Scorched earth for water plant we might not need

An update on Sydney’s grand desalination plans (I told you to remember the name Blue Water Consortium). This is reporting of a fairly low calibre, however:

This is the first clear glimpse of the massive scale of the construction work for the state’s $1.76 billion water desalination plant at Kurnell.

Earth works to prepare the controversial site, south of Botany Bay, have been under way for several months.

Scientists and environmental groups warn that creatures in the bay will be threatened if a proposed undersea pipeline gets final approval.

Construction and operation of the plant would threaten smaller creatures such as sponges, giant cuttlefish and weedy seadragons. The noise might force migrating whales further out to sea.

The article is a pretty-well-listed…list of affected wildlife. It’s also poorly-sourced or balanced, but then I’m sympathetically feral, myself, so I don’t mind.

A big problem that I have is that title; specifically the “…we might not need” part, which gets almost that little attention in the article itself:

Protest organisers say a desalination plant is not required, particularly now dam water levels have risen to close to 60 per cent capacity. They say work should stop.

Oh. Okay. In fact, the rain didn’t exacty top us up. The most recent count has dams at just shy of 60% capacity.

Not bad – but hardly cause to go out and wash our cars, right before Summer hits. For the moment, average daily supply is just on average daily demand (good enough):

but that average is going to go through the roof, when Spring hits (bad). That wonderfull 11ml of rain we’re all in love with hardly bumped the water levels, anyway (allowing also for the time some of it may take to reach the dam, if indeed it fell in a catchment area).

And to think, I did all that with barely a few minutes and internet access (porn wasn’t even my opportunity cost, or anything. I was just sitting here!). Then there is the ongoing forecasting, most recently of the esteemed British Meteorological Office, predicting pretty much streaming hot and dry for places like Australia. Couple that with, say, the rate of growth of Sydney’s population.

My point, delivered with Trumanesque subtlety, is that no argument that a piece of rain, gratefully received, means that we can stop planning the water and energy infrastructure for a city of 4.2m (excluding visitors) should be taken the least bit seriously.

This is not to say I agree with salination, let me clear (since I’ve had this happen once, today, already). As I’ve mentioned previously: moving into desalination before trying any of the other, better, alternatives is some bastard child of lazy and lunatic. The fact that the construction only now appears harmful to wildlife should come as no surprise – nor should the fact that our newspapers will report upon it without the slightest tone of apology for not working this out before the bloody ground-breaking ceremony. I’m sure we can look forward to it all running over-time and over-budget, and delivering nothing like what was promised. Serves us right for sitting around while it happened.

I love Warren Ellis

As I make corrections, clean my apartment and generally ’spend’ my weekend re-accustoming myself to a town away from my wife.

Warren Ellis’ writing is of this calibre: there is something fundamental missing from your use of the English language if you have not read something like Transmetropolitan or Desolation Jones. Transmetropolitan alone ought to blow your brains out.

Anyway. Of all the cool things imagined in Transmetropolitan, I decided to share one of the two best:

City cleaners turning garbage into oxygen with maker guns.

Click on the image for a larger version.

He also has a website, currently showing some very impressive shuttle-launch photographs.

A trend so ill it should be too expensive

From the Underwire blog, also:

A Trend So Ill It Should Be Illegal. Oh Wait – It Is.

It’s a trying time for baggy pants: over the past two weeks, Atlanta, Dallas, Shreveport, and other pro-mom-jeans cities pushed for laws banning boxer-baring via pants-sagging. Officials offered numerous reasons for legislating tighter belts, all of them priceless in their banality.

Shreveport Councilwoman Joyce Bowman said that she was “…tired (of) looking at behinds,” while Atlanta police officer R.E. Williams claimed that, “the lower the pants are, the lower the self-esteem.” Fellow Atlantan and sponsor of that city’s anti-sagging ordinance, Councilman C.T. Martin, said the style was an “epidemic.” Martin also made clear that he doesn’t “want young people thinking that half-dressing is the way to go.”

…

Charges of racial profiling and discrimination surfaced in the zoot suit debates, as they have recently in regards to pants-sagging. CNN notes: “A similar proposal in Stratford, Connecticut, was soundly rejected this week after critics argued it would be unconstitutional and unfairly target minorities.” Some of the proponents acknowledge human rights dilemmas themselves. As Atlanta Councilman C.T. Martin admitted, “We know there are First Amendment issues…”

There is also an interesting point to the hypocrisy (oh, Wired? It’s not bloody irony: it’s hypocrisy. Get a dictionary) of the debate standing next to this country’s mad love affair with cheer-leaders.

Me? I’m an economist: I will take market solutions over command and control, whenever possible. I say the city council should (i) institute a fine, or (ii) issuing permits attached to the wearing of trousers so low that one simply looks like a fucking idiot to everyone around them (not to mention causing us properly-pant-ed people to wonder how on earth one expects us to think they’re tough when they’re forced to waddle along, holding their pants up with one hand. Even if they were carrying a gun in the other hand, we couldn’t seriously find such people threatening).

So that’s my solution: the solution of basic economic principles. Individuals want both to look ridiculous and flout authority (especially hypocritical authority). Conflating the two never shall solve this problem. Use prices to separate the issues. Ensure that anybody dressing like this does so only because they really want to (i.e. willing to pay $200 for the permit to do so).

Bear in mind, though, those racial profiling/human rights dilemmas won’t go away, and you’ll probably have to start arresting people for wearing their pants low without a permit (which is my ultimate goal, I confess).

Your other option, of course, is to restructure American culture such that people see no glory in looking like a prison inmate – how about us all trying to look like we’re educated, and in fact living in the richest country on Earth? Just a thought.

Burning Man

Mostly I just wanted an excuse to share with you this wonderful installation from this year’s Burning Man:

Provided by the Underwire blog at Wired, the former covering the event.

“When people stand under it and see a big truck hovering over you, it should give a sense of danger and fear and that something is wrong,” Ross says. The piece also provides a real sense of constriction from the oil economy as attendees climb up the inside the tankers, crawling through what looks and feels like a truck’s filthy undercarriage. They gingerly feel their way up and down through random cross pipes and structural corners, trying not to step on the hands of people below. The occasional plastic plant wrapped among the metal summons the trapped aura of nature into the cramped trucks.

It isn’t that I don’t trust the architects – but you’ve Buckley’s of getting me climbing in that thing. The installation “Crude Awakening” is very good, also.

The interesting part (besides the big trucks) is this year’s controversy (premature Man-burning, and, yes: that’s a petrol tanker truck underneath – fucking idiot), as well as the green theme (also lightly mocked in that Valeywag link as “corporate sponsor appeasement).

The theme, while good enough in a world under the rule of Commodification Rides With Identification (not, as many believe, Cash Rules Everything Around Me. If you’re living by that one, you’ve lost, you sucker), and therefore where ethical consumption is as popular as it is meaninglessly ill-defined, deserves some context. Such as what happens at night-time:

And of course our friends with the truck:

In the Burning Man spirit of art on the fly, how the piece will even leave the playa, much less where it might live afterward, is still up in the air, Ross says.

I’m just saying: merely being able to clean up a desert after you’ve been there hardly means you’re the environment’s BFF. This event uses, as said, petrol trucks, cranes, etc. It’s generating waste which will be disposed of the same as that of everybody else. Lights burn through the night (and those sure looked like tungsten, rather than ‘efficient’ or LED). I’m not criticising the value of what’s there, or suggesting people are wasting resources on their art (last head count was 44,000, after all). I think Burning Man is very cool. I just think calling the theme “Green” gives the wrong impression that somehow the event itself is “Green”.