Chris Till

Tag: Sustainability

  • Labour will be a disaster on the Climate

    Starmer’s right wing so called Labour Party will be an unmitigated disaster for the climate and nature. They are ripping up planning regulations so that their mates in the private sector can build unsuitably large, car dependent, poor quality in many cases, not remotely sustainable, homes that will not address the chronic need for genuinely affordable housing, nor the desperate need for council housing. While at the same time forcing developments through on communities that have voted against them multiple times in recent years. For example the Goring Gap proposed development in Worthing that we thought we’d seen the back of.

    The type of housing we need is mid-rise apartment buildings of tiny home size flats, built on brownfield or derelict sites, in harmony with nature as much as possible; and with sustainability at the heart of every element of the design and build process. And yeah, maybe you can go out into the green belt a little bit when you build in harmony with nature as I say. But that is not what Labour is going for. Quite the opposite.

    Perhaps a bit more wild than this, but you get the idea

    We need developments to be walkable and with great cycle infrastructure. To have minimal car infrastructure. The narrowest roads we can get away with to carry buses, delivery vehicles, emergency services, taxis when necessary, and so on. No private cars. We need to have all the amenities required nearby. This is obviously very possible when you build with this type of consistent medium-ish density. We need to have rail connections within a reasonable distance. Obviously, when you build in this way, it becomes far easier to achieve this. If you build, as Labour plans to, ugly, expensive suburban sprawl; then rail connectivity becomes incredibly difficult to achieve. Especially when they don’t want to spend any money as a government. Maybe they’ll rip up regulations on that too, and get a US firm to come and build us private rail lines with diesel power in the late 2020s.

    This topic is probably the most frustrating of all to communicate in modern Britain. Even more so than the climate crisis itself. Despite what Julia Hartley-Brewer would have you believe, most people get that the climate has warmed and we need to burn less fossil fuels in order to have a future. But when it comes to housing, and building in general, people don’t really put two and two together. I think people have a sense of the population being high. Some are just racist, but not all, and the non-racists have a point. It’s interesting, because the thing we should be worried about is not the thing they’re worried about. They’re talking about public services being stretched, which is really caused by austerity. Some extra immigrants aren’t making a noticeable difference there. The real problem, which they’re not talking about, is in terms of building and general overpopulation causing our already severely nature depleted country to be put under yet more strain, to the point that almost all our wildlife is threatened. We can’t live without wildlife.

    The truth that these people will never bring up, is that we’ve obviously built on all of the suitable sites without major issue. For example, I wrote about before a site in this town where they built a development on an actual swamp. It even includes its own pumping station to make sure it doesn’t flood. If places like that already exist, how many suitable sites do you think are left? That aren’t on a floodplain? That aren’t on a swamp? That aren’t on precious remaining green belt land? This is why we have to build density, and very carefully build on the fringes of the green belt. But making sure to tread as lightly as we possibly can. The opposite of what Labour is going to do. They don’t care at all about our remaining precious wildlife habitats. They want endless growth, and they’ll trample anything they have to in order to see that line on the graph go up. They think that’s the key to getting re-elected in 2029, and it’s all that matters as far as they’re concerned.

  • Computer Capitalism has nowhere to go

    We don’t need this

    In terms of technology for regular people, we’ve come to a point now where we don’t need more. We don’t need more video resolution. 4K is plenty, and I would say 1080P is still more than good enough. Most of what I watch on Virgin Media TV is still in 720P, even now. No one really complains. For photo editing you don’t need anything crazy. The reasons to upgrade a phone or computer are diminishing rapidly, and more and more people are realising it. I used to be so into new tech, more power and all of that stuff. Gradually it started waning maybe 5 or so years ago. I stopped watching all the Apple conferences; stopped caring about gimmicky new features, unless they clearly weren’t solutions looking for problems. But most of them are.

    Even if you look at professional applications, I struggle to think of anything that needs more power. Perhaps AI medical technology would. General AI uses a lot of power, and to me, that’s a big reason to not go down that route. I think AI for specific tasks that can really enhance our lives can be great. General AI is not really necessary, and is most likely going to end in tears, as we’ve all been told recently by the media, and obviously long before that in science fiction.

    In terms of regular people, maybe a new phone camera would be nice, especially if they can increase the optical zoom functionality. But do you really need that on a phone? People would probably benefit from having a separate camera that can provide better zoom for the odd occasions that you’d use that; while sharing out the battery drain between two devices.

    I didn’t watch the recent Apple event, but I heard about the computer models they announced on the PetaPixel podcast, which is mainly about photography. They were saying that very few people need these powerful machines now, and that got me thinking.

