Chris Till

Tag: Communism

  • The Future of Tech in the Climate Crisis

    Why battery life matters

    This is going to be the screen tech of the future in everything.

    I talked in my last post about the end of tech capitalism, and its search for ever more power and graphical capability. Now I want to talk about my vision for tech, and especially consumer (hate that word) devices in a degrowth communist society. Power and graphics are clearly going to be less important, if not entirely irrelevant. Energy efficiency, battery life and the ability to function in times of crisis when disruption of power grids is common will be crucial. The ability to live off-grid, even just for a few days with a few solar panels, small wind turbines and battery backups will be important around the world. Even in rich countries.

    Devices with adequate or poor battery life when they are first manufactured become useless as they age. Especially in an era where we will increasing covet longevity and reliability. E Ink devices (like e-readers) and DSLR cameras, are great examples of tech being entirely usable even after many years of battery degradation. An original Kindle probably still works like new, and I know personally that a 14 year old DSLR keeps going no problem. You also see this in the youth trend for buying and using old digital cameras. We need to focus on this type of tech. Stuff that’s really useful, built to last decades, repairable, and ultimately recyclable.

    Even EVs fall into this category. Things like electric buses could be refurbished and kept in service for many years. You could also imagine EV buses or coaches being used as emergency shelters during extreme weather emergencies. Their huge batteries being able to power the basics for a number of people for multiple days. They could also be used to power buildings, like we’ve seen with vehicle to grid technology in cars. Especially in Japan where they see it as vitally important during potential earthquakes and similar events.

    Going back to consumer devices, I think we will see an increase in the use of E Ink screens in phones and tablets over the typical LCD and OLED models we’re all used to. They’re already being deployed in some advertising situations where screen refresh rate is irrelevant, and it allows a huge reduction in energy use.

    E-paper screens, as they’re known, only refresh when something changes on the screen. So, if you’re reading a book, it only refreshes when you turn the page. This is in stark contrast to traditional screens which refresh 60 or more times a second. You just don’t notice it. This is massive for battery life as you can imagine. It’s why your Kindle or other E-reader lasts for months in standby mode, and weeks even if you use them often. It would make so much sense for battery life, longevity of the devices, reducing overall energy consumption, and for potential emergency situations for many of us to switch over. Not to mention reducing strain on our eyes. Perhaps not for video and fast moving games, but the technology is continually improving. We already have various impressive colour screen options, and I can imagine refresh rates fast enough to watch videos smoothly coming along in the next several years. Perhaps we’ll see TVs and large video screens using E-paper.

    Even in the somewhat unlikely event that they don’t improve, I occasionally find the thought of replacing my phone with a black and white E Ink model with a slowly refreshing screen very tempting. Part of me would very much like to switch off from the nonsense you see every day on social media. Especially the climate denial and far-right bullshit. But also any other stupid and unnecessary arguments and hate from people; who are clearly mentally unwell and are taking their stress and anxiety out on others. Many of whom probably have similar afflictions themselves. The further we go into our future of climate chaos, the more tempting it will be to escape from social media. Or at the very least be incentivised to use it less because of the less than ideal screen for Instagram, TikTok etc.

    There are so many other areas of technology where we can simplify, focus on reducing energy use, use better materials (anything other than plastic) and so on. We need to investigate as many possibilities as we can as soon as possible. It’s quite an exciting prospect, because for so long the emphasis of technological and design improvement has been the opposite of the new philosophy we need. When we actually try to do things better; logically, you’d assume that there’s a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of avenues for innovation that haven’t been tapped into at all yet.

    I’m not saying it’s going to save this current disastrous economic system and global civilisation as we know it from collapse. But as we try to mitigate and adapt as best we can to the climate chaos that’s already here and on the way, these principles will definitely help. Even if we ultimately fail in creating a new system that works with nature. It’s better to do things right at some point than never. I’d rather we go extinct, if that’s what happens, having first tried everything we can to live in a far better way. And failing us doing it together as one humanity, I’ll just get that phone and ignore all the idiots fighting amongst themselves over pointless shit.

