Today's random idea: linking train and plane ticket prices in Europe

Here’s a random idea to start off the week:

What would happen if the law in Europe became: For each city pair A and B, the price of the cheapest flight between them has to be higher than that of the most expensive train ticket(s)?

Twelve months in advance, train operators would have to signal to the airlines what their highest ticket price will be (or maybe a price point at which 90% of their tickets will be sold for less than), and the airlines would have to adapt to that.

As competition with national train operators now enters the European train system (by law), it is unlikely this will artificially inflate train ticket prices. Demand is still demand, and competition works.

There is no real reason why a flight from A to B should cost less than a train from A to B. Certainly no environmental reason, and as for “convenience” (a modern way of saying you will pay extra cash to “save” time by flying), it still makes no sense.

Any unintended consequences of my crazy idea you can see? Feel free to comment on the Facebook post here.

[PS: a properly implemented carbon tax would probably have the same effect and perhaps less complexity]

Colorado’s ‘rebel’ farmers – ‘I’d like to see industrial farming go extinct’ →

Maybe you’ve heard of regenerative agriculture?

If not, here’s a bog-standard definition:

‘Regenerative agriculture is a holistic land-management practice that uses the power of photosynthesis in plants to sequester carbon in the soil while improving soil health, crop yields, water resilience, and nutrient density.’

Basically you’re trying to bring back real, pesticide-free, ecosystems to farmed land, and thus the planet.

One pathway to regenerative agriculture holds that you need big grass-munching, tree scratching, earth trodding, plenty-pooping animals (e.g., cows/pigs) as part of the ecosystem you put in place to renew the land—often farmland previously taken to the brink by traditional, intensive, pesticide-based destruction.

And since land put into renewal like this can be paradise for a small herd of cows and bulls or a bunch of pigs, they’re going to multiply like crazy, which is then no longer ideal for a fixed area of land. So this is how such farms try to survive financially: “culling” their herds and selling at a premium the meat from free ranging animals on pesticide-free pasture. They even do this at the amazing Knepp Estate rewilding project in the UK.

Making it economically otherwise is even less obvious, at least to start with as the land is renewed from its terrible state back into working ecosystems, with improving soil and the carbon sequestration that goes with it. This is not some snap-your-fingers magic, it’s a backbreaking decades-long effort.

Farmers such as Jake in this excellent Guardian piece are basically trying to put the planet back into a better state, a few hundred or thousand hectares at a time, while one day hoping to pay back their investors. If you want to hurt your head a little bit, try and comprehend why, for example, the US government continues to subsidise farmers growing mono-crop grains on massive Mid-West farms, drowning in pesticides, in order to feed cattle and pigs in ghastly conditions in various levels of factory farm, while not making it financially possible for someone like Jake to get off the ground on his own, as he puts the natural world back together again for the eventual good of all.

I’m guessing that this big-government mega-meat focus will gradually have to change as this decade goes forward. There are hints it is underway already.

Right, so, if you’re willing to be truly inspired, this video made by Jake’s buddy as they walk around his regenerating property, is bloody brilliant, and has apparently turned Jake into a mini-online rockstar, unexpectedly. He’s literally dripping with passion. It’s addictive!

Now, before any of my meat-munching friends try to use Jake’s example as some kind of justification for zooming off to the meat section of the supermarket, just remember: none or almost none of the meat you eat lived a life like Jake’s animals do. There are plenty of photos and videos of the true lives of what you eat online. You know the ones I’m talking about. If the farming world was turning massively towards regenerative agriculture under models like Jake’s, meat would become a special “treat” from time to time, like the occasional bottle of champagne or something.

Be part of the change. The planet will thank you: the birds, the trees, the butterflies, not to mention the soil—without which we are especially fucked.

[Thanks to Tyler for giving me the heads-up on the Netflix documentary on soil: Kiss the Ground. It’s a bit one-sided but still inspiring.]

Vegan cheese →

From the New York Times:

“The pleasures of a bloomy-rind cheese begin before you slice into it — the softly wrinkled wheel, dappled and dimpled like the face of the moon. The promising stink, getting stronger by the minute.

“But I considered the velvety rind of a two-pound Barn Cat with more than a glint of skepticism. This cheese was made of cashews and coconut, run through with a dark line of vegetable ash, and I doubted these ingredients could undergo any kind of meaningful transformation.

“I was wrong. I was unprepared for the mellow, pleasingly dank flavors of a soft-ripened goat cheese, for the mildly peppery tang, for the dense, luxurious creaminess.”

