Well surprise, surprise. McKinsey has surveyed a selection of executives (and yes, I know all surveys are rubbish) and found that these company people not only believe that they will face increasing regulation in the next few years but expect to make some money out of it! With change comes opportunity. With expense comes profit – for some. After all, someone will have to clean up – literally – this carbon-dumping habit of ours. The execs also say they are doing nothing right now. Typical – wait until pushed. Well I know some are doing something about it, and I expect we’ll all have to pitch in soon enough. It’s a decent read, anyway. You have to register.

Have you ever read a headline and drew conclusions that weren’t supported by the following text? Well I just had that sort of moment. I read the headline ‘Is CVS-Caremark out-innovating Apple?’ and thought I’d be reading a comparison between two firms based around the subject of innovation. Intead I got a story about how products may or may not “fit” the needs of individual consumers. Like if you slim down a notebook and call it something “airy” because it’s light, it may now lack features that some people need. In which case you buy the “fat” version, I guess. I surmise that these Harvard Business people think that any new product represents “innovation”, and maybe they are right. Perhaps even varying the size – or simply the colour – of an existing product is an innovation.

I tend to disagree. To me an innovation is something that makes you go ‘a-ha!’ or ‘why didn’t I think of that?’, not a shuffling of features or an earnest desire to be merely different. Innovation is (again, to me) a real change, small or large, where you invent a new thing, a new way of doing something, or a new use for an existing thing. It’s not about trifles, or even incremental improvement. It’s a leap.

So does Apple “leap” in that sense? I don’t think so. Way back when, in the olden days, Apples were just one of many backyard computers. Now the home-brewed PC itself was an innovation. Taking the big-iron computer and re-thinking it and re-packaging it as a personal device was a leap. But Apple wasn’t first to do that (was it the Altair, instead?). But they were good at it, and they incrementally improved their design over time; but Jobs and Wozniak were riding a wave of innovation that started elsewhere. (Bill Gates rode that same wave, of course, but ended up on another shore.) Sure, Apple showed great flair and resoucefulness in those early days and made something useful out of what was a hobbyist’s plaything. In bringing it together and fashioning a total, usable unit they innovated to a degree – although to what really must be an obvious and fairly simple degree. They just put together a nice, more widely usable package. Perhaps a better one than most, but just another option in the bustling pre-IBM PC marketplace. Does Apple’s ‘innovator’ tag come to us from these early years? I doubt it. Most people have forgotten or never even knew of the Apple I or II.
Indeed if Apple are innovators because they brought together some nice external ideas and made a marketable package out of it, what about IBM’s slightly later effort? They took parts from all over the company and made something different. Again they leveraged existing ideas, but they assembled a complete package and marketed it. Innovation? As much as Apple’s, surely. (Potential conflict of interest! OK, I work for IBM, these are my views, not necessarily the company’s.)
Just to extend this argument historically, Apple Corp didn’t invent the mouse, or the GUI, but they brought them together in one machine, and may have been first or close there-to. It’s line-ball but they certainly deserve credit for their vision, and by persisting with that ‘ease-of-use’ concept they were certainly exercising creativity in their PC designs. Maybe in that sense they were innovators? Certainly Xerox and the  separate inventors of the GUI and mouse, respectively, were truly innovators, but they didn’t get the product to market. Not successfully, anyway. So are the innovators the low-key inventors, or the successful marketers?
OK, let’s be generous and say that Apple innovated in moving from the old green screen Apple 2 era to the mouse and GUI Lisa and Mac era. They implemented a few good ideas (mostly from elsewhere) and have run with them ever since. Sure, they have made them stylish, and colourful, and smaller, and they have fiddled with the technology and the operating system to make a grander design; but exactly where is the innovation? By leaving out the disk drive or the Ethernet card? By forcing the market to move to their preferred technical solutions? By locking up the box and prosecuting the clone-makers? Is that innovation, or is that tactics and strategy?

Which leaves us with iPod – and again they neither invented the MP3 file format or the MP3 player, but they did get a product to market quickly and did give it the best marketing push imaginable. So they had both good timing and a sweet design. Perhaps that sweet, simple design was the innovation? Perhaps, although again it wasn’t new, was it? It was an adaptation of tried and tested ideas from the video industry, amongst other places. Still, that’s good enough, isn’t it?
In bringing these ‘invented-elsewhere’ ideas together into great, simple designs and getting the product to market swiftly Apple may indeed be said to be innovators, if only by degree. Am I too harsh? Well, what exactly makes you think of Apple as innovation machines? What Apple ideas have no peer in your mind? The mad colours and clear boxes? The simple interfaces? The effectiveness with which they hide the internals of there PCs and avoid using cooling fans? Is it enough that they dominate the MP3 player market, whilst barely scratching out 4% of the PC market? Can successful innovators really have so little impact on the market that they can effectively be ignored in their mainstay product line? Or is it enough that they are a great niche marketing company with a fantastic spin on innovation? And a charismatic leader, of course.
It all depends on how you define and weight things, doesn’t it?