  • Does Cycling have a future in the UK?

    Considering that the already paltry cycling and walking budget just got slashed by two thirds; you might expect me to throw my hands up in exasperation and head on down to the nearest SUV dealership (that’s pretty much what they are these days) and place an order for a trendy Ford Puma or equivalent from any other brand.

    Shockingly though, I’m not going to do that. Our future isn’t to give up and fit in. And here’s why.

    Thankfully, this isn’t our future. Photo: Vauxford

    This latest budget cut and effective middle finger to cycling for transport in the UK just reaffirms my strongly held belief that we need to ban private cars and use the roads as bike lanes in the very near future (as in now). I already felt that time was too short with respect to the climate crisis, and that half-decent infrastructure change, built over decades, would be grossly insufficient to make any real impact. But now, not only do we know that slow, incremental change will be completely ineffectual in any relevant timescale; but we also know unequivocally that there will not be any significant infrastructure change at all, even in the medium term. The dream the eternal optimists in my local cycling group had of ubiquitous, Dutch style infrastructure is completely, utterly dead.

    Having said that, it probably still won’t be enough to deter these people, which is partly why I decided to stop involving myself in the local advocacy. Metaphorically banging my head against a brick wall in those meetings and Facebook groups was growing a bit tiresome, to say the least. So, I guess they can continue lobbying the town council that has no money and no power to do anything about the roads anyway; and the county council, that is openly trolling us about cycling, and one of the handful of counties across the UK rated as 0 out of 5 by Active Travel England. Not that they have much funding to give out after this first tranche anyway. I hope they wake up, but I’m not so sure they will.

    Either way, I think I’ll stick with offering ideas that might actually lead to achieving something in short order, rather than next century.

    We’re never going to get infrastructure. We need to empty the streets of cars.

    So I suppose you could almost call these cuts a good thing? That may be going a bit far. We do need some infrastructure to separate bikes from the vehicles that do remain after we ban private cars. There will still be buses, coaches, trucks and some vans (although no doubt many of them will be replaced with cargo bikes). But the good news is that this kind of infrastructure wouldn’t be hard to add later on. With so few vehicles on the roads, and buses not getting stuck in traffic, there would be no road rage and bikes and bigger vehicles would be perfectly able to share the mostly empty space.

    The other type of infrastructure – my favourite kind, the LTN, or Low Traffic Neighbourhood, is so cheap, quick and easy that it almost doesn’t need to be mentioned. But just as a quick refresher, you put some bollards at the ends of a road to stop through traffic, and that’s it. It’s so simple, even a Tory could understand it. I don’t think they want to, but still.

    Speaking of Tories, I’ve been thinking recently about the Highway Code changes, where vulnerable road users have been given priority at junctions and so on. It changed over a year ago now, but I still see Highway Code trending on Twitter almost every day. I know the rules changed before Boris Johnson got booted out of office, so on first glance it wouldn’t appear that a pro-cycling PM would want to stoke increased tension on the roads by changing the Highway Code rules and then not publicising it very well. But it’s not as if Boris Johnson was ever that supportive of quality infrastructure. Like most Tories, he told people to cycle, without actually providing any infrastructure to do so. Other than the public hire bikes (operated by private company Serco of course). And he didn’t even implement that. It’s commonly known that Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor before him, green-lit the project.

    When you consider this, it does seem more plausible that the Tories could have been planning all along to turn cycling into a big culture war topic at the next election. Seeing what Sunak and his cabinet are willing to do in terms of demonising asylum seekers, underfunding the NHS, disrespecting and underpaying striking workers while refusing to come to the negotiating table with serious offers; going after “woke cyclists” seems like an obvious next step. The Highway Code change may have been a happy coincidence for them, but it’s irrelevant. What matters is it sets them up perfectly.

