My employer recently gave me permission to make our book reviews available to the public (once company-specific information was removed), for which I am deeply appreciative.
Here’s the summary for the book club’s first book, The Geography of Hope.
If you find the review useful, please consider supporting the author by buying the book. 
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The Geography of Hope - summary
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It’s an odd decision, but I guess it’ll satisfy traditionalists…
LEED-Monument Rollout (click to… yeah, you know the drill)
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(Originally written March 15. Posted March 28)
We’re back from the Diamond Capital of North America(tm), with tales of our quartz-priced travels and gypsum-level accomodations.
On the flight over, I was struck by the vast expanse of the north — most of the landscape was as empty as the mind of a Zen adept. It was astonishing, thrilling in a way, to see an entire landscape under the horizon, unoverrun by civilization and unblemished by the mark of man.
On the other end of the spectrum, I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the oil sands from 35000 feet, but sadly Fort MacMurray and its environs were crowded over. So much for seeing one of the “7 eyesores of the industrial world” with my own eyes.*
The first thing I noticed when stepping off the plane and into the frosty frontier, was that the airport was very small. You walk off a ramp onto the tarmac and into the terminal building. Mind you, Yellowknife does have a third small baggage conveyor, to Whitehorse’s two. And it’s got bilingual ads at the airport — English and Japanese! Playing to the tourist base, the audio tour of the legislative assembly building is also available in Japanese, as well as the expected English, French, and nine other official languages of the territory. While there seemed to be more Japanese folks in Yellowknife than Aussies at Whistler, it’s apparently a big draw for German tourists too. Which means *both* sides of my family tree predisposed me to visit. In a sense, it may have been my genetic destiny! (That and invading Russia… hmm, maybe it’s an Arctic wanderlust thing.)
Back to the igloo-esque legislature building: it’s open on weekends, staffed by a volunteer and a security guard. Built in 1993, it’s the first permanent legislative building for the Territories. Prior legislatures met in the ballrooms of Yellowknife hotels, with occasional “road trips” hither and yon; maybe an attempt to neutralize the Yellowknifers’ home field advantage. 
The NWT flag was actually designed by a Manitoba high schooler, who in 1969 won $1000 for his inspiration, about thirty times what graphic design student Caroline Davidson was paid three years later, for designing the Nike Swoosh. (To Phil Knight’s credit — did I just write that? — he later gave her an envelope-full of Nike stock.)
Fair to say that things are pretty relaxed up in the Territories — someone outside can look all the way into the legislative chamber while they’re in session. Reinforcing this impression, the security guard at the offices of Joint Task Force North told me that, even though the Canadian Forces were a “diet Coke of a military” he was “pretty sure” the building didn’t offer tours. He then suggested a couple tourist venues I might consider visiting during my stay.
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* this is my list, in no particular order; readers’ private lists may vary:
- Ohio’s pride, the Cuyahoga River, which caught fire a record thirteen times over the years
(note: since cleaned up)
(note 2: I sure hope that’s a record…)
- the great manure lagoons of the factory farms of the American midwest
- the Yanacocha Mine in Peru: a “cyanide fortified” open pit gold mine as big as the tax havens where its investors probably hide their winnings: bigger than Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, it’s a whisker smaller than the Cayman Islands
- the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch (filed in Wikipedia under that very name!)
- the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
(note: in the quarter-century since 300,000 people were evacuated, wildlife seem to be thriving there)
- Alberta’s oil sands tailing ponds
- Exxon Headquarters in Texas - scientific illiteracy central
(incidentally, three score and ten years before Exxon started funding global warming deniers, the President of Union Oil bankrolled the publication and distribution of three million copies of the first American Christian Fundamentalist tracts. Fun guys, those oil barons…)
(Originally written Dec 2009; posted April 2010)
I ran into one of my old Classical Studies professors at a Starbucks recently. It was fun catching up; it was sobering to think those days were about twenty years ago. Back then, Brian Mulroney (!) was Prime Minister and the ground-breaking, subversive, edgy cartoon TV show was The Simpsons.
