

Well, Australia's THE AGE broadsheet published a very interesting summary of a currently ongoing crisis in that context. Food prices worldwide have gone up at a record rate. It goes without saying that the poor are very much at the receiving end of this development. Part of the reason is that the world's farmers are switching their production to more lucrative products. Not, as you might expect, illicit drugs, but oil replacement products such as ethanol. Prices for staple foods have gone up by a whopping 18% in China, 13% in Pakistan and Indonesia and about 10% in Latin America. Reports THE AGE, 'India, Yemen, Mexico, Burkina Faso and several other countries have had, or been close to, food riots in the past year. Meanwhile, there are shortages of beef, chicken and milk in Venezuela and other countries as governments try to keep a lid on food-price inflation.'

Looks like we're heading for a head-on competition between motorists competing for ethanol fuels for their vehicles, and the much larger number of poor people trying to survive, and being unable to purchase food at affordable prices anylonger.

Scary stuff. Having just made my way to North America, I'm flabbergasted by the ridiculous number of oversized cars with absolutely gigantic engines on the streets everywhere. You know, in the UK or Germany you'd see a 3 litre V6 type car only once in a blue moon, while here it seems to be at the lower end of what people like to drive around in. Not much by way of sympathy for our poorer neighbours then...

Courts and ethicists

You know, I have always been somewhat dismissive of the law as a good means to take forward political causes. I always thought one needed to win the substantive normative argument first, and then, somehow, miraculously the law would fall into line. Well, while I worked in South Africa for a couple of years, the Treatment Action Campaign there gave me much food for thought. They used legal cases to advance usually sensible policy matters. Of course, sometimes the law can be an ass and nothing can be achieved by means of suing one's way through the courts, but there are two cases reported today that suggest that sometimes at least the legal route just might be the more efficient way to achieve particular ethical or policy objectives.

The first case could best be described as: Whales: 1, US Navy: 0. Check it out here.
The second case I reported about on this blog. I learned today that Novartis lost its case in the Indian High Court.

Mind you, none of this shows that critical analysis and argument are not called for, but equally it seems fair to say that in some circumstances a good team of lawyers can replace a lot of academic papers and books and campaign officers, if one is concerned about achieving desireable outcomes at all.

Made in England - Bought in Scotland...

I know, I know, to some this might sound like a Fool's Day posting, but... I bought myself a pair of new sneakers today. Not that I needed them, those that I use are still in perfectly good shape. However, I wanted to start into spring with a new set of sports wear, so don't castigate me too loudly, if you could. Even so, I bought a pair of terrible looking sneakers from a company called New Balance. I bought them for no reason other than the label saying that they were made in England, and that they're vegan friendly (ie no animal was killed producing them). I preferred them to shoes made in Vietnam, China or any of these places, because I know that a product produced in the UK by local workers means: 1] the sneakers didn't have to be transported half-way around the world to get to me (less energy wasted); 2] the company had to abide by pretty strict EU/UK rules and regulations on the environment (they were produced in a manner less harmful to the environment than a pair of sneakers produced in China where standards are substantially lower and environmental protection is by and large unknown); 3] the company had to abide by EU/UK labour regulations, which means staff receive a pension, paid leave, don't work more than 35-40 hours per week, things like that; 4] last but not least, no animal was subjected to suffering or was killed during the production of the sneakers.

So, in short, by supporting New Balance I supported a better deal for the environment, and a better deal for the factory workers producing the sneakers. Seems eminently sensible to me.

What's the downside? Well, for starters, the sneakers were more expensive then comparable sneakers produced in Asia. I don't mind, but I do understand that many people do not have the luxury of being able to afford more expensive products. The other downside, and I got to be honest here, these sneakers look about as terrible as the cars Rover produced (yes, the defunct last British owned car maker). I truly wonder what prevents the company from producing seriously better looking sneakers, given the premium it charges for its England made products.

Car drivers must soon pay for road utilisation

The UK government received a report proposing that car drivers shoulod be charged for using public roads. The report indicates that up to 28 billion GBP could accrue to users of trains and busses per annum. Must say I much like this idea (declaration of potential conflict of interest: I would be a beneficiary of this policy if it came into being - I don't have a driver's license and do not know how to drive a car). This should result into measurable reductions in cars on roads. This in turn would reduce the continuing destruction of our environment as well as make road utilisation more efficient for those using them (they would be able to get faster from A to B as there should be less cars about).
The funny people at SKY news (Rupert Murdoch's 'news' outlet) wondered aloud this morning whether the money would be spend to build more roads...