It’s long weekend time, which (1) is awesome, and (2) means there won’t be any updates here until Tuesday. So get off your computer and get outside.

This is pretty ridiculous.  Lee Breen, of Fredericton, is going to jail for skateboarding on city streets.  He had a choice of paying a $100 fine or spending 5 days in jail, and chose jail.

“I won’t pay because I believe I’m following the Fredericton Green Matters campaign in finding alternative transportation with my skateboard,” he said yesterday at a rally in support of him at city hall.
“If I pay the fine, I would be admitting I was doing something wrong.”

I think it’s safe to say this guy isn’t just claiming green after the fact, as he runs a landscape company which operates only old-school push mowers and is involved in several Fredericton environmental campaigns.  Regardless, I’m so sick of old people passing laws against kids trying to have fun (e.g. skateboarding) that I frankly would support this guy even if he was doing tricks on private property - the fact he was using his board for transportation on public roads makes the case that much sillier.

I’ve always loved the idea of integrated systems for technological and biological symbiosis, and I fully intend to embrace cybernetics to aid me in my twilight years. As such, I found Ryan Wolfe’s cyborg houseplants that photosynthesize independently of sunlight through the use of embedded LEDs to be unbelievably cool.

Natural or not, I find there’s an alien beauty to them that is weirdly compelling. Though I feel like he should maybe be using more red and violet-blue LEDs for proper photosynthesis, not green…

It’s becoming a distressingly common theme here I feel, but “green” design is getting out of control and threatens to take the credibility of the sustainability movement with it (unless it becomes economical FAST). I got sick of trying to learn QuickBasic this afternoon and took a little browse through the posts at Inhabitat, and it made me really angry. While there were many undoubtedly good ideas and really neat concepts, so many of the “sustainable” items they profile seem to miss the entire point of the movement. For example:

That is an outdoor solar panel table, designed to power “all of your electronic gadgets”. And they are serious about it. There is no way the tiny amount of power this thing generates can ever pay off its production debt, let alone the fact that solar panels in the sun get fucking hot and would make a terrible work surface. As Andrew says, “the table is probably catastrophically expensive, too, because it’s a chic-design-y limited-run piece for yuppies.” That is precisely what pisses me off - how much this stuff makes sustainability look like just another fad (note the continued use of apple products to reinforce the trendy nature of this shit). Another example:

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I just recently completed my industrial design undergraduate thesis, and the design that I decided to explore combines two elegant sustainable technologies - airships and renewable electricity - and puts them to work on the oft-neglected (but increasingly significant) issue of disaster relief. It recently won 1st place in its category at the 2008 ACIDO Rocket Show.

Air travel is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions. That problem is compounded because, unlike other industries, there is currently very little investment in alternatives. One potential option is airships (lighter-than-air craft) because they are inherently extremely efficient - by George Monbiot’s reckoning, their impact is 80-90% lower than jets. The problem with historical attempts at building a modern airship is that they’ve begun at a massive scale, which makes attracting venture capital much more difficult. The goal of my thesis, thus, was to produce an airship at a modest scale, fulfilling a present need, to act as a transitionary element towards a more sustainable aerospace industry based around airships.

Solarial is an unmanned airship that provides mobile support infrastructure for disaster relief and remote communities, generating renewable energy and supplying communications links where they are needed most. Utilizing a skin coated in thin film photovoltaics, and a reversible drive propeller/wind turbine, it delivers clean energy via tether cable. Housing a suite of telecommunications equipment, Solarial also acts as a relay station for radio and cellular telephone signals, aiding the coordination of relief operations.

More technical details and images after the jump.

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Just got back from the Clock Strikes/Whitey show in Guelph, and I have to give some quick props to the opening dudes, Mr. Bidet. These guys have been playing shows across Ontario every night, but instead of packing up after each event and heading to the next town they head back to Brantford so they can work bitchass jobs the next morning. As soon as they get off work, they hop back on the road to the next town. While it was the naive, judgmental, hypocritical and elitist attitudes of the punk scene that drove me away, these Mr. Bidet guys reminded me of the passion and dedication that is also part of the scene, and what they’re doing is kickass.

A pretty sobering look at the true cost’s of China’s growth in the New York Times. It’s from this past August, but it’s new to me, and if it’s new to you, take a look. China’s environmental problems gets a lot of mention anecdotally, but without quantification it’s hard to grasp the immense scale of the crisis.

Among the scarier pull-quotes:

Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union.

China already burns more coal than the United States, Europe, and Japan combined.