    We’re going to be simplifying our lives as climate change gets worse and worse. Even if capitalism continues for the next 5 to 10 years (which I really doubt at this point), what would these tech companies sell us? Phones and computers that are excessively capable for what the vast majority of people need to do? Perhaps they’ll focus even more heavily on services (like Apple TV+) once they realise that people don’t need more powerful / gimmicky devices. But, again, I don’t see them being able to push this indefinitely before people get sick of being so busy all the time. Being so committed to watching every new show. They’re going to rebel against that I think.

    It feels like capitalism has reached its end point. We don’t need more stuff. We don’t need more power. We don’t need more pixels or better gaming graphics. We just need to enjoy what we have and make the most from it. Does anyone really think that the PS5 is not powerful enough? That we need even bigger TVs and games that are 100% indistinguishable from real life? I don’t think I want that. The closer we get to photorealism, the more I realise I don’t actually want that. I want games to look still look like games.

    This obviously applies to every other aspect of our capitalist society as well. But it really interests me specifically in terms of tech; because for so long, we’ve been obsessed with the idea of ceaseless progress. And that we would always need more. The thing is, all of a sudden, we don’t.

    You might be thinking that I’ve forgotten about AR and VR, and that it will be the thing from now on that keeps tech capitalism charging forward and making us buy iterative headsets. I don’t think so. Firstly, people are increasingly being lured back to nature. We’re getting tired of looking at screens all the time. Especially when they’re right in front of our eyes. My eyes can just about adapt to my new camera with an electronic viewfinder. That’s about as close to VR as I want to get. Before you accuse me of being a hypocrite, my old camera is a 14 year old model, that still works, mind you. But I thought it was time to get something better than I can grow into over the next decade plus (assuming our existing societies last that long). I never said I don’t buy anything. I just keep it to a minimum.

    The basic fact is that we have enough, we don’t need more, and we don’t want to end up like the obese, permanently sedentary characters in Wall-E. That was the future we seemed to be hurtling towards, before we thankfully began gradually veering away.

  • The Endless Climate Fight of Consumption vs Production

    Boycotts + campaigning to take down capitalism

    We’re stuck in this endless loop of arguing about how we get started dealing with climate change in a serious way. Until we reach a consensus about what will actually work, we won’t get anywhere. We will just keep going round in circles while we put giant amounts of emissions into the atmosphere every single day. I think you can fit the argument into these three main categories.

    Right wing politicians and most of the media focus on individual carbon footprints, and shame environmentalists who aren’t perfect in every way.

    Many climate activists say individual action doesn’t work and that we need to change the system first.

    People like me say it’s boycotts that will bring down the system from the bottom up.

    If you follow different environmental and mainstream media channels, as I do (as little MSM as I can get away with these days); then you’ve no doubt noticed that no one can ever agree and we just go round and round forever. Climate discourse hasn’t moved forward in years. You could play back something now from Good Morning Britain or BBC News that aired before Greta started school striking, and it would be practically indistinguishable from what you see today.

    It’s time to end this nonsense once and for all.

    How I see it, bringing down capitalism from the bottom up is the only option. The neoliberal political systems in pretty much every country are designed to prevent an uprising occurring at the ballot box. And even if it was possible; even if there were candidates allowed to stand who believed what many of us do, it’s definitely not possible in the next couple of years, which is all the time we have, if even that.

    Those who say that many of the choices we make to pollute are made for us are correct. Many of us are effectively forced to do things like drive a car, fly, drink bottled water and consume things that are made of plastic much more than we’d like. This is because of political choices made by the right wing that mean infrastructure is not fit for purpose. I’m not arguing those things. But what I am saying is that there are plenty of areas where we do have real, affordable choices that put pressure on polluters financially. That’s how you bring down capitalism.

    If you only consider things that are the same price, or less than what we’re doing now, you rule out plastic free organic food and things like that for a lot of people. But so many people could choose to not own a car if they live in an urban area, or stop buying useless plastic junk. I know there are lots of things I used to buy that cluttered up the house that I now avoid. There are ways most of us can cut down on our consumption of things we don’t need, cut our spending and put pressure on the capitalist system. If we live in smaller homes, with lower heating and cooling requirements for example. Even people who are forced to drive because they live in the suburbs and have poor, expensive public transport and no bike infrastructure can find ways to put pressure on the capitalist economy. Spend money only on the necessities, and the things that mean the absolute most to you.

    And I’m not saying that boycotts and consumption reductions should come at the expense of campaigns. They go hand in hand. You may be able to boycott or reduce your consumption of certain products, but maybe you still have to buy the same plastic packaged fruit. That doesn’t mean you can’t join a campaign calling on the supermarket to get rid of the plastic.