    So what can we do? I guess the first thing would be to just stop thinking about Dutch style infrastructure projects. As I’ve mentioned above, some people are a bit beyond help in this regard; but those of us in the real world need to focus fully on three aspects. Banning cars, bike parking, and LTNs, as previously mentioned. These are all things that can be and are being delivered to varying degrees by progressive councils (or even moderate councils) for very little cost. Banning cars is the most difficult to achieve in total, but we do see some towns and cities banning cars from historic centres, or introducing low emission zones, which I think are over complicated and not worth doing personally. I’ll talk more about banning cars later. As far as parking and LTNs, town councils can’t build bike paths, but they can get rid of car parks and replace them with bike parks. That’s certainly the biggest tool available in a situation like here in Worthing, where the town council is pro-cycling and the county council is about as oppositional to cycling as it’s possible to be. In other places where the councils in charge of roads are more amenable to our demands, LTNs can be introduced rapidly and make a huge difference in making areas feel safe and welcoming for people not in cars. They can start with temporary schemes to test how they would work before being made permanent, which is incredibly useful. If your local council has the power to remove street parking, then that can also be a quick way of making progress by replacing spaces with Bike Hangars for example. There’s also the potential for town councils to turn vacant town centre shops into indoor bike parking. So there definitely are ways you can push your council, even if they don’t have control over roads or bike lanes.

    We can achieve a lot through those three avenues, but to ban private cars entirely, you need central government to play ball; and that is where you encounter that familiar problem which tends to come up when you want to do anything good in society. It’s Capitalism, and the urgent need to dispense with it in favour of Degrowth Communism. This is partly why I haven’t been posting as much recently. Every time I come up with an idea for a problem that needs fixing, ultimately it always comes back to the economic system. The ultimate solution is always the same, whether it be cycling, public transport, inequality, healthcare etc.

    However, we do at least know what is officially no longer on the table, and that is a very helpful thing in my view. With this government (and probably the next one too), we’re only going to get some tarmac shared pavements and some paint. Once we all (or most of us) accept that, I think we can become a lot more effective in terms of potential protests and making a real impact. I’m thinking along the lines of the Just Stop Oil slow marching protests, but on bikes. I can definitely see that kind of thing being the result of the anger and desperation people who want a cycling future are feeling at the moment. It’ll be interesting to see if it happens before or after the government officially start their anti-cycling culture war push. But either way, I think it’s inevitable at this point.

    When you look at the EU pushing for e-bikes and cargo bikes, with the uptake being so strong in those countries; the damage Brexit has done to cycling imports and exports; and you see us going backwards from a position most people didn’t think we could go backwards from; you can clearly see how untenable this situation is. It can’t be allowed to go on any longer. It’s time for very targeted campaigns and mass protest.

  • The Earthshot Prize shoots for the Moon and misses

    I don’t want to be too critical of the Earthshot Prize; it did do some things right. But at the end of the day, the focus was almost entirely placed on innovation and green growth as our way out of this disastrous situation, rather than the real solution of slashing consumption and shrinking the economy. The parts about restoring nature were generally great; in particular the project to restore coral reefs by engineering corals that can cope with the increasing ocean temperatures. But then you had a project about reversing deforestation in Costa Rica, and it was predicated on the idea that it would attract tourists and lead to economic growth. So they fix one problem in order to exacerbate another one. There was another project in the Masai Mara doing a similar thing; protecting animals by getting wealthy tourists to fly around the world and spend their money on useless knick-knacks.

    I think the undeniably best thing about the series was the name. Earthshot is a great name for the scenario we’re in. It makes perfect sense to compare it to the Moonshot decade, because it’s exactly the scale of ambition we need. The parts of the documentary series talking about the problems are also good, but they got the solutions part almost totally wrong. Yes, we need some technological solutions, but fundamentally, it comes down almost entirely to living smaller and more local with less stuff and with better diets. Neither consumption nor population were mentioned a single time throughout the 5 part series or award ceremony. The fact that not a single youth activist was involved tells you all you need to know. The more I think about it, the more it feels like it was made for sceptical boomers. Perhaps the moon landing nod was even more intentional than I realised.

