Biofuels - boon or bane?

The United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food has concluded that the continued development of biofuels, including ethanol and biodiesel, is ill-conceived and that there should be a five-year moratorium.
I used to go out of my way to fill up at gas stations which used a higher percentage of ethanol, but I no longer do, and I have a suspicion that Mr. Ziegler may well be right on this.
Despite its climate change advantages (growing the plants absorbs a comparable amount of carbon dioxide as the burning of the resulting fuel emits), biofuels have several drawbacks:

• any agricultural land devoted to biofuels production is agricultural land not available for food production which, in a world where food is in short supply, seems immoral;
• in Brazil and Southeast Asia, pristine rainforest is being burned down for sugarcane, soy bean and oil palm plantations for biofuels, which has climate change as well as species habitat consequences;
• growing corn for biofuels in the first world requires fertilizer, tractor use and transportation, to the extent that it has been estimated that it uses almost as much energy as the final fuel provides, as well as leaving behind eroded soils and polluted run-off;
• meeting the increasing demand for biofuels would require an unconscionable proportion of the available arable land;
• some estimates show that ethanol only achieves carbon savings of about 13% when the pollution from the production process and reduced mileage efficiency is taken into account (even if that estimate is disputed, more conservative estimates put the savings at no more than 50%);
• evidence from the current sugar and palm oil industries indicates that biofuels production will push up food prices significantly, with worldwide consequences;
• potential problems with genetically-modified plants and mono-culture agricultural practices loom on the horizon, with implications for bio-diversity and species habitat;
• developing biofuels will take away the impetus needed for conservation measures and improvements in fuel efficiency (a 20% overall improvement in fuel efficiency standards - quite feasible using existing technology - would apparently save far more energy than Europe's biomass could produce).

As usual, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and no technology that doesn't have its concomitant shortcomings. How depressing...

Donuts, saxophones, nihilism and satire

I am enjoying Chris Turner's Planet Simpson at the moment - 450 large-format pages of encomium, homage and rant.
It helps that I'm a Simpsons fan, of course. If you've never seen, or (Heaven forbid!) don't like, The Simpsons - whose remit, according to creator Matt Groening, is to "entertain and subvert" - much of it may be lost on you, but as a critique of modern society and popular culture, it's still a good read.
Sub-titled "How a cartoon masterpiece documented an era and defined a generation", the book focusses in turn on each of the main characters and what they tell us about our world, as well as dissecting the creative process and pointing out some of the clever-clever homages to old movies, some of which flash past in a moment and are all too easily missed. Some of the illustrative quotes and scene descriptions are almost as hilarious as the originals, and tiny details are blown up and deconstructed level by level.
Turner's analysis of 1990's North America is pretty sharp and inciteful, and his prose is suitably ascerbic and irreverent. He touches on family mores, punk rock and grunge, rampant consumption, media control, corporatism, environmental activism, religion and race, libertarianism, irresponsible advertising, the Internet ("Interweb") revolution and much else besides.
Who would have expected section titles like "Existential Angst and Cultural Criticism" or "Ironic Culture and the Sleek Surface of Modernity" in a book about a Fox cartoon series? Who would have expected to find an analysis of Michel Foucoult's comments on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon theory sandwiched in between a bunch of expletives and guffaws at the cartoon violence of the "Itchy and Scratchy Show".
"Woo-hoo!"

Utopian Literature

I have recently spent some time (while business is slack) creating and researching a website on Utopian Literature (www.lukemastin.com/utopia).
For some reason, ever since first discovering the genre as a teenager (introduced to 1984 and Brave New World at school) I have been fascinated by utopias and dystopias. But I realized recently, while looking something up, that there is not a whole lot of information on the subject available on the web.
So I thought I would cobble together some resources from various provenances, and list and briefly review the main examples. My contribution to posterity.

Rumblings from Québec

Despite an apparently weaker showing for Québec separatism recently than for many years, ominous reports keep trickling out of the province. In today's Globe and Mail alone, there are three such.
We learn than the Parti Québécois want to establish a "Québec citizenship" requiring an "appropriate knowledge" of French. While I find it difficult to believe that anyone would immigrate into Québec without a reasonable knowledge of French anyway, as much for their own comfort as anything else, Québec is not a legal nation and so cannot impose or enforce this kind of framework. Immigrants to Canada have to prove a working knowledge of French or English, and one has to assume that those with a working knowledge of French and not English are likely to end up in Québec, so what would be the point?
Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe recenty waded into the ongoing debate (in Québec and elsewhere in Canada, but particularly in Québec) on what constitutes "reasonable accommodation" of minorities, by offering that "Quebeckers form a francophone nation in America, not a bilingual nation." Ho hum...
And then the Mouvement Montréal français (luckily not an organization with a great deal of clout) is insisting that Second Cup coffee shops call themselves "Les cafés Second Cup" within the boundaries of la belle province, on the grounds that French is being eroded by companies that have English-only names. This, clearly, is verging on the ridiculous, and conjures up images of Québec strip malls festooned with signs for "Le Burger King", "le Home Depot", "le Future Shop", etc. And what would be the appropriate translation for "Femme de Carrière", "Esprit" or "La vie en rose" (or for that matter "La Senza") in the rest of Canada? If French is so threatened by something of this nature, which I strongly doubt, then is it really worth protecting?

Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize

What's with that?

Apathy and cynicism in Ontario

I don't really have that much to comment on, but I thought I should mark the end of the Ontario provincial elections with a short snide comment, as is my wont.
After an election campaign completely lacking in any drama or anything as practical as serious debate, all of 52.8% of the eligible voters bothered to turn out (even less than usual, and showing a continued downward trend). Apathetic and cynical, us?
So, yes, Mr. McGuinty and his merry band of Liberals were handily re-elected, but in actual fact only 22% of the eligible voters actually voted for them. Some mandate!
It was generally acknowledged that John Tory lost the election rather than Dalton McGuinty winning it, and most of that effect was over something as stupid as a mistaken call for faith-based school funding. McGuinty just had enough sense and professionalism to stay above the mud-slinging and negativism which characterized almost all the other campaigns.
Tory didn't even win his own seat, so it's probably just as well the Conservatives didn't have to form a government. Anyway, I find it difficult to take a Tory called Tory seriously, don't you?
The referendum on a possible change to the voting system was also resoundingly defeated, with inertia and the status quo being the most likely cuplrits there. Interestingly, if such academic what-ifs kindle your interest, if the suggested MMP system were to have been used for this election, there would now be 10 Green MPs and 21 NDP MPs, as compared to the actual 0 and 10 respectively, both parties registering a significant increase in their share of the popular vote, at the expense of the two main parties.
Ah, well....

The "$47,680 Now!" campaign

One of the dafter news reports in recent weeks (and there has been plenty of competition!), sees the Royal Canadian Mint suing the City of Toronto for $47,680 over the use of the cent in the City's "One Cent Now!" advertising campaign.
Toronto's campaign for one cent of the six cents collected in federal GST to be used for municipalities (one of the dafter campaigns in recent years, quite frankly, but that's another story, as they say) actually started last February, but apparently the Mint have just realized that they are contravening some obscure law and, according to them, the City of Toronto owes them:

• $10,000 for the use of the words "one cent" in the ads;
• $10,000 for the use of the words "one cent" in the phone number (416-ONE-CENT);
• $27,680 for the image of the image of a one cent coin on posters and printed materials.

Now, how daft is that!
If I were of a suspicious nature, I would almost believe that that were under instructions from their political masters. But even so, who would choose to make themselves appear totally ridiculous for the sake of $47,680?

Just add glass façade for a world-class city

The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto main gallery and one of the country's most important galleries, has decided that it is good policy to close for a year. Completely. All service staff have been laid off until further notice (read: we are expecting overruns, and have no idea when we might be re-opening), and thousands of works of art are being crated up for storage (there is no temporary exhibition space).
Arguably it has been closing gradually for some time, and my last couple of visits have been disappointing. But this is the big one. They have wheeled in a famous name (architect Frank Gehry), thrown millions of dollars of tax-payers' money at it (total cost: quarter of a BILLION), and converted it into a long-term construction site and traffic hazard.
As far as I can see, this is all in the interests of the buzz-word (or, rather, buzz-phrase) "world-class city", something Toronto has been fixating over for some years now.
Certainly it does not seem to be anything to do with rational economics. If they really believe that a new fancy glass façade will miraculously cause Torontonians to drop everything at the weekend to pay increased entrance fees to visit the art gallery, then they are naive in the extreme. Ditto with attracting additional visitors from New York, Phoenix, Tokyo or Berlin.
The Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto's pre-eminent museum) has been going through the same process in recent years with the construction of the "Michael Lee-Chin Crystal". Wheel in a famous name (architect Daniel Libeskind), throw millions of dollars of tax-payers' money at it (total cost: MORE than quarter of a billion) , close down major segments of the museum over a period of years so that visits become disappointing trawls around construction tape, et voilá: world-class city! Or not.
Meanwhile, the city council is broke and services are closing down left, right and centre.
Maybe we should concentrate on getting things working for the residents first, and then we can use any left-over money for coddling visitors with glass baubles. Too radical?