Runaway Future

I’ll put this here, because no one will see it.

The experiences of the past month or so have humbled me greatly.

Tonight on the Colbert Report, the guest was Bill McKibben. He’s a noted environmentalist who has made waves with his organization 350.org, a grass-roots anti-climate change initiative. One of his major recent projects has been working to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline project that would connect the oil sands developments in Alberta with the refineries and distribution networks of the United States, namely along the Gulf Coast region.

In discussing this project with Colbert, McKibben repeats the oft-mentioned fact that due to the oil sands, Canada has, in its hands, the second largest oil deposit in the world after Saudi Arabia (a bit of a disputed fact considering the struggles to be able to recover it, the number could be as much as eight times higher, but that’s neither here nor there).

Anyway, I knew all this before and I wasn’t really sure what to think about it (besides knowing that a lot of people from this region (including many that I know) have travelled to Alberta to work in Fort Mac or elsewhere on these projects). Tonight, it kind of hit me. McKibben is advocating that the oil in those sands would be best served to stay there, that the environmental impact is too great to recover it and to transport it to the States and that it only serves to continue to fuel the world’s addiction to oil.

I’m in no place to disagree, because I think he clearly knows better than I do. But I wonder if Canada can afford to even consider that.

It’s a bit of an environmental balance: rising oil and gas prices are a “good” thing environmentally, as they may change the way an average consumer uses these products in their day-to-day life, whether it’s buying a more fuel-economical car or opting to take public transportation more often. Meanwhile, rising oil and gas prices are a “bad” thing economically as consumers have to spend more of their hard earned money on these products and there is the related trickle-down effect that sees rising costs in almost all other products that have to be shipped/manufactured/delivered and the related rise in the cost of living.

The same balance is in place for  Canada. The export of energy products makes up almost 3% of our Gross Domestic Product. Canada is firmly in the top 10 countries in the world in GDP and our natural resources (of which the oil and gas sector is a huge part of) has a lot to do with that success. It makes political sense that a government would do well to keep those economic fires burning bright (and in doing so ignore environmental concerns to capitalize on these natural resources) and it is no surprise that the current sitting government was elected due to a power base in Western Canada where this oil boom is centred.  Any rise on oil prices just opens up the door for more money to be made, a simple supply and demand with the whole world demanding and the supply continuing to dwindle down.

I truthfully don’t know where I stand on this (in typical fashion, I see both sides of this equation), but I wonder if by embracing a more environmentally conscious approach, does Canada shoot itself in the foot economically, the same way they would be hurting their environment irreparably they take a purely economical-minded stance?

The answer is the same reason I don’t know where I stand on this: it appears to me to be a no win scenario. Always sacrificing one thing to achieve something else.

You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.

There is very little conscious volition in all this. What I do was ordained by the inscrutable fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful but still subordinate interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, and at the same time my poor father tried to make me a business man. At other times, like any other realtively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle. But I became a writer all the same, and shall remain one until the end of the chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.

I am far luckier than most men, for I have been able since boyhood to make a good living doing precisely what I have wanted to do—what I would have done for nothing, and very gladly, if there had been no reward for it. Not many men, I believe, are so fortunate. Millions of them have to make their livings at tasks which really do not interest them. As for me, I have had an extraordinarily pleasant life, despite the fact that I have had the usual share of woes. For in the midst of these woes I still enjoyed the immense satisfaction which goes with free activity. I have done, in the main, exactly what I wanted to do. Its possible effects on other people have interested me very little. I have not written and published to please other people, but to satisfy myself, just as a cow gives milk, not to profit the dairyman, but to satisfy herself. I like to think that most of my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don’t care. The world may take them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them.

Full Letter

I have a friend who really enjoys film and music. He’s quite a bit older than me, in his mid-60s and the movies and music he enjoys the most are from an era before my own. Classical music and the golden age of film from the 30s and 40s. There’s been a few times that he’s had the good fortune of seeing a film that he might have originally seen 50 years ago, or hearing a piece of music that he hasn’t heard for over 40 years.

When he explains it to me, the joy of hearing music that he only heard as a child or seeing a film that he only read about when he was younger, his eyes light up with an animated joy, but in the same vein, I know it’s a joy that I won’t likely ever feel. Part of it is definitely lacking that passion for the form: I enjoy film and music, but not in a fanatical sense. But equally because in my memory, I’m not sure that there’s much in the film or music world that holds up to the test of time at least not to this degree.

Granted, it’s entirely possible that maybe I won’t see a movie like the Green Mile or Forrest Gump (to pick two out of the ether) for years or maybe even decades to come, but the distribution is so much different, with DVDs and downloads and reruns on television, all things that often didn’t exist when my friend was younger. The same goes for music, where back in the day, you had to be content with hearing a particular tune on the radio or perhaps buying a record and now I can stream most music from online sources, or purchase the digital file.

In a way, I’m jealous of my friend, when he tells me with enthusiasm that he’s going to stay up late and watch Turner Classic Movies at 3am when a film that he hasn’t seen in 37 years is playing. I feel that he enjoys the experience more because of the rarity of it. That, because of the time passed and the limitations (he doesn’t own a computer and has no pretenses to start), he gets to appreciate the film more, in ways I could never imagine. The same goes for ordering CDs from catalogues or over the phone to hear a single track once again after decades and to have that experience live up to or even surpass the expectations of memory and nostalgia.

To have the appreciation, that dedication, that love of art…it’s truly remarkable.

Solar eclipses are unique to Earth, as far as we know.

The reasoning is that the Sun is about 400 times the size of the Moon, but the distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 400 times farther than the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

So what results is a Moon that just barely covers the entire Sun in the Earth’s sky, causing a solar eclipse.

And because of those special set of circumstances that need to occur in order for an eclipse to happen, we’ve yet to discover another planet that might experience this phenomenon. Which, when you think about it, is pretty cool.