    Then there’s the prize money itself. Rewarding innovations with a million pounds each over 10 years seems like the wrong approach. Obviously, I believe governments should be in charge of the money and saving our world shouldn’t come down to the generosity of private finance. But, if you’re going to go down this path, at least do it better than this. Firstly, a million pounds is not that much money; and if you really believe in green growth as the solution to the climate crisis, and that these innovations can be key to our survival, then I would imagine you’d throw a lot more money at it than they are. I’m pretty sure there are enough rich people in the world who “care” about the planet to the point where you could raise billions for the prize pot relatively easily. Giving away only a million each goes against the urgent message about rapidly scaling up these businesses to save humanity.

    Ideas like a solar powered ironing trike are nice, but do we really need to iron our clothes at all? It is a nice story that the young girl in question was entrepreneurial but it’s too small to make a difference on a global scale at this late stage. Having said that, it should definitely be put into production. As long as people keep ironing clothes at least. The project that allows farmers to cleanly burn their crops in a machine rather than setting their fields on fire gave me a similar feeling. Why do we need to burn crops at all? I’m pretty sure it’s not necessary.

    There were so many moments I took issue with. They showed the ski slope power station in Copenhagen. But didn’t talk about getting rid of waste in the first place rather than burning it to make energy. They talked about global dimming in terms of reducing rainfall in some areas; but nothing about how dimming has limited warming and getting rid of pollution would actually increase warming. They talked about electric cars and an overall growth of vehicles. No mention of cycling whatsoever other than the ironing trike. There was a segment about tyre and brake pollution from cars and buses. Again, no mention of the key role cycling could play in reducing it. They show Singapore’s touristy green areas but ignore the huge roads and growth based economy. There was no mention of Bhutan’s model of economic stability and protection of nature over profit and GDP. At least they mentioned indoor and vertical farming. That’s something we definitely need to scale up urgently.

    The city of Milan winning the waste free world prize was by far the most bizarre award of the evening. All they’re doing is redistributing food to prevent waste. This is being done in various locations all over the world already. There’s nothing unique there that deserves money. Sanergy (creating fertiliser from human waste with insects) and Wota Box (fountain with filter which allows water to be reused many times) were clearly the better ideas. It’s hard to understand why they were snubbed.

    At the end, Prince William talked about how Earthshot is for young people. Well, it isn’t because young people want an end to capitalism and an end to economic growth. This does neither of those two things and you’ve just ended up patronising them yet again. Just like with climate anxiety, the establishment have proven that they don’t get it. They just can’t get past this failed model of treating the symptoms rather than the cause of our problems. Whether it be anxiety or our climate crisis, the root causes are capitalism and economic growth. Until they accept that, the young will see all of this as insult after insult.

    And the final insult is to give Earthshot 2022 to the kingdom of unrestrained corporate greed, the United States. The country that is going to drop all climate funding from Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan. The only thing remaining is to see how far over 1.5c we are in 12 months time (by the 1750 baseline). Hopefully it doesn’t go ahead because they realise by then that green growth doesn’t work. Probably wishful thinking.

    It will unfortunately happen again next year, but it really is debatable how long it will keep going. Prince William says it will award prizes every year for 10 years; but given how little time we have left to act drastically, what use will a prize be in 2030? Maybe they’ll need to take a page out of Bangladesh’s book and host the ceremony on a ship. Maybe one of the prize winners will be some kind of affordable houseboat. That would make sense by then. There will probably be huge demand.

    As a final aside; as we were watching the episode of Earthshot Prize about clean air, near the end, I heard the neighbour’s petrol lawnmower so I had to rush around closing all the windows. You couldn’t have timed it better. But with any luck, he watched the award show and decided to buy a battery mower to boost our economy.

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