Truth is made, not found - Richard Rorty

Commuting

26 May 2007

The rapeseed is gone. My commute – across the Valley of the Avon, south from Bath and along the edges of Salisbury Plain – is no longer between fields of bright yellow flowers but along macadam lanes bordered by serrated rows of green stalks (early wheat?) and freshly ploughed fields, still brown, awaiting their next crop.

England is a beautiful country. The geology is more varied than that of others countries, particularly given that the nation has been squeezed onto a small island off the northwest coast of Europe. It’s late May now but the temperatures, even in this time of global warming, are still refreshingly cool and, in the early mornings, even bracing.

The drive is a time for reflection. My mind wanders down various mental lanes, into politics, science and beyond, towards pure speculation.

Is Gordon Brown, the next Prime Minister, a good guy?

15 May 2007

I’m worried he may not be. There is evidence he’s a control freak, paranoid and greedy for power. He can be a frightening man, at least he appears that way from what I’ve seen of him. Oh, I grant you that he’s smart, but so is Dick Cheney. When I watch Gordon, I think I see someone who isn’t really concerned about the ‘people’; instead, I see someone who is focused on an objective that I don’t see at all. Gordon is heading for a goal that is his alone. If it benefits people, that will be a bonus.

Are Dick Cheney and Gordon Brown going to form a new duopoly, a new Atlantic partnership? I’m being a bit facetious but the two do appear to share a number of similar characteristics. They are incredibly smart, probably not as smart as they think they are but certainly very, very smart. They appear to share a sense of entitlement, particularly with respect to power – they are entitled to rule, to power, because of some set of characteristics that they regard as unique. I’m afraid I don’t see what that set of characteristics is; in fact, I can’t actually define what they are. I’d have to ask Dick or Gordon to tell me but both are so apparently paranoiac that I’m positive neither would give us a straight answer.

Gordon’s saving grace in my eyes is that he obviously and sincerely loves his child and his wife. Dick Cheney’s is that he clearly loves his gay daughter; paternal love has overcome any acquired prejudice against homosexuality.

In Gordon’s case I’m open enough to change my mind. He can prove to me that he’s a decent man who cares for the under-served and the under-privileged. He can prove that climate change really is a concern that over-rides his over-weaning ambition. He can prove that starvation and disease are more important than his control of the Labour Party. If he does these things, I suspect – no, I predict! – that he will not only stay Prime Minister longer than if he acts otherwise, he will be elected as Prime Minister in his own right. Go Go Gordon!

Evening ...5 May 2007 ...Bristol

The Church on Whiteladies Road …

Strewn across evening stone, daylight fades.
That Church, late day’s target, is now an auction house!
God bought out!
Reverse take-over!

Gargoyle, age-pocked face leaning vertiginously over the street,
Acrophobic, hanging from a pediment,
Is your stone face a rictus smile or grimace?

What Beer Has to Teach Us About Saving the Environment

9 May 2007

Up the James River, near Norfolk, Virginia, lie several hundred ships that make up the bulk of the US National Defense Reserve Fleet. Like giant maritime mummies, the mothballed vessels float quietly along the river banks, waiting for the next emergency when they will be called back into service. Within 90 to 120 days from that call, the fleet can be made ready for sea.

Some of the vessels in the Reserve Fleet are pretty old, the battleship ‘Iowa’ has been in and out of mothballs numerous times and she was commissioned in 1943. Recently though, a relatively young ship was withdrawn from the Reserve Fleet. Last year the Maritime Administration authorized the decommissioning process of the ‘NS Savannah’. ‘NS’ stands for ‘Nuclear Ship’. Christened by Mamie Eisenhower in 1962, the ‘Savannah’ was a showpiece of the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme. In January of this year, she was tied up to pier 23 at Newport News. From pier 23 the ‘Savannah’ will go someplace, as yet unidentified, for removal of nuclear components and, eventually, a new life as a historic relic, floating alongside a pier somewhere. A historical curiosity, the ‘Savannah’ is/was the world’s first nuclear powered merchant/passenger ship. I wonder if there will be another.

The ‘Savannah’ is a beautiful, sleek vessel; to me she’s the sea going equivalent of the 727 or the Concorde, the last beautiful commercial aircraft – if you anthropomorphized them, it was easy to imagine that flying was a joy for them. In the same way, the ‘Savannah’ looks like it could fly, across the waves.

This piece is about the environment and flying so stick with me. I recently finished George Monbiot’s ‘Heat’. Monbiot proposes alternatives to current economic practices, each designed to help us achieve a truly radical reduction in carbon output. Flying, though, stumps him, he doesn’t have an alternative. No one has come up with an acceptable substitute for kerosene powered turbines (okay, I know that an old-fashioned propeller driven aircraft is less damaging to the environment but it’s only relatively less damaging, the fact is that there is nothing right now that can make flying carbon neutral).

I was talking about this conundrum recently – I’m about to take the family on a visit to relatives in Taiwan and we’re feeling pretty guilty. You see, air travel really does ruin lives but not immediately the lives of the consumers of air travel (at least not yet). Mostly airplanes ruin the lives of people on the economic margin, people in developing countries. It can be hard to summon up real compassion for folks in Ethiopia that are nearly invisible to us and who have no voice that I’ve heard. We’re all generous and caring people but it’s hard to make the link between sitting down in seat 37A and flying to Singapore with a degree increase in average temperature that will mean the difference between growing enough to eat and desertification.