Smalltalk aside, we discussed the recent Landmark Edition of Herodotus, the Greek historian known variously as “the father of history” and “the father of lies”. This is because he’s generally reliable (for an ancient historian) on Greek matters — and hilariously unreliable for anything outside of Greece (being, the other 99% of the world). To his credit, he does tell his readers that he’s just reporting what all these foreign sailors have told him. Which begs the question of why he spent so much time with foreign sailors.
Though one line in his Histories suggests that Pheonicians circumnavigated Africa millenia before Europeans, Herodotus is most famous for telling Greek audiences that in India, fox-sized ants would get covered in gold dust while digging their burrows, which the locals would collect with whatever passed for the “Swiffer” of that era.* But they’d have to be careful, because these ants were so fierce, they would eat camels. The more mundane reality is that folks in a part of Pakistan have harvested gold dust from the coats of marmots for centuries. And there is a type of scorpion in that region dumb enough to chase camels. Ah, the miracle of mistranslation!
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* this is separate from the Golden Fleece legend. If the latter has historical roots, it would most likely be the ancient practise of using sheepskin to collect gold dust floating down rivers in the Black Sea area. (The sheepskin was cheap, available, and renewable, and had lots of surface area with which to catch the particles.)
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.
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.) __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
Late last year, one of the executives asked me to help write a paper on the future of energy.
McKinsey & Company have now published it.
Other authors in the series include:
Cooler still, as this unPhotoshopped screengrab shows, we’ve got the top spot in the Energy section!! (For now.)
Even cooler still, McKinsey had originally intended to circulate the essay collection at the World Economic Forum at Davos. (Ultimately they published a subset, and ours didn’t make the cut.) So I came within an editor’s whim of being able to put “…his work has been circulated at the World Economic Forum at Davos…” on my resume!
A long-form version of the essay will be made publicly available soon; I’ll link to that in due course.
Meanwhile, I think I’ll take a few more days off blogging to bask in the quietly ecstatic glow.
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(click to enlarge)
I attended the Peter Senge lecture at the Vancouver Board of Trade yesterday. He’s the MIT lecturer who wrote “The Fifth Discipline” years ago, about learning organizations. His latest is “The Necessary Revolution”, about corporate efforts to develop true, legitimate, authentic sustainability. He made some very interesting comments, detailed below the fold:
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A New Scientist article from a few years back suggests that vampire legends were how our ancestors tried to explain rabies. Interesting to think of vampire stories as educational tools.
Nowadays, of course, kids learn about rabies through Old Yeller, that “sick doggy snuff film”, to quote Phoebe from Friends.
[Rabies/vampires] is then analogous to [Williams Syndrome/elves]. The latter is a genetic disorder which causes elfin features and a love of music, clearly the inspiration for elves in various fairy tales.
This article in the Times is about James Lovelock. Like many articles about the author of the Gaia hypothesis — which posits that the earth and life on it form a self-equilibriating system — it notes his pessimism for the future of humanity. Heck, that’s evident even in the article’s title:
“It’s too late for planet earth, says James Lovelock.”
The article also notes Lovelock’s derision for renewable energy — he prefers nuclear (despite its myriad challenges including cost, lead time, uranium depletion, and that whole management-of-waste thing — tho thorium reactors might hold promise… many years from now). Indeed, Lovelock evidently thinks renewable energy is an elaborate scam made possible by subsidies! This neatly parallels my thoughts on nuclear energy.
In this, Lovelock reminds me of Einstein. As we all know, Einstein also contributed epochal insights to the scientific community. Few realize though, that Albert was on the wrong side of the debate about quantum mechanics: he spent his later years in a futile attempt to disprove it. As innumerable experiments have shown, Einstein was wrong.
This is in fact the subject of Einstein’s famously mangled quote “God does not play dice with the universe”, which started off as “I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice“.
Einstein could not accept the premise that at the microscopic, quantum level, reality exists as a field of probabilities, until interactions collapse all possible outcomes into one. (See Schrodinger’s cat for a PETA-unfriendly example.)
It seems to me Lovelock is in the same position - he made a titanic contribution to science. But as with Einstein, he’s been unable to keep up with the latest developments, and so is making an inferior argument (that is, nuclear over renewables). As one of the article’s interviewees notes, Lovelock is:
“very knowledgeable about how Earth systems work, and he is right about the need to integrate science. But he does not apply the same intellectual rigour to his judgments about energy”