    We have to do what we can to pressure the polluting status quo with all the tools we have available, and we have to stop going round in circles being dictated to by the right wing media and its obsession with climate hypocrisy. It’s ok to be annoyed about wealthy climate activists and celebrities flying around in their private jets and living in mansions. But we have to stop short of falling into the trap of believing that their overall message should be voided by their individual actions.

    We need to all reduce our consumption in whatever way we can. We all have something we can do less of, and those of us in more privileged positions have certainly accumulated more crap. We also have the moral duty to offset what those less fortunate can’t do. And then we need to come together to campaign and pressure.

    You can’t use imperfection as an excuse to do nothing, and you won’t have success campaigning profit driven industries when you keep buying as much of their product as you always have.

  • Be wary of car brands infiltrating the bike industry

    So far, just an overpriced standard EMTB. But be wary of speed restrictions.

    Car companies. They’re the bad guys who eliminated urban cycling in the UK and elsewhere. They brought us the joy that is one giant SUV after another on our narrow roads; originally built for bicycles, narrow vans and the odd truck. Now they want into the e-bike industry as well. Haven’t they done enough damage?

    To be fair to them, there are a couple of potential benefits they can bring to the cycling industry. But before I get to that, I want to run through the obvious downsides.

    High tech solutions to questions no-one asked

    They’ll try to advocate for cars and bikes coexisting without infrastructure, and push overly complicated technology for bikes and cars to talk to each other. Just as momentum starts to build for bans on private cars in urban areas, they’d love to set us back and seduce neoliberal lawmakers (who eat this kind of stuff up) with plans to make cars and bikes work together by leveraging new technology. Why do the obvious thing of getting rid of the cars and having all that glorious space and clean air, when we can have cars and bikes that talk to each other and traffic lights to avoid collisions? It’s not as if we could use our eyes and ears to see bikes and pedestrians coming or anything.

    Speed

    They’ll try to increase speeds in e-bike regulations from 25kph to make them more like small motorcycles. This is a big one. Car companies are supposedly about speed and efficiency, so of course they won’t be able to resist lobbying their mates in power for higher e-bike speeds; and they may well think why not get rid of the pedals too while we’re at it? Never mind that you get stuck in traffic and passed by people on bikes gliding along to their destinations before you.

    Greenwashing

    They’ll try to use cycling to greenwash their businesses so they can phase out fossil cars or privately owned EVs later. Clearly, the car industry loves a bit of greenwashing. Manufacturers often promote hybrids while giving the impression that they’re better than EVs because you don’t have to plug them in. Just ignore the fact that you still have to fill them with explosive fossil juice. Or they make a car that powers the wheels like an EV, except the only way to charge it is with a tank of petrol. Seriously. Nissan calls that e-Power.

    Presumably the next logical step would be to distract people with some e-bikes to make you look really green. But of course if you want to travel further than e-bike range, you’ll still want that aforementioned giant fossil powered SUV. Ok, maybe I’ll be charitable and say it’s a hybrid by 2025 when the world’s melting.

    Survival

    As a desperation move, I could imagine a car company or two buying a bike company and rebranding it in a last ditch effort to turn around their flagging fortunes when private car sales drop off a cliff. Or, alternatively, I could see it in the case of a manufacturer that gets caught particularly flat-footed during the EV transition. A rapid pivot to Micromobility might be the only play left to save the company.

    The Positive(s)?

    I did promise some positives, so here they are. Or here’s one anyway. All I could come up with. The car industry will bring a new perspective and prioritise vehicle grade components that last for urban journeys. Especially for cargo bikes, trikes and quads. But, the thing is that you can get a new perspective without resorting to embracing the car industry. Almost anyone from any industry can come in with a fresh vision of what bikes should be (anything without a derailleur would be a start). It’s not worth the risk of the automotive sector wrecking the bike industry. And I’m not saying that as someone who thinks much of the bike business. I’m very much of the opinion that it requires a massive shake up.

    So… I guess that makes zero positives actually…

    Before I write them off entirely, I should mention that this is assuming the current neoliberal system stays as it is. The system which of course will kill us all in due course if it does. However, if / when we do nationalise the car industry under a new economic system, it becomes a whole new ball game. You would have the engineering expertise of the auto industry but without the profit motive. In that case, you could repurpose their vast factories to make cargo bikes at record pace, and you wouldn’t have to worry about them lobbying for turning e-bikes into small motorcycles, since there would be no one left to lobby. The government (and the people) would be running the show.

    So technically there was one positive in the end; but it probably won’t be a possibility any time soon when you look at the state of our politics. For example, Penny Mordaunt says she will cut fuel tax in half if she becomes PM (sigh).

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