I’m not going to lie, I’m like Judas on this one: I’ll believe it when I taste it. It certainly all looks like cheese:

The amber cheeses are Kirsten Maitland and Fred Zwar’s Chebrie, a vegan Cheddar-Brie hybrid; at left and right, their truffle Brie, and at center, plain vegan Brie. —Jessica Attie for The New York Times

“When I was a vegetarian, in college, cheese was the final boss for everyone I knew considering veganism, the last and most difficult food to relinquish. And it seemed no one could win — cheese made from milk was too powerfully delicious, and the vegan cheeses available in specialty stores were bland, pale simulacra.

“This newer generation of packaged cheese is more convincing, in part, because it’s produced in roughly the same way as dairy cheeses, made from cultured plant-based milks that develop texture and flavor through fermentation, rather than solely through additives.

“On a much smaller scale, specialty cheesemakers like Blue Heron Creamery in Vancouver, British Columbia; the Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis; and Vtopian Artisan Cheeses, in Portland, Ore., are pushing the limits of those fermentations to create vegan cheeses with flavors and textures I’d previously thought impossible.

“To make that ashy-centered Barn Cat, Stephen Babaki of Conscious Cultures Creamery, in Philadelphia, inoculates the surface with various strains of Penicillium candidum, typically used to ripen Camembert and Brie, then ages it for two to three weeks.

“You can’t fake time,” Mr. Babaki said. “And if you don’t give cheese time, it can’t develop flavor.”

Lots more interesting stuff in the article.

I once ordered Spanish alcohol-free wine just to see what it tasted like after seeing rave reviews online.

It was awful. Let’s hope the vegan cheese is following a better path. It sure looks like it might be!

When bitcoin means reopening a power plant just to create new baby bitcoins →

This kind of crazy shit is one of the reasons bitcoin needs to die a painful death or radically change:

“A decade ago, the bankrupt owner of the Greenidge power plant in Dresden, New York, sold the uncompetitive coal-fired relic for scrap and surrendered its operating permits.

“For the next seven years, the plant sat idle on the western shore of Seneca Lake, a monument to the apparent dead end reached by the state’s fossil fuel infrastructure.

“But today, Greenidge is back up and running as a Bitcoin mining operation. The facility hums with energy-hungry computers that confirm and record Bitcoin transactions, drawing power from the plant’s 106-megawatt generator now fueled by natural gas.

“The mining activity is exceptionally profitable, thanks to an 800 percent rise in Bitcoin’s price since last April. Seeking to ride the boom, the plant’s new owners plan to quadruple the power used to process Bitcoin transactions by late next year.”

If I had to describe the stupidity of humanity as it accelerates towards the wall, this story would probably make the final draft.

You can read all about this madness and the fight to stop it right here.

Fun and games and climate tipping points →

From CBS:

“For 55 million years the Amazon rainforest has weathered all of nature's ups and downs, but just one century of human negligence — a geological blink of an eye — threatens to be the nail in the coffin for this ancient forest.

“When Lovejoy started studying the Amazon in the 1960s, 10 million people lived there and the forest was 97% intact. Now there are 30 million people living there and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is at 20% — the critical level at which scientists believe the Amazon starts to tip towards the point of no return, where it no longer survives as a lush wet rainforest and transitions into an arid savanna.

“Lovejoy says this transition from rainforest to savanna could happen as fast as a mortgage cycle. "I would say it's a matter of something that happens on the timescale of decades like 10, 20, 30 years, not centuries. So, a lot of the people alive today would actually get to see that negative consequence."

What is a rainforest, anyway?

“A rainforest is only a rainforest because it is a rain-making machine — generating 50% of its own rainfall. That phenomenon is made possible as the leaves that make up the canopy of trees exhale moisture upward (a process called evapotranspiration), condensing in the cooler air above and forming a river of clouds that rains the moisture back down. 

"Just by watching what happens after a rainfall in the Amazon and afterwards you see plumes of moisture coming up out of the canopy of the forest and that all moves westward to become rainfall once again, " explains Lovejoy. 

“But as the trees disappear and the forest becomes fractured, so does the moisture. Lovejoy says this destruction is due to fires and deforestation from small landowners grabbing land and to large corporations engaged in industrial agriculture, mainly growing soybeans and supporting livestock.”

Plenty more on the Amazon, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the Gulf Stream right here in the article.

Good luck!

[Cover photo: CBS]

The slow yet steady return of night trains to France →

From Liberation.fr (use Chrome to translate the article to your preferred language):

“There are only two lines still in operation: Paris-Latour-de-Carol, connecting the capital to the Spanish border, and Paris-Briançon, which joins the Hautes-Alpes. A sign that the situation of night rail links is still very fragile, the latter is under construction until the end of the year. The government has promised their survival.

“We are also waiting for the imminent return of Paris-Nice , delayed by the health situation, as well as that of the Paris-Tarbes-Hendaye line , "the Blue Palombe", by "the end of the year", says the government.”

Here’s a cool map on the current and future state of things:

The slow return of the night train (Alice Clair / Julien Guillot)

Red in currently running, dashed red undergoing works, pink is ‘coming soon’, and blue is what there used to be.

