a sibilant intake of breath

Scarborough Bluffs

Milan — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

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Sasha

Milan — Sun, 20 May 2012 10:00:48 +0000

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Flock of seagulls

Milan — Sat, 19 May 2012 11:00:05 +0000

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Alternative to a carbon tax: carbon deposit

Milan — Sat, 19 May 2012 03:59:31 +0000

It just occurred to me that there might be a way to both (a) spur the development of effective carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology and (b) circumvent the apparent political impossibility of creating a carbon price. It involves treating tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution like soda cans.

Instead of charging people a fee based on their tonnes of emissions, as an incentive to use less, you could require everyone to pay a disposal fee for the carbon up front when they buy oil, gas, or coal. It’s possible to separate carbon dioxide (CO2) from air and to bury it underground. The cost of doing so could be built into the disposal fee. For instance, if it cost $600 to bury a tonne of carbon, there could be a $600 deposit required on that quantity of fossil fuel. If you burn it, capture the carbon, and sequester it then the deposit gets returned to you. If you just vent the CO2 into the air, then you lose the deposit. The effect is similar to a carbon tax, with an exemption for firms that demonstrably nullify their emissions. (Of course all the issues with safety and verification and CCS remain.)

A $600 carbon price would have a large and immediate effect on an economy like Canada’s, so this probably isn’t politically possible either. (Of course, it would be possible to start lower and scale up, giving people more time to adjust.) There may well be all sorts of other problems with it also, but I thought it was an idea worth contemplating.

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We usually count climate pollution badly

Milan — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:00:48 +0000

As far as the atmosphere is concerned, it doesn’t matter if an extra molecule of carbon dioxide (CO2) comes from a recently-felled tree, from a molecule of methane in burned natural gas, from oil burned in an airplane, or from a coal-fired power plant. Regardless of the source, it adds to the already-dangerously-large stock of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This is one reason why commenters miss the point when they say things like: “the oilsands were responsible for seven per cent of Canada’s annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, while the entire oil and gas sector produced 22 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gases in the same year”. While these figures may be accurate, they convey the false notion that these are the only sources of CO2 we need to worry about and that reducing these numbers is adequate for solving the climate problem.

What matter is how much fossil fuel we burn in total across history

These figures only take into consideration the emissions that arise from the process of producing oil and gas. For instance, there is the natural gas that gets burned to make bitumen liquid enough to be processed and transported. The figured do not include the emissions that result when these fuels are burned. This is where most of the pollution actually happens and it is inevitable. Even if carbon capture and storage (CCS) was completely free and available today, it wouldn’t be possible to capture the pollution from vehicles, and that is where most of the oil from the oil sands ends up.

The key factor that will determine how much climate change the planet experiences is how much CO2 gets added to the atmosphere. Burning coal, oil, and gas inescapably contributes to that stock, which is already dangerously large. As such, Canada cannot ignore exports when it considers how to bring its economic activity in line with what the planet can withstand. The entire coal, gas, and oil industries need to be phased out in a rapid way. At the same time, we need to develop whichever carbon-neutral energy sources will sustain us in the future: some mixture of renewable forms of energy like wind and solar, biomass, and nuclear power.

Warming begets further warming

It is important to remember that the indifference of the climate to the source of CO2 molecules extends beyond direct human activities. If we warm the planet so much that the Amazon dries out and becomes grassland, the huge volume of CO2 currently stored in the rainforest will be added to the atmosphere. Similarly, if we warm the permafrost to the point where it melts and releases its gargantuan content of methane (a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, though shorter-lived), we will have another large dollop of warming to deal with, and an increased chance of catastrophic outcomes like the disintegration of the ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica.

Based on the evidence we have from millions of years of climate data, we know that the climate can be prone to violent swings when provoked. Push it a little bit and perhaps it will naturally return to about where it was before (‘pushing’ here means releasing greenhouse gas pollution). Push it enough, however, and it can tip over into a very different state, like a Coke machine tilted to the point where it falls over. All of human civilization has taken place during times of relative climatic stability. If we radically destabilize the climate, the consequences for human beings everywhere will be dire.

