The McWetlog

Charlie Stross links to this piece about environmentalism, which says some interesting things (e.g., “Go after pollution sources with the highest benefit/cost ratio, not those which are most noticeable” — such as underground coal fires rather than aviation emissions), and then goes on to say some interesting things himself:

Expecting everyone to dump their standard of living in the shitter in order to save the environment is not a realistic strategy because humans don’t work that way. … If you really want to know how humans work, in the mass, you need to look to economics; and if you want to effect positive environmental change, you need to figure out how to make people want it.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the modern environmentalist movement is a puritan religious movement in secular drag. But that doesn’t mean that fixing our environmental problems isn’t a good idea. Nor are we going to get there by wearing sackcloth and ashes, mortifying the flesh, and trying to live like mediaeval subsistence-farming peasants.

The Puritans weren’t the archetype of self-abnegating killjoys; they were simply the English 16th-century manifestation of a human tendency that persists to this day.

Last week, David Suzuki denounced bottled water:

“It’s nuts to be shipping water all the way across the planet, and us — because we’re so bloody wealthy — we’re willing to pay for that water because it comes from France,” he said in an interview.

“I don’t believe for a minute that French water is better than Canadian water. I think that we’ve got to drink the water that comes out of our taps, and if we don’t trust it, we ought to be raising hell about that.”

So, how much does it cost to ship water all the way across the planet? Not in terms of money (obviously it’s cheap enough to be profitable), the environmental cost? Pablo does some back-of-the-envelope calculations: to produce and deliver one bottle of Fiji water to the U.S. takes 26.88 L of water, 849 g of fossil fuels and 562 g of greenhouse gases. This, so you can drink water that is not as stringently tested as municipal tap water. Via Treehugger.

Interesting article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail about how smart meters help reduce energy consumption in apartment buildings where individual electricity use has not previously been metered. But what struck me was that how reptile breeders — along with marijuana growers — were held up as an example of profligate energy users:

Mr. Stewart has found apartments filled with illicit marijuana cultivators, multiple video duplicators and even catering businesses. “There’s no shortage of examples you could find in certain buildings of folks who are growing dope,” he says.

But the strangest discovery was a reptile farm tucked into a Toronto townhouse complex.

“The resident was breeding reptiles. Iguanas were just one thing. He had alligators,” says Mr. Stewart, owner of a company that installs meters and then bills customers for electricity use.

People doing unusual things risk revealing themselves through their electricity bills, he says. Marijuana growers and reptile breeders use a lot of lights, and their bills are sky high. The same goes for caterers, whose ovens are “literally being used all day.”

A little close to home, that. Interesting factoid from the article: “in a typical building, the top 10 per cent of electricity consumers use 25 per cent of the building’s electricity.”

Much to my surprise, I’ll be reading up on forest management and silviculture over the next month. Homework for one of two working groups for PEP, the local environmental group. Jennifer, on the other hand, is on the other working group and will be looking at waste management.

Ask MetaFilter is the bee’s knees. A couple of threads for future reference:

• Advice on building a “green” home, in the event that I ever have enough coin to contemplate owning property, much less a straw-bale off-grid solar-heated extravaganza.
• Advice on how to come up with a company name, since I’ve been having a devil of a time coming up with a name that can serve as an umbrella for all my possibly-but-not-very remunerative projects.

Glen Hunter sent me a note about this Map Room post about GPS receivers, which gave me a chance to discover his really neat blog about building an off-grid house, which I’m just completely fascinated by.