A couple of things to be excited about:

  • the train that will go from Paris to Tarbes looks like it will then go on to Hendaye/Irùn on the French/Spanish border. From there it’s a 30 minute train hop to a nice relaxing breakfast at a beachfront Café de la Concha in San Sebastien. Yes please!

  • The Paris - Vienna route is opening at the end of the year. Maybe not right at the start—but hopefully quickly—the wagons used will be the awesome brand new Austrian-built Siemens ones with new bedroom designs as well as individual sleeping pods. Yes please!

The lack of news about any other European service provider looking to redesign sleeping wagons for the 20th century is however a little disappointing. Push for it!

After eight years, the question remains: What’s the point of bitcoin? →

From the Washington Post (might be behind a paywall unless you clear your cookies):

“Bitcoin has been around for more than a decade, yet it remains an inconvenient way to pay for things, inferior to dollars or credit cards in almost every way. Most merchants don’t take it, so in the United States, it’s mostly used by devoted hobbyists, though firms such as Tesla are trying to make it a bit more mainstream.

“Those issues are somewhat related to a larger problem: For technical reasons, transactions are slow to clear, and that decentralized network uses a lot of processing power, making it challenging to scale beyond a devoted fanbase. Some of these problems can be worked around by creating another layer on top of the bitcoin network — but at that point, it’s unclear why anyone would prefer a third party denominating transactions in bitcoin rather than a stable, spend-anywhere currency such as the U.S. dollar.

“One could argue, of course, that one shouldn’t think of bitcoin as a currency at all, but as an asset. Certainly it’s hard to argue with the way its price has appreciated. And yet, my inner skeptic keeps asking: What is bitcoin actually good for?”

Here’s a lesson from Tokyo:

“After decades of remarkable growth, Tokyo real estate was so valuable that at one point in the 1980s, the Imperial Palace was theoretically worth more than all the real estate in California. Eventually, however, prices require some sort of pragmatic anchor, or else they collapse; after Tokyo real estate prices finally crashed, it took decades for prices to even approach their previous peak.”

And a very good point about ‘value’ and expensive rings:

“To some extent, all value is a collective hallucination. Those rings are beautiful, but they are not objectively several thousand times more beautiful than stainless steel and cheap crystal. If the market wants to slap a similarly elevated price on elegant technical solutions to gnarly game-theory problems and call it a cryptocurrency, who am I to gainsay it? Why shouldn’t it be a small but significant alternative investment option, just like silver and gold?”

Even though bitcoin is designed so that the number of bitcoins can never exceed 21 million, getting there means pumping out crazy amounts of Co2 (from electronically ‘mining’ the coins). Already bitcoin mining requires more electricity that Argentina or The Netherlands, and the last time I looked, the world doesn’t run on renewable energy quite yet.

Here’s a graph showing the carbon footprint of the electricity mix used to run countries, and mine bitcoin:

The average carbon footprint of the electricity used by bitcoin is 837 g CO2 / kWh. This is worse than the US mix. From here.

Yikes.

As the environmental impact of this craziness becomes clear to a wider audience, they’re going to have to find another way to ‘mine’ bitcoin than pumping Co2 into the air, or simply fade away in a big crash.

To me, deep down bitcoin feels like just another pseudo-pyramid scheme where the aim is to get out just before it crashes.

Good luck to you Bitcoiners when trying to correctly pick the moment just before it all goes pear-shaped.

‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe →

Some stories are temporarily more important that speeding climate change freight trucks with no brakes.

Arundhati Roy, author of the magical book, The God of Small Things, social justice warrior, and thorn in the side of India’s fascist Hindu nationalist leader, Nahendra Modi, has written this terrifying piece on India’s Covid-19 catastrophe while her friends and their families get picked off by a combination of the virus and Modi’s dangerous games.

It’s a must read.

Narendra Modi in front of the Orwellian Statue of Unity, the world’s tallest statue, in India’s Gujarat state in 2018. It overlooks the Narmada dam, constructed after decades of protest and the destruction of a whole tribal civilization living in the valley to make way for it. (This photo makes me want to vomit.) Photograph: HANDOUT/AFP/Getty Images

Texas trying to win Wind and Sun →

From Reuters:

“Texas, already the U.S. state with the most wind energy capacity, is catching up to California in utility-scale solar capacity, according to a report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) on Wednesday.

“California currently has the most installed utility-scale solar capacity of any state - about 16 gigawatts (GW).”

Every three gigawatts powers the equivalent of one million homes: three million homes but only 1/3 of the time.

EIA projected Texas will add a record 10 GW of utility-scale solar capacity by the end of 2022, compared with 3.2 GW in California. A third of all U.S. utility-scale solar capacity planned to come online in the next two years (30 GW) will be in Texas.