Our choice

To a very large degree, Canadians are missing the point about climate change. It isn’t a matter of deciding whether growth in the oil sands is pushing up the Canadian dollar in a way that hurts manufacturers. It also isn’t a matter of deciding what sort of small carbon tax would make Canada’s emissions acceptable. If we are to preserve a habitable planet for the people who will follow us, all signs indicate that we must get serious about the process of phasing out fossil fuels. Either humanity has a future or the global fossil fuel industry does – not both. That is very unwelcome news in a country that stands to make billions of dollars from fossil fuel exports, but it is the situation in which we now find ourselves.

We can choose to ignore the fact that what we are doing threatens the future habitability of the planet. We can also choose to bet that some future technology will allow us to solve or counteract the climate problem. If we make such choices, we should be entirely clear about what we are doing. If we accept the reality of climate change but choose to plow on heedlessly anyway, we should accept that we are entering into a suicide pact with countries like China and the United States that are doing the same thing. Neither has shown itself to be at all capable of moderating its demand for fossil fuels, and Canada is providing an increasing share of the oil, gas, and coal that fuels their frightening emissions.

If we choose to bet on technological salvation, we should similarly recognize that we are placing bets with lives that are not our own. We are saying that whether people in future generations inherit a planet that permits human prosperity or a planet in which civilization struggles to endure depends on whether some magic new technology appears in time to correct our mistakes – mistakes we now fully understand, but which we have so far refused to stop making.

Every barrel of oil we dig up and burn is another dangerous dart we are hurling at random at the people of the future – people who are already going to suffer substantially from the damage we have already done. We don’t need to choose that kind of irresponsible and selfish behaviour. We can turn our energy instead to building a zero-carbon energy system and an efficient society. Such a society will have a shot at long-term prosperity, which is something that cannot be said for societies that depend on fossil fuels that are ever-more scarce and which are destroying the planet.

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Pullet (Gallus gallus domesticus)

Milan — Fri, 18 May 2012 10:00:39 +0000

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Final Boston photos

Milan — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:59:26 +0000

After much procrastination and delay, I have uploaded the last of the photos from my trip to Boston with Sasha.

These are pretty much all straight from the camera, whether the camera in question is a dSLR, a point and shoot, or my iPhone. I definitely get more photography done when I keep post-processing to a minimum. Unaltered photos are probably more informative anyhow, though perhaps less beautiful or technically perfect.

Boston was a thoroughly welcoming city and a place which I really enjoyed my time in.

It would be nice to get the chance to live there at some point.

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Politics by spin in Canada

Milan — Thu, 17 May 2012 11:00:36 +0000

Olivier De Schutter, the right to food envoy of the United Nations, recently released a report highlighting how many Canadians suffer from food insecurity. In response, Canada’s health minister Leona Aglukkaq described him as “ill-informed” and “patronizing”.

To me, this response seems like part of a worrisome trend in Canada. Instead of thinking about real problems, our government obsesses over negative media coverage related to those problems. It’s not malnutrition or worsening climate change or tortured detainees that are the problem, but rather critical media coverage on these sorts of issues. Rather than trying to fix problems, effort seems to be disproportionately dedicated to silencing critics and producing counter-spin.

It doesn’t help that opposition parties generally use every bit of negative media coverage as a means of hammering ineffectually at the government. What they need to realize is that our current government is largely an accident arising from the nature of our electoral system. With one party on the right and four on the left (counting the solitary Green), elections tend to favour the more unified ideology.

Just as the government should re-dedicate itself to governing for the benefit of Canadians, the opposition should dedicate itself forming an electable party through one or more mergers.