Chinese industry uses 4 to 10 times more water per unit of production than the average in industrialized nations.

One-third of all river water, and vast sections of China’s great lakes have water rated Grade V, the most degraded level, rendering it unfit for industrial or agricultural use.

By World Bank and WHO estimates, air and water pollution causes 750,000 premature deaths each year. According to Chinese experts, the models used are probably conservative.

China now seems likely to need as much energy in 2010 as it thought it would need in 2020 under the most pessimistic assumptions.

In 2005 alone, China added 66 gigawatts of electricity to its power grid, about as much power as Britain generates in a year. Last year, it added an additional 102 gigawatts, as much as France.

As someone who has historically been critical of carbon offsetting in order to absolve Western guilt, I was getting ready to write a fairly scathing post about Worldchanging’s “carbon clean slate” offsets. But then I started reading through some of the comments section, and there’s actually a pretty good discussion there about the validity of offsetting. As far as Alex Steffen (of Worldchanging) is concerned:

“…as an average American with currently used systems and currently available technologies, you simply cannot save enough energy by yourself to have no carbon impact. Even if you underwent radical lifestyle reductions (reductions that almost no one is willing to undergo), your share of the public impact (roads, bridges, airports, military, NASA, the health department, the Postal Service, etc.) is larger than a one-planet carbon footprint. That impact is made in your name, with your tax dollars, for your benefit, but you can’t change it with what you buy or what you forego. You can, however, offset it and work to change it.

That is not the same thing as trying to shop your way to sustainability.

It’s worth [being] clear-headed about that, I think.”

While I can consistently agree with that side of things, it’s hard not to be cynical about offsetting; but if done properly, it’s important to recognize that it is a positive step. If it weren’t framed in business terms (money for carbon), anyone would laud planting trees or buying more renewable electricity. While in the case of offsets it just means treading water in terms of net footprint, offsets of this scale represent a pretty huge chunk of “negative” carbon, since very few people really enter past impact into their reckoning. The notion of rich people paying off their sins is sort of distasteful, but realistically, there are a far worse uses for their cash.

I can only wish that this discussion gets as heated…

It is an electrical storm over an erupting volcano in Chile.

For the summer I’m subletting a place in the heart of U of T’s student ghetto, and I must say, living here is definitely something that needs a little bit of adapting to.

It’s a tiny place, but it’s clean and cheap. Most of the places down in my neighbourhood are Victorian-era row-houses (built fantastically densely), and while it’s obvious that none of the interior in my home is original, many of the 100+ year old buildings are holding up much better than the shoddily constructed sprawl of suburban homes just a few decades old.

There are little idiosyncrasies everywhere. My bedroom has a hugely slanted roof. The wires leading to my computer speakers are acting like radio antennas, so if I’m not playing music, there’s a constant ghostly hum of voices and little tunes in the background. I needed to get a snap-on ferrite sleeve from Active Surplus to shield them. Never had to do that before.

The dryer wedged haphazardly under the basement stairwell apparently doesn’t work, but that’s okay, because I’m planning on rigging up clotheslines on our expansive, flat roof (accessible by wriggling through a tiny window).

After living in the armpit of Toronto’s suburbs near Humber, having everything I need within walking distance is a bizarre experience. Kensington Market is 3 minutes away, and there are at least four farmers’ markets that are in about a 1 km radius from my house. Not to mention a 24-hour market at the end of my street. And a hardware store at the corner (it took me 5 minutes to go buy a plunger the other afternoon, which definitely came in handy).

I went and saw my friend’s band play a show the other night. The venue (a church, oddly enough) was less than 5 minutes away. The bar where I met my friends afterward was 10 minutes in the other direction.

Despite being a minute away from a major street, it’s astonishing how peaceful and quiet the place it is at night. The patio is going to get put to very good use once it’s a little bit warmer out.

I haven’t put them into practice yet, but there are also bike lanes that go all the way from my house down to the office where I’m working. As it stands, its a 40 minute walk, but I’ve done it the past three days and haven’t minded it one bit.

Living down here and talking to people has also made it patently obvious that very little of the traffic that makes the downtown core so brutally congested comes from people who actually live in the city. Toronto’s lead city planner recently said Toronto doesn’t need a congestion tax, but given the positive effect it’s had in Singapore, London, and Stockholm, it’s pretty clear that it’s chicken-shit politics and not real planning that’s behind that decision.

I’ve only been down here for less than a week, and even in a cramped house with random housemates, I can’t see myself wanting to live anywhere else.