The bigger picture:

“President Joe Biden's administration wants all U.S. power to come from non-carbon-emitting sources like nuclear and renewables by 2035.

“Solar is expected to make up the largest share of capacity additions in Texas between 2020 and 2022, with almost half of the additions, compared with 35% for wind and 13% for gas, according to EIA projections.”

A whole blog post about Texas without mentioning the word ‘oil’ once!

The times they are a-changin’.

Fiordland 'Dark Sky Park' would be world's second-largest →

From Radio New Zealand:

“Great South Southland Regional Development Agency has been working with the Fiordland community and stakeholders on the possibility of it becoming an accredited Dark Sky Park with the International Dark Sky Association (IDA).

“Great South expected it would extend the tourism season over winter when viewing is at its best, and spokesperson Amie Young said Fiordland already ticked most of the boxes with very little light pollution.

"If Fiordland National Park received IDA Park designation it would make it the second largest Dark Sky Park in the world, second only to Death Valley National Park in the USA," Brown said in a statement.”

This is where Fiordland is in New Zealand:

Fiordland, New Zealand. Wikipedia/Costello

It’s one of the last basically pristine almost-wildernesses on Earth, all 12,600 square kilometres of it.

Much of it looks like this:

The road to Milford Sound. Kevin Bleakley

There’s a big flaw in these “stakeholder” arguments though:

“Work is already under way with hopes it would bring domestic and international visitors to the region.

“Fiordland Community Board chair Sarah Greaney was enthusiastic about the opportunity.

"We have amazing night skies here in Fiordland, completely unpolluted by light. The opportunity for us to become a Dark Skies Park opens up possibilities for businesses, photographers and many others to share this with the world, so it's very exciting to see this progressing," she said in a statement.”

Conclusion: It’s all about the money. It’s all about getting international tourists in planes from far away places to burn thousands of kilos of Co2 each to reach New Zealand in order to look at the stars.

Do these “stakeholders” listen to the contradictions in their own sentences from time to time? One gets the feeling they’re still not really being confronted by the fact that New Zealand has to de-international-tourist, going forward.

Next.

Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language →

This is pretty cool. From National Geographic:

“On a crisp spring morning in 2008, Shane Gero overheard a pair of whales having a chat. Gero, a Canadian biologist, had been tracking sperm whales off the Caribbean island nation of Dominica when two males, babies from the same family, popped up not far from his boat. The animals, nicknamed Drop and Doublebend, nuzzled their enormous boxy heads and began to talk.

“Sperm whales “speak” in clicks, which they make in rhythmic series called codas. For three years Gero had been using underwater recorders to capture codas from hundreds of whales. But he’d never heard anything quite like this. The whales clicked back and forth for 40 minutes, sometimes while motionless, sometimes twirling their silver bodies together like strands of rope, rarely going silent for long. Never had Gero so desperately wished he understood what whales were saying. He felt as if he were eavesdropping on brothers wrestling in their room. “They were talking and playing and being siblings,” he says. “There was clearly so much going on.”

Meanwhile, machine learning (AI) researchers have started to succeed in translating certain human languages to English without having the slightest information about the non-English language used to create the “translation machine”.

Without going into detail, these new “machines” don’t strictly learn to translate between languages, they learn hidden structural links between languages.

So, as I understand it, the aim with whales is to use the (hidden) structural links learned between pairs of human languages, and then transfer this knowledge to whale “languages” and hope for the best.

It’s much more complicated than that, but I hope you get the idea at least.

“One of humanity’s most enduring desires is the enchanting notion that we might one day converse with other species. In the years since Gero’s insight, and partly because of it, the potential to bridge this communications gap has grown less fanciful. On Monday, a team of scientists announced that they have embarked on a five-year odyssey to build on Gero’s work with a cutting-edge research project to try to decipher what sperm whales are saying to one another.

“Already, these scientists have been at work building specialized video and audio recording devices. They aim to capture millions of whale codas and analyze them. The hope is to expose the underlying architecture of whale chatter: What units make up whale communication? Is there grammar, syntax, or anything analogous to words and sentences? These experts will track how whales behave when making, or hearing, clicks. And using breakthroughs in natural language processing—the branch of artificial intelligence that helps Alexa and Siri respond to voice commands—researchers will attempt to interpret this information.”

I’ll bet the most common whale sentence turns out to be, ‘Another ferking big container ship coming right at you, Gero!’

[Cover photo: Sperm Whales—National Geographic]

Burps in Space →

Even though I now have hundreds of interesting climate articles to write about, I figure that burps in space have priority.

From the Guardian:

“In space, no-one can hear you belch – at least, not for the time being. New Zealand has announced mission control for a new satellite that will orbit the earth observing methane produced by burps or other flatulence from cows.

