Beware of the Train

Impressed by their consistent stand in favour of civil liberties, and concerned worried absolutely frickin' terrified by the way none of the other parties were treating climate change with the seriousness it merits, I joined the Scottish Green Party shortly before the election, and spent a few evenings posting leaflets, hanging up placards and so on. Last weekend was their annual conference. All the reports I'd read about other parties' conferences had led me to think that this would be a tooth-pullingly ghastly affair, but James Mackenzie convinced me that it would be OK, so I went along.

And it was pretty good. Not as much fun as (say) a juggling convention, but a hell of a lot more fun than sitting around in Glasgow doing nothing, and much more likely to change the world for the better than either. I'd like to write up a proper post about what happened, but in the not-totally-unlikely event that I don't get around to it, here's a rec.juggling style HLCGB capsule review. For those not familiar with the format, it goes like this: best thing that happened, worst thing that happened, person who impressed you most, what did you hope to achieve (and did you?), what constant niggle most undermined your enjoyment.

High: It's a tossup between Caroline Lucas MP's anti-cuts speech on Sunday morning, and Andy Wrightman's storming closing address on land reform.

Low: Probably the first debate session on Sunday morning, which went very slowly and kept getting lost in procedure. I think some kind of debate-procedure flowchart would seriously help here - it made a huge difference when we introduced one for JCR meetings at uni. I'll have to try and introduce one next year, but I'm not sure how to go about doing so - anyone familiar with SGP procedure like to suggest an approach?

Crush: I'm gonna have to go with Patrick Harvie MSP; great speaker, seemingly has every issue at his fingertips, and he bought me a pint after the conference. His impromptu speech at the Carbon Capture and Storage fringe event was particularly awesome¹, but every one of the many contributions he made was top-notch.

Goal: vote to remove mention of homeopathy from our policy reference document. This was a major problem for the English and Welsh Greens last year, and judging by some of the remarks on Twitter there was a lot of desire to fix it. Annoyingly, that was right at the end of the policy-debate agenda, and we didn't get to it. Some of the constitutional stuff that pushed it out of the way was genuinely important - procedures to follow for ratifying coalition/confidence-and-supply arrangements, for instance² - but several of the motions were IMHO less important.

Also, catch up with some of the Edinburgh Greens. The packed programme (and consequent lack of a hallway track) made this difficult, but I said hi to a few people, had a brief chat with Susan Guest, and a slightly longer catch-up with Kate Joester.

Putting my personal experience aside, the most important thing we achieved as a party was probably to vote to use the Scottish Parliament's tax-raising powers to offset the worst effects of the public-service cuts, and to pledge not to enter a coalition with a socially-regressive cuts agenda (because the other thing we're all about is social justice). More on this here. The electoral arithmetic is such that with a small swing to the Greens we may find ourselves kingmakers in Holyrood next year, so it's good to have this sorted out now.

Bane: It turns out (and you'll have to excuse my ignorance here, remember that this was my first ever party conference) that most of the important work gets done beforehand, in the form of writing motions and amendments. Any member can do this - party of radical democracy, and all that - but by the time I decided I was coming I'd missed the deadline to contribute to this part of the process. Consequently, a lot of the things I wanted to do - for instance, splitting a proposed amendment into two smaller orthogonal changes so that they could be voted on separately - couldn't be done at the time³.

So, I'm definitely going next year, and next year I'm going to get involved well in advance...

¹ tl;dl: by all means let's research this, but let's not increase our fossil-fuel burning capacity on the promise of a technology that still might turn out to be vapourware.

² C&Ses must be ratified by either Council or an EGM; a full coalition must be ratified by a supermajority of Council and an EGM. As a party of radical democracy it's only fitting that the membership should decide on this sort of thing, but I agreed with the speakers who said we shouldn't introduce a structural bias against entering coalitions - they're a risk, yes, but also an opportunity.

³ I was grimly amused when Caroline Lucas listed the lack of this feature as one of the ways in which Westminster parliamentary procedure is worse than European parliamentary procedure.

A couple of days ago, I encountered this DailyKos post about BP's response to the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. More precisely, it's about the oil containment boom that they're laying in a largely ineffective attempt to keep the oil away from the land.

That inefficacy, Fishgrease claims, is not because boom is useless, or even because it's useless in these specific circumstances. It's quite a long post, but this handy diagram contains most of the information:



Guess which one BP are doing? Yep.