The fact is that we’re not really economically rational beings. If we had macroeconomic sense and took a longer view of things, we’d recognize that slow travel, like slow food, is good for us. We’d take a lot fewer flights, we’d vacation closer to home, if we had a second residence, it would be that cabin in the woods an hours drive away (in our electrically powered vehicle).

Nowadays, though, people fly long, thoughtless distances. They fly to New York for a show and some shopping. They fly to the Canaries for a weekend of sun in the middle of the winter. They fly to a second home in Tuscany. We are simply flying too often and too far. When you include the whole cost of the flight, adding in the price of damage to the environment (which may, in fact, be nearly infinite if the damage takes us past a tipping point beyond which we cannot reverse a process), the amount we pay for the ticket is obscenely and irrationally low.

So the burden of your fundamentally valueless flight is borne by those who are most helpless to do anything about it, desperately poor human beings in places like Ethiopia or rural India. There is, as well, a huge irony in all this because nearly everyone who is suffering because of your flight will never fly themselves.

But it’s not morally black and white; there is another point of view about flying and this has to do with its role as a force for peace. As terrible as it may be for the environment, it may be like the EU, whatever it costs, it’s better than the environmental and human cost of another war. We will never be able to go back, the world is interconnected, when you know someone, it’s a lot harder to kill them and flying lets you get to know more people, quicker.

But, I digress. This is not the place for me to contradict myself or I’ll entirely lose the thread which, if I recall correctly, is about the ‘NS Savannah’, the environment, slow travel and saving the planet.

‘Savannah’ was designed for show. Her gracious lines, thirty staterooms, 100 person dining room, library, verandah and pool were more important than whether she was easy to load or had much cargo capacity. The ship was, simply, a political statement, she was built to be a floating example of the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme, a demonstration that atomic power could be put to practical and peaceful purposes. But, because there was only one of her, the support logistics for the ‘Savannah’ were prohibitively expensive. Also, against conventional freighters that were purpose built to carry the maximum amount of cargo efficiently and with fuel at $20 a ton, the 1972 decision to decommission the ‘Savannah’ made economic sense. Two years later, in the midst of the first oil crisis, with fuel at $80 a ton, the ‘Savannah’ was competitive. At about $280 a ton today, game over!

I don’t know what to do with used nuclear fuel and I don’t know how you decommission a reactor so I can’t put together a convincing argument about why we should consider nuclear powered passenger liners as a slow travel substitute for air travel or nuclear powered cargo ships as a substitute for vessels that burn sulphur rich bunker C oil. If you could figure out what to do with the spent fuel, knew what to do about decommissioning and provide for their physical security, nuclear powered sea transportation makes a lot of sense.

1. Their fuel economy is unsurpassed. Nuclear fuel costs 10% or so of what conventional fuel costs.
2. They have zero operating emissions. Imagine moving thousands of tons of cargo across the Atlantic with a zero carbon footprint!
3. They can go very fast. Imagine going from London to New York comfortably in three days. You’d leave on Friday afternoon by train for Southampton (electrically powered of course), catch your nuclear powered liner from Southampton and be in New York, mid-morning, on Monday.

If we could create a culture of ‘slow travel’, if we could learn to prioritise just a bit differently, can you imagine how pleasant a world it would be to arrive in New York aboard a ship, without jet lag, at a civilised hour. Can you imagine boarding an electrically powered bullet train to run over to Chicago in, say, four hours (probably less total travel time than doing it by plane today)?

Of course, there’s no doubt that it would ultimately mean that we traveled less and that we took longer to do it but, managed properly, not that much longer and the positive benefits would far outweigh the negatives: the impact on the planet would be far, far less, and the positive impact on our health – no jet lag – would be good.

Now consider the European habit of taking one, longer holiday a year – and traditionally that was to somewhere easily accessible – versus the British middle-class culture of three or four holidays a year, each one via cheap flight to some haven in the sun, perhaps the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean.

Take our trip to Taiwan. At Waterloo we would board the Eurostar to Paris – two hours from London. We would then shift to our compartment – with toilet and shower – aboard the new Orient Express, an electrically powered bullet train from Paris to Hong Kong – traveling at about 300 mph across Europe and Asia, it would arrive at Hong Kong in two days – an average traveling speed of about 150 mph to allow for stops and so on. From Hong Kong to Taipei via nuclear powered ferry taking a few hours and, presto, we’ve crossed the world within a few days, including stops and at virtually no carbon cost to our poor, sick planet. Australia would be the same – a nuclear powered vessel from Hong Kong that arrived at Sydney in two days. Total travel time from London: an efficient and healthy five days.

Yes, we’d still have planes for those trips that required us to move quickly, for diplomacy, to make peace, for health emergencies and so on. Technology will catch up anyway, one day we’ll even be able to fly en masse again if we want. But, maybe clean, efficient slow travel will become so popular that the people will not want to go back into the air in such numbers.

Remember what the brewers tried to do to real beer in England? They tried to impose lager on the country and to do completely away with traditionally brewed, natural beers. But the people resisted, a real beer movement was launched and it was hugely successful and now, on summer days, all over the island, you will find friendly, crowded, country pubs holding beer festivals with vast numbers of natural, locally made, interesting tipples. What if we did the same thing about flying? What if we opted for something that achieved its objective (getting us somewhere) but gave greater pleasure whilst doing so?

So, cheers!