“The digestive processes of its 6.3 million-strong cow population are among New Zealand’s most critical environmental problems. Agriculture is one of the country’s biggest producers of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global heating and climate breakdown.

“Last year, global methane rose to the highest levels on record, driven by farming and fossil fuel use. Methane makes up 43% of New Zealand’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and more than 80% of that is produced by agriculture, primarily through the digestive processes of large ruminant animals.”

Typically, T-Rex-sized dairy cows.

“Local greenhouse-gas researcher Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher, who will lead that research effort, told Stuff the satellite would use New Zealand as a testing ground for checking the accuracy of its agri-methane detection, comparing the satellite’s own measurements with the New Zealand government’s. Because many countries don’t keep accurate or comprehensive records on agricultural emissions, the research could help scientists and politicians establish how much methane is actually being produced by animal farming.”

It’ll be really interesting to see if NZ is doing better—or worse—than it thought it was.

[Cover photo: William West/AFP/Getty Images]

Happy Earth Day →

Today is Earth Day.

Margaret Renkl—in a gorgeous meditation on life on Earth: ‘We Were Born to be Wild’, writes for the New York Times:

“To get from my bedroom to the coffeepot every morning, I pass a bank of windows that overlooks two feeders and a birdbath. My early-morning habit is to stand there for a bit, starting the day with my avian neighbors. If it’s migration season, as it is now, I get my coffee and come back for a longer stay, just in case an exotic visitor has arrived during the night.”

“Last summer the biggest grasshopper I’ve ever seen in my life flew into my pollinator garden while I was weeding. My bug book taught me her wonderful name: obscure bird grasshopper. She studied me as I pulled weeds, turning to follow my movements, and I studied her studying me.

“I find all creatures fascinating, and have ever since I was a little girl, but I pay more attention to them now because I know how much harder my species is making life for all the others.”

The pivot begins.

“During my childhood in the 1960s, it was common to see people casually throwing trash out of their car windows, but these days human indifference to the natural world tends to be better hidden, even from ourselves.

“Market forces have worked hard to make sure we don’t notice the depredations we’re complicit in: the microplastics that pollute our waterways every time we wash a fleece jacket or a polyester blouse, the toilet tissue that’s destroying the boreal forest, the poisons we spray on our yards — up to 10 times as much, per acre, as farmers use — because they are marketed to us as benign “applications.”

On the subject of those poisons…

“As I waited in line at a garden center last week, I listened to the store owner telling another customer about a “treatment” she could spray on every bush and tree in her yard to “take care of” any kind of bug that might be feeding on them. He didn’t tell her it would also kill butterflies and bees and obscure bird grasshoppers. He didn’t tell her she would also be poisoning the songbirds that would feed on the poisoned insects or the predators that would feed on the weakened songbirds.”

Then she nails a very uncomfortable truth:

“Many people no longer feel a connection to the natural world because they no longer feel themselves to be a part of it. We’ve come to think of nature as something that exists a car ride away.”

Yep.

Things you can do this Earth Day and in the following weeks and months to start to reconnect with nature:

  • Get online and look at places in your country where you can go free camping, away from civilisation for a day or two, and look at the stars and listen to the forest rustle around you in the dark, and try not to freak out when you hear some of the few remaining wild animals on Earth stumble around outside in the night. Try and get there by public transport and hiking.

  • Grab a copy of the brilliant book, ‘Silent Spring’, by Rachel Carson and then marvel at how—believe it or not—we actually do worse things to the planet now than when it was published in 1962.

  • Think about eating a little less meat this year.

  • Get an electric bike and use it.

  • Muse on the destructiveness of Western “culture” with a copy of Helen Norberg-Hodge’s seminal, ‘Ancient Futures, Learning from Ladakh’ (1991) in which she observes an ancient self-sufficient and HAPPY culture entirely cut off from the developed world (Ladakh) implode after India builds a road in in 1975 and lets the tourists arrive. This book’s a true eye-opener and could have been written yesterday. It’s translated into 40 languages, so don’t let that be an excuse.

  • Only buy an SUV if you have to ford rivers frequently.

  • Try to fly less, or not at all. Especially if you live in Europe and you need to get somewhere else in Europe. Take the train, look out the window, sit in the dining car with a glass of wine (if your train has one) and watch the world go by. Bliss.

Best wishes to you all.

Kevin

[Cover photo: Rose Marie Cromwell for the New York Times]

Sweden and its forests →

Here’s some fantastic photojournalism with fairly sobering texts on Swedish forestry in the Guardian by Marcus Westberg:

“Forests cover 70% of the country, but many argue the Swedish model of replacing old-growth forests with monoculture plantations is bad for biodiversity.”

Yeah…

“Thousands of logs seen from overhead at a timber terminal. Sweden is the world’s third biggest exporter of pulp, paper and sawn timber.” —The Guardian.