[The swearing, by the way, is a constant through the post, and doesn't just reflect Fishgrease's anger; that's how oilmen talk, apparently.]

Now, I know damn-all about oil spill containment, but that looks pretty sensible to me. Don't try to block the oil; deflect its path so that the current forces it into a handful of small locations where it can be skimmed off, and use multiple layers of boom because your boom will never be high enough or low enough to stop everything. I can't find an equivalent "this is how you lay boom to protect a long stretch of coastline" diagram elsewhere, and the NOAA's boom fact sheet (PDF) makes no mention of this stuff, but this page and this page from oilspillsolutions.org back him up on the general principles:

Deflection

This use of booms is normally executed for shorelines. Usually where sensitive environmental areas are concerned. It is necessary to have an adequate point for the collection of oil on the beach. The booms are used to deflect the oil towards that point. After the oil has been deflected, it may be retrieved by skimmers, vacuum pumps or other methods of recovery.

This rather garish presentation by the Massachusetts state government is also big on deflection, angling booms, and multiple layers of boom. So why are BP doing it so badly wrong? Here's Fishgrease again:

Not only is Oil Spill Booming a large industry in the USA, teaching Oil Spill Booming is a large industry in the USA. Most of BP's production and pipeline employees in the USA have attended at least one booming school. Many have attended two or three. Most oil and gas production employees in the USA have attended booming school. Some of us have attended really good, really extensive, week or two-week booming schools. BP's production employees have attended the best booming schools. I know this. I've seen them there.

BP's drilling folks have mostly not attended booming school. They're sometimes sent to booming school, but they fuck off in the bar and their bosses sign off on that being okay. Because for Drilling Hands, booming is for pussies. This is a generalization. Not all drilling hands think that, but most of them do and I guarantee BP's drilling executives think that booming is for pussies -- and that's if they think about booming at all or even know what it is.

It gets worse:

1. The booming is being run by a company that concentrates on drilling and booming is for pussies. Production employees were not invited because they would just cause trouble. This is a drilling operation so just fuck off.
2. There's not enough boom, rope nor anchor on this planet to properly boom the Northern Gulf of Mexico. There should be! It's not that much an expense! Really! It's not! They said they were ready! Having enough materials to perform fucking proper fucking booming, IS part of being ready! THEY'RE NOT READY! ARE THEY?

If Fishgrease is right, we're about to lose the Gulf of Mexico because of organisational infighting and machismo.

So, Avatar: as you've probably heard by now, it's very, very pretty, has little to recommend it by way of script, plotting or characterisation (to quote chromatic scthewriter: the solution to flat characters is not 3D, it's better writing), and it has a really stupid ending.

Other than that, I quite enjoyed it. The fight scenes are good. But I'm going to air some minor grievances anyway, because these things have been bugging me.

First off: when Jake Sully arrives, the scientists are all "ooh, he's a Marine, he's going to be such a thicko, why did they bother". Er, no. He's the identical twin of the scientist originally slated for the mission, which means he shares his genome and upbringing: hence, there's a very good chance that he's highly intelligent. Secondly, he's had extensive experience of jungle warfare in Venezuela¹, and thus should be at home working and surviving for long periods of time in a jungle environment (in a rather different ecosystem, obviously, but there must be some transferable skills, especially given how much Pandoran jungle looks like Earth jungle). Thirdly, he's a reconnaissance specialist, which means he's been trained in close, careful observation. Put all this together, and you have the makings of a first-rate field assistant, which is not something to be sniffed at. Yes, scientists can be dismissive of expertise from outside their field. But they're not stupid, and they'd certainly think of the identical-twin thing.

Secondly: is Colonel the most evil rank, or what? At least as far as the movie biz is concerned. A re-watching of Akira suggests that yes, it is. Relatedly, Col. Miles Quaritch is another entry for my ongoing list of "evil characters called Miles in fiction".

Thirdly, the ending. Oh God, the ending. There were at least two ways they could have recovered the situation: ( Spoilers herein )

Anyway, I'd like to end on a more serious note. The displacement and genocide of tribal peoples is not safely confined to the past or the cinema; it's still going on now, and it's much more brutal than Cameron dared to show. If your planet is affected by the issues raised in this feature film, please consider donating to Survival International³.

