UBC still has a long way to go though. As witnessed by the recent battle between the UBC Farm and the UBC Administration to ensure the Farm’s future existence. This was unsettling to me and hinted that the UBC admin is more concerned with meeting government metrics on reducing CO2 emissions than achieving actual sustainability. (Let’s tear down the farm and replace it with a LEED certified building, eh?)

However, any steps necessary to ensure large scale sustainability are better than others. I would like to see more of the focus shift towards local resilience rather than large scale sustainability but at least UBC is taking steps in the right direction.

Regardless, the following video is quite impressive.

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Post tags: grad school, sustainability

We watched through the film which began by detailing the issue of peak oil. The point here was that Cuba has faced an artificially imposed peak oil so it provides a good case study for how peak oil may impact the rest of us. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 80s and early 90s, Cuba’s currency was devalued over 90% and the nation faced an almost overnight drop in oil imports from 14 metric tons per year to 4 metric tons per year. Suddenly everything changed: doctors had to ride bicycles to the hospital, cars were worthless, agriculture needed oxen instead of tractors. Because the US said that any company trading with Cuba could no longer trade with the US globalization was not an option. The government realized its people were going to starve without oil and the numerous imported food goods so it said to all its citizens, grow food on your land or we take it from you and give it to someone who will. Cuba’s people banded together in communities and survived the scarcity by depending on each other. The government found people familiar with raising oxen and sent them around the country to teach people how to raise oxen and to train others how to. Australian permaculture experts were flown in and taught the people how to garden with nature instead of against nature.

At the end of the film we started a discussion and one student pointed out that while the film did a good job of detailing some of the successes of Cuba, she thought it was overly optimistic. While Cuba was surviving, it wasn’t doing much more. Her experience there in 2005 had her surprised at how little food there was and how long it took to get anywhere because of one hour or longer waits for transit. I asked the professor if he thought that developed nations like Canada and the US would face similar success when faced with scarcity. He answered that Cuba faced these conditions because of a rare intersection of circumstances and that Cuba valued communal survival which led to their ability to transition.

This is the key point: Cuba faced an unprecedented set of circumstances in the 1990s but developed nations now face a high probability of these circumstances over the next decade. In the US, massive levels of public debt and over 60 trillion dollars of committed future expenditures make hyperinflation or planned currency devaluation highly likely’ oil has already begun to decrease in price dramatically over the last few years and market based actions will not be able to account for the fact that the entire infrastructure of globalization is built on easy to obtain (cheap) oil and that oil has no substitutes. The current global financial unraveling is just the first round of returning towards a primarily tertiary economy over the next 100 years.

After watching the film, I’m convinced that the same successes Cuba had in transition will not be matched in the US or Canada. Cuba is a small nation with deeply communal values. The US is geographically and regionally disperse, held together in common identity primarily by media and currency. Canada is in a similar situation but with fewer people. The US is also filled with guns and people that aren’t afraid to use them. The outrage against health care reform is only a taste of what could easily happen in a real catastrophe induced by the realities of peak oil. I recall when gas supplies in Charlotte, NC ran low in late 2008 and everyone freaked out… I could only imagine if a real shortage occurred. But ultimately, a country that thinks expanding Medicaid from 50 million to 65 million is socialism would not be receptive to the necessary actions Cuba’s government undertook in the 90s.

So no, I don’t think the US could survive peak oil in the same way Cuba has but small, tight-knit communities might be able to mimic this model with some success. Canada stands a slightly better chance but would likely still face the same problems although with probably much less violence.

Regardless of what you think may occur, the movie is definitely worth spending an hour with. Enjoy!

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Post tags: documentaries, peak oil, transition

You might wonder what I’ve been working on at UBC recently. In general I’m working on nanofibrous materials, transparent conductors and photovoltaics with a few other little things interspersed. Yes, I’ve learned a lot over the past few months. I recently put together a presentation and a paper on electrochromic materials and I thought this might be a great place to share it. Enjoy!

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Post tags: grad school

...as spotted on the UBC campus

[via Citizen Paranoid]

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Post tags: canada, olympics

The other market-based initiative, prevalent in the United States, distributes wallet-size cards designed to steer consumers toward fish that the group issuing the cards deems to have been caught sustainably. Their success is considerable if measured by the millions of cards given away, for example, by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but assessing the impact on the fisheries is difficult. For one thing, the multitude of such cards leads to contradictions and confusion, as the same fish are assessed differently by different organizations. For example, ahi tuna is rated as “safe,” “questionable,” and “avoid” on the wallet cards issued by three U.S. nonprofits. A bigger issue, however, is that these cards generate only “horizontal” pressure–that is, a group of restaurant-goers might chide each other for ordering the cod filet or might ask the overworked student who served them where the fish came from, but this pressure does not reach wholesalers, fleet operators, or supermarket chains. “Vertical” pressure exerted by environmental NGOs on such decision-makers is far more effective. But, if that’s true, why not directly pressure the government and legislators, since they are the ones who regulate the fisheries?