Then…

“Most cleared areas are replanted with monoculture plantations to be harvested again in 60 to 80 years. According to Swedish Forest Industries, at least 380m trees a year are planted. Many environmentalists and indigenous Sami reindeer herders say a rethink of this model is urgently needed.”

The problem is not exactly the number of trees being kept more or less constant, or even increasing! The problem is all of the downsides of industrial monocultures, in particular their smack-down effect on ecosystems and biodiversity.

“Last month, 33 signatories, including representatives of youth movements such as Fridays for Future Sweden, and 44 indigenous communities via Sámiid Riikkasearvi, wrote to the European commission warning: ‘The Swedish forestry model is wreaking havoc. The forest ecosystem has changed so dramatically that not even the reindeer that have learned to survive on these lands since the ice age can live in the landscape that this type of forestry creates’”.

To give a concrete example:

“Ancient trees are a vital host for lichen, a key source of food for reindeer. More than 70% of Sweden’s lichen-rich forest has disappeared in the past 60 years. This hugely affects northern Sweden’s Sami people. Their culture and livelihoods are closely tied to that of the reindeer, which rely on lichen for survival.”

Old-growth forest, Sweden.

Not to mention the fact that industrial pine forests are pretty depressing to look at, even for people keen to check out ‘nature’ and pay for the pleasure:

“The loss of old-growth forests are a concern for many other locals, including those active in nature-based tourism. Johan Stenevad, owner of Lapland Guesthouse, says: ‘Soon, plantations are all that will remain. That will be the end of both tourism and of our communities’”.

So you destroy biodiversity and tourism in one fell swoop.

That’s not exactly a win in my book.

[Cover photo: Johan Stenevad by Marcus Westberg]

The beauty of clear-cutting and the regrowth of industrial forests near Gävleborg county, Sweden.

James Cameron and the dairy cows: Part II →

In a recent blog I talked about James Cameron’s organic vegetable farm in New Zealand being used to grow grass for dairy cows instead.

There has been an update to this saga.

“Cameron has however defended the cattle grazing, saying while the animals would be phased off the farm, that work had been delayed by Covid-19.

"Our plan to expand the veggie operation and get the animals off basically sort of got derailed by the pandemic, because we needed a lot more labour for the veggie operation than we do to run the stock, and our access to labour from the Solomon Islands or Philippines and things like that basically just went away. 

"So we've been in a holding pattern for a year but that initiative starts soon."

“They said more cattle had not been brought onto the farm since the start of the pandemic and most had been grazed in the same areas of the farm since they bought it in 2012.”

Fascinating how you need to import humans to work on farms in rich countries.

That’s a topic for another day.

“Cameron said there had been a change towards regenerative agriculture on their farm about 18 months ago.

“Regenerative agriculture aims to improve the environment by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity - resulting in both carbon draw down and improving the water cycle.

"We can get the animals off any any time we want to, but, but we can't tell other farmers to do that unless there's a pathway. So our job is to be the precursor and figure out the pathway. So we hired this new young hotshot farm manager who is very well schooled in regenerative ag, we said 'all right, convince us, show us how this works'. 

"I was pretty sceptical that we needed it at all. And I've been convinced that it is a viable pathway that's transitional," Cameron said.”

I wonder if this is therefore just a spat between farm neighbours and their diverging visions for the future.

Also: I wonder if Cameron has a doomsday bunker under his New Zealand farm.

Asking for a friend.

Amazing satellite timelapse of forest cover on Earth →

From Bloomberg:

“Google Earth has partnered with NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, and Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab to bring users time-lapse images of the planet’s surface—24 million satellite photos taken over 37 years. Together they offer photographic evidence of a planet changing faster than at any time in millennia. Shorelines creep in. Cities blossom. Trees fall. Water reservoirs shrink. Glaciers melt and fracture.

“We can objectively see global warming with our own eyes,” said Rebecca Moore, director of Google Earth. "We hope that this can ground everyone in an objective, common understanding of what's actually happening on the planet, and inspire action."

Right, so if you click on this link, Timelapse will open (slowly! It seems to be rather data intensive).

Then if you click on “Changing Forests” to the right, you find a slideshow of eleven examples of changing forest cover on Earth over the last 30-40 years.

Depending on your mood today:

  • if you are sad and want to remain so, slides number 1-3 are for you.

  • if you are sad and want to be “hopeful”, slides 7-8 are simply AMAZING.

You can see the parts of the Amazon that are truly protected by indigenous tribes!

Screenshot from Google Earth’s Timelapse.

Incredible.

Sometimes you see aid groups and fundraising to help Amazon tribes maintain their way of life and forests, and I’ll admit to being one of the first to say, “That sounds like cowpoo!”

But it really is a thing!