¹ Even though he later appears completely unable to move tactically in a jungle environment. Never mind, there are bigger plot holes out there.
² Did you notice him? Giovanni Ribisi, AKA Phoebe's idiot brother Frank from Friends. If you ever get the chance to catch him in the Kieszlowski-written film Heaven, do take it.
³ Hat-tip to James "Two Doctors" Mackenzie for the link.

Historians sometimes talk about the "long 19th century", which covers the period from the French Revolution to the start of the First World War - the idea being that (in the West, at least) international relations, warfare, social structures and technology in the periods 1789-1799 and 1900-1914 were more typical of the 19th century than of the 18th or 20th. Eric Hobsbawm, who proposed this idea, then went on to propose the "short 20th century" as a natural historical period: in his view, the short 20th century should run from the First World War to the fall of the Soviet Union. Which means, presumably, that we've been living in the long 21st century since 1991. This commenter suggested that the rise of the Internet also makes a good starting point for the long 21st century (though the September that never ended began in 1993).

[It's worth pointing out that redefining the endpoints of your period to include any grey areas is a standard move in the power games played by different schools of historians - Renaissance historians typically put the start of the Renaissance a couple of hundred years earlier than medievalists, for instance. Hobsbawm was just more blatant about it than most. Googling for "long nth century" turns up some relevant hits for most n between 1 and 20, often, entertainingly enough, for two consecutive values of n.]

Anyway, I agree with Hobsbawm and Dresner, but for more pessimistic reasons: 1991 was also the year of the first Gulf War, and I think in years to come that will be recognised as the opening salvo of the Oil Wars of the long 21st century.

I was surprised to see that there are currently exactly 1991 messages in my Livejournal inbox. Coincidence? I think not.

Quite an uplifting story:

In 1957, Yvon Chouinard bought a coal-fired forge second-hand, and started making hard-steel pitons for use in Yosemite Valley. Between time spent surfing and climbing, he sold pitons out of the back of his car to support himself. The improved pitons were a big factor in the birth of big-wall climbing in 1957-1960 in Yosemite. The success of his pitons caused him to found Chouinard Equipment for Alpinists (CEA), Inc.

...
Around 1970, he became aware that the use of hard-steel pitons made by his company were causing significant damage to the cracks of Yosemite. These pitons comprised 70% of his income. In 1971 and 1972, he introduced new aluminium chockstones called Hexentrics and Stoppers, along with less successful steel Crack-n-Ups, for climbing, and committed his company to the advocacy of the new tools and a new style of climbing called "clean climbing". This concept revolutionized rock climbing and led to further success of his company, despite destroying the sales of pitons, formerly his most important product.

It's good to read about someone taking a gamble and doing the Right Thing rather than continuing with their damaging but lucrative behaviour. But there's probably a more general lesson: if you do something useful but damaging, then there would probably be a market that's at least as big for something that fulfils the same purpose and is less damaging. And maybe you're the one with the expertise to invent it.

CEA no longer exists, sadly: they were hit with a load of liability lawsuits from non-climbers who claimed that they were not warned sufficiently of the dangers of climbing (er, it's a vertical wall of rock hundreds of feet high, guys, did you really think there was no possibility of injury?). This probably explains the fearsomely comprehensive disclaimer of liability that now comes attached to every nut, quickdraw and carabiner. The guts of CEA survive, though: the company's equipment was bought by the employees, who then went on to form Black Diamond Equipment. Chouinard himself founded the clothing company Patagonia in 1972.

I've been reading George Monbiot's new book, Heat: how to stop the planet burning. It's an excellent book, and I urge you all to read it. He describes how we can achieve the necessary cuts in carbon emissions to prevent the worst effects of climate change, and furthermore how we can do it without giving up our civil liberties or our industrial society. He seems to have done his homework pretty thoroughly - the chapters average out at about a hundred footnotes each. If you've been following his Guardian column, you'll recognize a lot of the material (some of it looks like it was copied-and-pasted from old columns), but there's some new stuff, and it's good to see his thought presented as a coherent argument.

( Herewith an executive summary )

He's also summarised his plan here, with timings.

I'm currently reading The Utility of Force by General Sir Rupert Smith, which, while not quite so well-written, is also fascinating. Yay for the Blackwell's sale! :-)