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Post tags: apocalypse, ecology, fish

Dr. Chris Shaw is a professor here at UBC in the Department of Opthamology and Visual Sciences. Judging from his hour and a half presentation yesterday, he is putting a lot of work into researching the injustice of the olympics, specifically for Vancouver 2010.

Dr. Shaw centered his talk around the idea that since the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has identified the three pillars of the Olympics as being:

1. Sports

2. Culture

3. Environmental Conservation

In reality, the IOC brings a fourth pillar along when the games are put on, privatized profit and socialized debt.

The core to Shaw’s thesis was that the Olympics are equivalent to the Nigerian banking scam. You are offered the opportunity for altruism, to help a person in need, along with the opportunity for significant personal benefit, you get some of the money in the imaginary bank account. The Olympics supposedly bring world peace, collaboration, camaraderie etc… but at the same time they offer the benefit of tourism, media attention and long term infrastructure upgrades.

As demonstrated by Shaw’s presentation, the “long term infrastructure upgrades” for Vancouver in 2010 were already on the list of a company that became Vancouver Land Corporation, the former company of Mr. Jack Poole Vancouver 2010 Organizing Committee (VANOC) Chairman. Poole had listed these projects many years before Vancouver made its 2002 bid for the 2010 games.  He wanted a new convention center, development along the sea-to-sky highway (out to Whistler) etc… Other groups wanted a connection between downtown and YVR. All of these priorities and more were sought because they benefited the private parties involved. Vancouver 2010 gave them a reason to get massive public expenditures to support each goal. Add to all that: the IOC gets billions of dollars from media contracts and is unaudited. This means over $2 billion dollars just disappears after each Olympic games.

When a feasibility study was done on the games, Vancouver commissioners decided that they would go with the medium-high profit scenario: the games would provide $3.3billion in economic impact, 77,000 hours of labor (job creation) and a net $863 million into the treasuries. This study did not measure potential costs. No cost/benefit analysis was present.

Vancouver told the public in 2002 that the cost of the games would be $660 million. Today, the cost has ballooned to $6 billion. This number doesn’t include city staff worker time and other real costs. Security costs for the games were estimate to run at $175 million. Current estimates say that security costs will be over $1 billion, but the city has basically provided a blank check for this aspect.

No one really knows the true cost of the Olympics to Vancouver thus far, the VANOC has stopped reporting to the BC Secretary for the Olympic Games.

Vancouver also pledged in 2002 that the games would be the greenest ever. So far, to build the expanded sea-to-sky highway over 5,000 trees from the only old-growth arbutus forest still remaining on BC’s south coast were torn out. A total of at least 40,000 trees were torn out to build other sites like the nordic ski tracks and luge runs. Most of it from old growth. Over 3.5 megatonnes of CO2 have been emitted to build the infrastructure. Has all this been offset by the adherence to LEED building standards for Olympic construction? From carbon offsetting? From burying the wood waste instead of burning it?

Even though I’m still looking forward to the games, I’m in a rare position. I’m a grad student and my job (being a student at UBC) is ending for the two weeks the Olympics are here. If I had a real job, or owned a business in Vancouver I would be worried. Traffic will be a mess as many roads will have reserved Olympics lanes. The roads in Vancouver aren’t like the roads where I’m from in the States. These things have only four lanes.

On top of all this: the civil rights compromises made for the sake of security will likely violate the Supreme Law of Canada, leading to many costly lawsuits.

Because of all the cost “over-runs” (Shaw believes that the organizers intentionally mislead the public on the true costs during the original bid phase), cultural amenities have been cut in Vancouver like funding for the arts and for school programs.

These problems continue for London 2012, as officials there now estimate the games will cost UK taxpayers £9.3 billion. Yikes. To me, the case was clear that VANOC has mislead the public and that the IOC will continue misleading the public.

Shaw answered a question from an audience member who asked about the value of the games in developing nations by saying that if the case is made in a clear and transparent manner then nothing should stop citizens of a willing host nation from enabling the games. I’d have to concur with that.