Brilliant.

Go forth and explore, my little ones!

New Zealand's "Clean-Green" myth continues to take a beating →

A Radio New Zealand article that doesn’t mince words:

“Forest and Bird agriculture spokesperson Annabeth Cohen said dairy was destroying the land.

"Basically if we continue to allow the fertiliser and irrigation industries to destroy rivers, soil and climate, it's going to be a dead-end road for New Zealand."

“The report said population growth in New Zealand and overseas would pile on market pressure to provide food and dairy to the globe.

“Cohen said the country submitted to these pressures at its own peril.

“She said it was not New Zealand's job "to feed the world milk powder".

This is what caused this outburst:

“A new report paints a stark picture of the environment under relentless pressure.

“The Environment Ministry and Stats NZ today released Our Land 2021 - a look at land use and the state of the environment in recent decades.”

“It describes the loss of productive food growing land to urban sprawl, an eroded environment under pressure from more cows and increased intensification.”

Not only is intensive agriculture basically poisoning whole swathes of NZ’s ecosystems, but urban sprawl is taking over good agricultural land around cities.

Perfect.

New Zealand’s population is increasing at a rate of 1-2% per year, essentially due to immigration; it would be pretty flat excluding that.

If the bipartisan agreement that “growth” is an necessary thing can be gradually put to rest, I fail to understand why balancing immigration with natural births in order to have no net population change is considered unattainable.

Once you have this, the house-building urban sprawl madness can cease once and for all.

It is really that hard?

And if so: why is it so hard to imagine?

“Federated Farmers said it was worth acknowledging given the big jump in food production and value from a declining area in farmland.

"While the report indicates New Zealand's soil profile overall is not improving, we're at least holding even while farm good management practice begin to bear fruit for our land, out our waterways and emissions," Federated Farmers environment spokesperson Chris Allen says.

“Between 2012 and 2017, cattle (dairy/beef) numbers flat-lined at 10.1 million, and sheep numbers further declined from 31 million to 27 million. Fertiliser inputs, including nitrogen, have also been plateauing over the last few years, he said.”

I dare you to find a better definition of greenwashed polished twaddle than those juicy sentences.

[Cover photo: Land on Pukekohe Hill (near Auckland, the biggest city) used for early potatoes now being readied for (housing) development.]

France to ban some domestic flights where train available →

One of those news items that seems to leave no-one entirely happy, even as reality closes in on our blinkered, extractive societies:

“French MPs have voted to suspend domestic airline flights on routes that can be travelled by direct train in less than two and a half hours, as part of a series of climate and environmental measures.

“After a heated debate in the Assemblée Nationale at the weekend, the ban, a watered-down version of a key recommendation from President Emmanuel Macron’s citizens’ climate convention was adopted.

“It will mean the end of short internal flights from Orly airport, south of Paris, to Nantes and Bordeaux among others, though connecting flights through Charles de Gaulle/Roissy airport, north of the French capital, will continue.”

Since Orly airport is currently poorly connected to the national train network, this will mean taking a half-hour bus (or taxi, or shuttle+suburban line) from Orly to Massy-Palaiseau train station, then a TGV train towards Bordeaux or Nantes. Not a very glamorous connection for high-rollers. The Massy-Bordeaux TGV leg takes just over two hours on the fastest trains.

On the upside, the “one day in the future” metro line 18 in Paris will directly link Orly with Massy-Palaiseau, but we’ll all have another decade on our counters before that happens. Best-case scenario is currently 2027.

As hinted in the text, Charles de Gaulle is even worse off, being on the far side of Paris, and the direct trains from it to Bordeaux—for example—take nearly 4 hours. At least you can catch these trains without leaving the airport though.

Overall, you’re looking at a three hour overland journey from Orly to Bordeaux (with really good connections) and a four hour journey from Charles de Gaulle to Bordeaux.

“The chief executive of Air France-KLM, Benjamin Smith, has said the airline is committed to reducing the number of its French domestic routes by 40% by the end of this year.”

Note that “number of routes” is not the same as “number of flights”. Even today, on the shorter routes with a good rail connection, Air France already doesn’t have that many flights (Paris to Lyon for example, currently 3 a day, compared to say Paris-Toulouse: 9 flights a day vs a slow train connection).

Basically everyone hates the new bill, including probably also the government in charge, who feel obliged to sign it.

“The measure, part of a climate and resilience bill, was passed despite cross-party opposition. The Socialist MP Joël Aviragnet said the measure would have a “disproportionate human cost” and warned of job losses in the airline sector. Other MPs, including from the Green party, complained that watering down the climate convention’s recommendation had made the measure meaningless.”

Pretending not to see that looming job losses are an automatic consequence of a desperate attempt to hold on to a liveable planet is disingenuous to say the least. Replace the word “aviation” with “coal-mining” and the lay of the land starts to become clear.

