Environment

Amsterdam bans dirty cars

Amsterdam, Environment
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You may not have noticed if you visited our fair city from London or New York, but Amsterdam is incredibly dirty and polluted. Just run your finger round the edge of any building in the centre of town (you know, like your mother proably used to do with the top of the cupboard) and it comes away covered in a mixture of dirt, dust and pollution. The main cause of this? Traffic. Amsterdam is a small, compact city with a lot of offices and a lot of people commuting into the city by car. For several years now air quality in the city has worsened, to the effect that living here can actually reduce your life expectancy.

No wonder than that the city council has been looking for ways to improve air quality, especially since several prestigious building projects had to be suspended last year because of pollution concerns. Yesterday the council presented the measures it wants to take and it seems they’re going for the carrot and stick method, by rewarding owners of more environmentally friendly cars and punishing polluters. From the end of next year the most polluting classes of car will be banned from Amsterdam. Any cars older than 1992 will be banned, while diesel cars without smog filters will also be banned. However, if your car is clean, your arking license will be cheaper. At the same time the council is allocating more money for bicycle lanes and to promote biking in general.

Great news, though personally I wouldn’t mind seeing the car disappear completely, at least from the centre of town. The old Medieval heart of the city just isn’t built for cars.

Strawman environmentalists

Activism, Climate change
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Unlike Charlie Stross I was less than impressed with this article on The Top Ten Things Environmentalists Need to Learn. Perhaps that is because it reminded me too much of the sort of thing Jerry Pournelle used to write in his science columns for semi-obscure science fiction magazines back in the late seventies. It pays some lip service to the idea that “maintaining the environment is a critical issue” but then argues in bad faith, more interested in attacking environmentalists than in contributing to solutions. Take for example, the first thing “environmentalists need to learn”:

10. Go after pollution sources with the highest benefit/cost ratio, not those which are most noticeable – If you are attempting to make a difference in the world, you should start with the largest problems with the simplest solutions and the least cost in remedying.

For example, underground coal fires produce as much CO2 as all the light cars and trucks in North America and most of those in Europe. The cost of developing a method of fighting such fires and implementing it is likely very low compared to the benefit especially in the context of the amount of effort which has gone into reducing the pollution from cars and trucks.

Now that coal fire example makes me suspicious, as it’s just the kind of pat factiod that appeals to the inner contrarian in all of us. What’s stated here is that coal fires are as big a problem as CO2 emitted by cars, what’s implied is that those silly enivronmentalists are not doing anything about the former but are only concerned with the latter, hence they are hypocrites and can be ignored. Unspoken is the assumption that as long as these coal fires are going on, limiting CO2 emission from traffic is pointless.

But is it actually true that underground coal fires contribute as much CO2 as “all the light cars and trucks in North America and most of those in Europe”? No figures or references are given, which doesn’t strengthen the author’s case. The Encyclopedia of Earth article on
carbon dioxide says 24% of manmade CO2 emissions is attributable to transport worldwide, while its coal fires article says that “according to most recent estimations coal fires in China contribute about 0.1% to 0.2% of the annual human induced CO2 emissions globally”. There seems to be some sort of mismatch then, though of course the figure of 0.2% is only for China (the world’s largest coal user) while the 24% of transport worldwide needs to be broken down to “all the light cars and trucks in North America and most of those in Europe” to be able to truly compared the two figures. Nevertheless, a case can be made for the author having overstated the contribution of coal fires to manmade CO2 emissions…

But even if the figure was comparable, does this mean tackling underground coal fires is more cost effective than limiting the emissions put out by cars? Not necessarily. Underground coal fires are partially a natural phenomenon, with some having been burning for thousands of years,
while the most famous manmade fire, in Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been burning for some 45 years. By any measures they’re hard and costly to put out, requiring huge investments; according to an article in The Smithsonian putting out the fire in Centralia would’ve cost as much as 660 million dollars.

Producing more fuel-efficient cars suddenly looks a lot more affordable compared to those numbers, especially since a lot can be done without requiring new, exotic technology. Just switching from using inefficient types of car (the infamous Chelsea tractor, or SUV) to existing, more energy efficient cars would help. More and better public transport as an alternative to car use is another obvious measure to limit CO2 emissions. And of course, it’s perfectly possible to both invest in fighting underground coal fires, as is actually already happening (see the Smithonian article) and more fuel efficient cars.

So yeah, if the first bullet point in this essay is already this dishonest, I’m skeptical about the rest of the article, especially in the context of the rest of the blog, which seems largely dedicated to showing how silly and stupid environmentalists are.

Balanced News

Auntie Beeb, Climate change, Manufacturing Consent
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There’s a good report up on Medialens of how something that looks at first sight to be a balanced newsreport, on further investigation,isn’t. No prizes if you guessed this might have something to do with climate change, and in particular, that High Court judge and his supposed finding of “nine errors” in Al gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The BBC did their usual piece on this, by interviewing the involved parties, but they let themselves been snookered as they never looked into how the complainant, Stuart Dimmock, a lorry driver and school governor could afford to bring his complaint all the way to the High Court. If they had, they would’ve found that he was sponsored by the climate change skeptic New Party, itself sponsored by Scottish millionaire Robert Durward. By not reporting this in their interviews with Dimmock, the BBC therefore provided a clearly false picture of this court case while still adhering to the doctrine of “balance”.

This is only one example of a widespread practise, not just at the BBC but in all news media, where instead of journalists trying to determine the truth behind the surface story, only the claims and counterclaims of the involved parties are reported. This is not necessarily a bad thing; in politics especially it is often hard to objectively determine the truth of a story, or the story is about the conflicting interpretations of government and opposition for a given incident. It’s then that a summation of claim and counterclaim is justified, but not when relevant facts are left out of the story.

But even when this sort of reporting is justified, a story can be balanced and still be unfair. An example of this was on display in a news item I heard last night on the Radio 4 six oçlock news bulletin. The story was about the Scottish government’s opposition against a replacement for the UK’s current Trident based nuclear deterrent. since the Trident submarines are based in Faslane in Scotland, making the country therefore a nuclear target, it’s clearly a legitimate concern of the Scottish governement, even though technically it falls outside their jurisdiction.

On the BBC news however this was framed with a soundbyte from Wendy Alexander, the leader of the Labour opposition in the Scottish Parliament, who said she didn’t want English politicians speaking for Scotland on matters like healthcare and therefore Scottish politicians should not speak out about English or British matters either. This was immediately followed by a question from the BBC reporter to the Scottish National Pary’s spokesperson on whether the SNP did not go too far in its opposition to Trident replacement. With that, even though both sides, Labour and SNP, got their say, the bias of the story was clearly in favour of Labour; but you wouldn’t know that it was biased unless you paid close attention.

It’s a borderline dishonest way of reporting on stories, and it’s far more common than you think. Much of the reputation of a Jeremy Paxman or a John Humpries for being “tough”, it seems to me, is due to mock aggresive oneway questioning like this, where only the weaker party is attacked like this. The BBC may pride itself on being independent, but in important matters it will almost always take the side of the vested interests, the establishment.