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Post tags: canada, olympics, public dishonesty

I was really impressed with Vaidhyanathan’s ideas on Google. As someone in the field of applied science my colleagues and I take Google for granted, at a lab meeting later in the day a question about a polymer was asked and the solution was, “just google it”. However, something that has become so ubiquitous needs a critical look and Siva was just the guy to provide this perspective.

Siva started out by mentioning that too often, especially in America, we see a corporation doing something that should belong to the public sector. In the case of Google, we see a single source capturing and “democratizing” all of the internet. We inform Google every day of our ideas, our thoughts and our fetishes. It occurred to me that Google knows things about all of us that even those closest to us may not. Vaidhyanathan continued by demonstrating that the US takes public sector service to the extreme by pointing out that many celebrated Wal-Mart as it distributed water to Katrina victims in 2003, while FEMA was failing.

I absolutely agree with Siva: in our modern world, living with Google isn’t realistic. How many conversations do we have on a daily basis about things from the Google world? “Did you see that youtube video?”

I’ve always wondered about Google’s business model but Siva cleared that up stating, “Google makes money because it knows what we love, it reinforces what we want, faster and faster.” Perhaps this is a problem because we feel less challenged, perhaps Google is theistic. All we see is the interface. We don’t get to see the physical world of Google, the heat of the server farms, the solar panels needed to run the place, the reality of the machine world behind the beast.

I liked that Vaidhyanathan took a balanced look. He mentioned how Google helps us find the messy stuff that libraries would never index, the user generated content that is changing professions, specifically journalism. Blogs are an important tool, but without Google, I doubt they would have caught on. Google helps us democratize information, making a wealth of knowledge available to the less privileged.

At this point I noticed a screenshot on Siva’s PowerPoint slide, presumably from his computer… a blog reader was open and it had an unread count of 14,000+. Ouch.

Siva defines Googlization as the act of being processed by Google, including communications, knowledge and us as individuals. But the key take away point for me was just on the other side of this definition: we are not Google’s customers, we are Google’s product.

The thought resonated in my mind. It was so true. I’ve heard that truth is when the internal world and the external world meet at the same moment and this was one of those moments for me. I then realized I was wearing my Google Sky t-shirt, the one I got at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, TX two years ago. The one that says, “organizing the world’s information wasn’t enough”. I had been googlized.

Google takes us and sells us. Its mission might be, “To organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible.” but in doing so it distills each individual to his or her maximum consumerist identity. Google grows its grasp on our attention by introducing ever more products, we now manage our lives through Google for better or for worse.

Siva continued, “Because Google rewards links, those that make links have inordinate power. Most that use the web don’t create links, they click, which is a secondary currency.” Another moment of clarity, of truth for me. The real power in the Google world lies with those that link and get linked to. My content’s quality becomes determined by those that link to me, for better or for worse. I’m voting every time I click or create a hyperlink. Oh how the digital world has come to embody the vision of the magicians of the pre-Enlightenment, those that used the power of words to change a presumed malleable reality.

This link economy has its risks, highly motivated groups gain representation regardless of the value of their message: holocaust deniers, hate groups and extremists. Because they have few sources and because they likely have difficulty finding girlfriends (Siva’s joke went over well with the crowd, and help to cut the tension that forms when talking about holocaust denial), these people spend a lot of time linking to each other, moving themselves up the Google hierarchy. Even typing the word, “Jew” into Google reveals the linguistic context. Results for Jew are very different than for Judaism, hinting that it is normally used in a condescending manner.

The myth that Google is neutral is just that, a myth. By even designing the search engine judgments were made and values were prioritized. We make an error with Google by sliding into technological determinism and market fundamentalism, that the free market solution to information sorting will meet the needs of our society. Google is changing rapidly and aims to make us better shoppers. Mixing our interface for shopping with our interface for learning is a reason to be wary. Our technological fundamentalism that assumes technology advances will solve our problems is an easy way to avoid looking at an ambiguous reality. A solution may lie in an information equivalent to the Human Genome Project. Summoning the world to save information.

I’m very excited about Vaidhynathan’s new book and will be following his work through his blog and via @sivavaid.

At this point I wondered, if children in the future when discussing the Christian Bible would refer to Jesus as being born about 2000 B.G. (before Google). And then, I left so that I could walk to my class on scanning electron microscopes.

Update: UBC Journalism prof @hermida posted audio of the talk on his blog

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Post tags: google, talks, technology