[Cover photo: AFP/Getty Images]

The UK has its "greenest" Easter ever →

From the Guardian:

“Great Britain’s electricity system recorded its greenest ever day over the Easter bank holiday as sunshine and windy weather led to a surge in renewable energy.

“The power plants generating electricity in England, Scotland and Wales produced only 39g of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt-hour of electricity on Monday, according to National Grid’s electricity system operator, the lowest carbon intensity recorded since National Grid records began in 1935.

“The new low smashed the grid’s previous record of 46g on 24 May last year, during the country’s greenest ever month for electricity generation.

“On Easter Monday, wind turbines and solar farms generated 60% of all electricity as households enjoyed a bank holiday lunch. At the same time the UK’s nuclear reactors provided 16% of the electricity mix, meaning almost 80% of the grid was powered from low-carbon sources.”

In the larger scheme of things:

“Over 2020 as a whole, carbon intensity fell to 181g of CO₂/kWh in part due to the collapse in demand for electricity during the coronavirus lockdowns. But under the UK’s climate targets the electricity system will need to cut its carbon intensity to around 50g of CO2/kWh in 2030, 10g of CO2/kWh in 2035, and 2g of CO2/kWh by 2050.”

Which means that for a day (Easter Monday), the UK beat its 2030 targets.

That’s a good path to be on.

Right, off to the pub!

[Cover photo: Solar farm on Godley Reservoir in Hyde, Manchester. Ashley Cooper pics/Alamy Stock Photo]

"Clean Green New Zealand": Is it time to stop poisoning your lakes and rivers? →

From the “this is bad but my ability to buy plastic shit from China will be curtailed if we stop this” category, Mike Joy writing for Radio New Zealand:

“While emissions of all pollutants inexorably rise and we waltz past tipping point after tipping point, we continue to talk and talk and set up working groups and commissions and expert panels. We commission reports - how this government loves a report! - and we monitor impacts, and we survey people. We do nothing real.”

He goes on:

“One quote from the 'ghastly future' paper struck a chord with me: "Humanity is running an ecological Ponzi scheme in which society robs nature and future generations to pay for boosting incomes in the short term". This sums up exactly what I see happening with freshwater in this country. We are continually kicking the can down the road.”

Yep.

Lest we accuse him of warm-fuzzy statements about saving the planet, here are some specifics:

“A perfect example of this can-kicking is Te Waihora (Lake Ellesmere) in Canterbury. Like most of our lowland lakes in intensive agricultural catchments, it is dying due to excess nutrient inputs.

“To save the lake from further deterioration, farming intensity in the catchment would have to be curtailed. The regional council Environment Canterbury (ECan) and Ministry for the Environment (MfE) did an analysis on the economics of two actions to reduce the pollution and try to save the lake.

“The options: reduce farming intensity in the catchment, (most nutrients come from dairy farming) or construct a wetland to take up the nutrients prior to reaching the lake. The analysis concluded that the cost to dairy farmers in lost revenue would be around $250 million yearly. The wetland option would have a one-off cost of $380m, much of which would go towards buying land and taking it out of dairy production.

“So guess what they decided to do? Nothing at all. They concluded that the economic impact of mitigation was too high either way, and so nothing would be done.

“In other words, let future generations deal with this issue. It's not like they'll be busy dealing with rising seas or disastrous new weather patterns, right? And in fact, when you run the numbers, we are effectively subsidising dairy farming in this catchment to the tune of $350m to $380m every year. We are not just bequeathing the death of Lake Ellesmere to the future. We're paying top dollar to have it killed.”

Well, if you put it that way.

Some numbers from what happens if you actually try to lower nitrate levels:

“Contrast this with the spending choices we've made around Lakes Taupō and Rotorua. To protect both these lakes, taxpayers are paying farmers in the lake catchments to take cows off the land. The price tag is around $90m for Taupō and $40m for Rotorua. For Rotorua the aim is to reduce nitrate flow into the lake by 100 tonnes, a nice round figure which makes it easy to see that we are paying $400 to prevent each kilogram of nitrate from reaching the lake.”

Keep that value in mind as we move on to the crazy conclusion:

“The total amount of nitrate leached to water from dairy farming in the 2017 year in Canterbury alone was above 30m kilos. If we paid to protect Canterbury waterways at the rates we paid in the two North Island lake examples, it would amount to a cost of $12 billion per year. Effectively, we are allowing dairy in Canterbury - just in Canterbury - to do $12b worth of free polluting every year. To put that into perspective a recent report said that the total dairy industry contributed $7.8b per year to the NZ economy.”

If that’s not an ecological Ponzi scheme, I’m a dairy cow.

[Cover photo: An Extinction Rebellion protest at Bathurst's coal mine in Canterbury last September.]