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Covering Cohen

Milan — Thu, 17 May 2012 10:00:59 +0000

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Concept for a secret communication system

Milan — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:00:10 +0000

What you need

In order to use this system you will need two computers (which could include phones or other devices) with the same chess-playing software installed on them. The software must always suggest at least two moves for any given board position, and it must always produce the same suggestions based on a particular board arrangement.

For instance, in a game that opens with white moving the king’s pawn two spaces forward (e4 in algebraic notation), the software must always recommend the same set of countermoves. It might recommend the Sicilian Defence (c5) as the highest ranking move, followed by an open game as the top alternative (e5). By choosing c5, the correspondent would indicate a ’0′ and by choosing e5 they would indicate a ’1′. It is essential that both players have software that suggests the same moves based on a given board position. It is this determined character that allows the communication system to work.

Sending a message

In order to send a message, it must first be converted into binary code. A simple way of doing this is to start with ASCII text and use an ASCII to binary converter. For example, we might wish to send the message “Your telephone has been tapped”. Converted into binary, this encodes as:

“010110010110111101110101011100100010000001110100011001010110110001100101011100000110100001101111011011100110010100100000011010000110000101110011001000000110001001100101011001010110111000100000011101000110000101110000011100000110010101100100″.

In order to send the message, it is simply necessary to look at the two top moves suggested by the chess-playing software. In the event that you want to transmit a ’0′ then you should select the topmost move. In the event that you wish to transmit a ’1′ use the second topmost move. Because the person who you are talking to will also be running the software, it will be immediately obvious to them which digit you intend to transmit. Because both of the top moves are likely to be reasonable chess moves, the game will look fairly ordinary to anyone intercepting the communication.

One option is to have each correspondent make moves in alternating fashion. In that way, each can send a message to the other simultaneously. Alternatively, one person can send a message while the other simply provides countermoves to maintain the impression of a game being played. Alternatively, a single player can transmit moves for both white and black. They could use each to encode a different message, or they could use both together for a single stream.

In order to send a long message, it would take quite a few chess games. There would also need to be a system in place for when there is only one legal move possible, or none at all. I suggest that whenever a situation arises where fewer than two legal moves exist, the ongoing game be abandoned by the resignation of one player and a new one be started.

Automation

The whole thing could be set up to run automatically – for instance, on cellular phones. You could put the text to be transmitted into an app and it could automatically query a database of chess moves. It could then transmit the appropriate move to a chess server which the other correspondent would be connected to. The rate of transmission could be automatically limited in order to maintain the illusion of a game of chess being played, or it could be allowed to run at a high speed in order to send messages quickly. In either case, the data being transmitted would consist of valid chess moves and the game being played would look fairly normal.

Super-encipherment

Naturally, it would also be possible to use an encryption algorithm to turn a plaintext message into a binary string. This could either be a symmetric key cipher with a key that the correspondents have agreed to beforehand, a public key system based on public and secret keys, or an online key exchange system like Diffie–Hellman. This would provide some protection against an attacker who realizes the chess games are being used to transmit a message.

Alternative mechanism

As an alternative to chess-playing software, each player could also look at one of the chess game analyzing websites that ranks moves by popularity. The most popular move could code for a ’0′ while the second most popular move could code for a ’1′. Over time, the popularity of moves in the database may change. This shouldn’t be a problem for communication happening in real time, and could be useful insofar as it would make it difficult for anyone trying to decipher the message later to do so.

Obviously, this system could be used for games other than chess. All that is necessary is that both players have access to the same ranking of moves, so that each move can be translated reliably into the appropriate binary digit and from there into plain text. In games where a fairly large number of moves are always possible, the system could be extended beyond binary and longer messages could be concealed in fewer games. For instance, if there were always ten possible ranked moves, each option could be used to convey a decimal digit between ’0′ and ’9′.

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Manic

Milan — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:00:54 +0000

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Sasha and Milan

Milan — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:00:33 +0000

Photo by Ihor Ilnyckyj

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