Yes, I know, I do go on about it. Labels. Again. I also mention video gaming, right at the bottom…

But to start with labels, and where better than with Astrology?  Astrology “works” for many people both because it is so accurately imprecise and because it taps into what seems to be true. You believe you really are a Scorpio, for example, because the description is so vague yet targeted: variously a noble, lofty eagle of destiny coupled with a vicious sting. Truth is that everyone has a sting of some sort in their tail, so it rings a bell. And everyone feels noble aspirations at times, so again it “fits”. You can do the same with all 12 signs. And you want to believe that it’s you because it sounds right and it’s generally a pretty safe flag to wave. None of the signs – even the promiscuous Pisceans – are so utterly bad and nasty that no-one wants to “belong”. They are safe homes defined more by the position of solar and planetary bodies than ourselves, so they are apart from us and “objective”.  These are clubs we automatically join just because, and we find it agreeable to so so. Of course if we don’t find it so agreeable and believe ‘this just doesn’t sound like me’, we can always delve deeper into the obscurities of rising signs and oppositions and have an ‘ah-ha’ moment that welds us to our charts. Or simply adjust our time of birth a fraction because mum wasn’t sure about that, was she?

Of course it may be that there’s something “to” astrology, other than possible psychic forces at work (maybe) and a small correlation with the planet Mars (true), but it hasn’t been proven – yet.

Now with the “Generations” label it’s much the same. We are born into it, for starters. It “sounds” right and it has a wealth of scientific-sounding correlation to back it all up. If you are a classic boomer born after the 2nd World War you can feel the connection with other boomers. Maybe you lost relatives in the war. Maybe you remember the shortages, the rebuilding, the focus on doing things right and better this time. You remember the fear, the anger, the pain. You grew up in dour, struggling families with little hope. And it affected you; you determined within yourself to break free, to declare war on war itself, to expand the mind and give peace a chance. You gained optimism out of shared heartache and helped build a better world. And then you feasted on it, taking the wealth that you created and building more. And you remembered where it came from: hard work, loyalty and dedication. And kept it for yourselves.
Alas your kids didn’t share the immediate post-war privations and struggles and shrugged off the idealism and optimism off the 1960s. They were Generation X and they were angry. They didn’t want to just accept what their parents wanted for them, they saw things differently. Jobs were harder to find and they took what they could. They saw wealth all around but couldn’t share in it. They were disenfranchised. They latched onto technology and travel and meandered through their lives, rejecting the home-style values of their parents and making for themselves a more mobile, flexible and detached lifestyle. Oh, and they grew up with the fear of an imminent nuclear holocaust, too, so that affected them lots, eh? But out of all that we got a services-based economy with 24*7 fast food, so it must be all right. And they too grew up and had kids and trips in the country.
Except that the Next Generation has to work those poor hours for low pay and no overtime, whilst bathed in the light of a computer screen, one ear on the MP3 player the other on their mobile. Of course it’s what they want, but, isn’t it? They want flexibility in everything because that’s what they have grown up in. They don’t want a career now, do they? They want to flip and flop and dabble. And those aging boomers had better understand that, rather than whinge about the youth of today and their techno-babble, lack discipline, poor grammar, lousy spelling and loose morals. Oh, but they still eat at Maccas, travel widely and take drives in the country
I could go on. You can smell the truth in there, can’t you? It rings true, if only because the media bombard us with this message about generations and differences on a daily basis. We never hear about similarities, only the differences. We don’t get good news, just bad. Kids are never going to be good enough in this world and we’re going to tell them all about it. Older people just don’t get it – especially if it involves technology – and never will. Kids these days don’t display loyalty and they shift from job to job relentlessly – but that’s because it’s what they want, not because it’s how our modern economy works. I think you get the drift.

Of course it’s labelling. It’s black and white and filled with generalizations. But if you randomly sampled a thousand people across these ‘generations’ you’d get a thousand variations of life, genetics, experience, preferences, skills and education. You’d find common ground in emotions, feelings and human urges like reproduction, of course. And you could say that generally the youngest people have the least influence on society, the least independence, and the least accumulated wealth and experience. But you could do that sample at any point in history and it would ring true. It may shift temporally – we on average live longer and stay at school longer as well – but it’s part of our human reality.
Of course the labelling starts with some innocent marketing surveys. You’d find that at one end of the scale ‘older’ people tended to like big band music, but then they went to dance halls and listened to the steam radio, so what do you expect? They didn’t have MTV or MP3 players after all. And post-war ‘boomers’ tended more towards rock, but this was the great age of rock and roll, so again what do you expect? Some of them actually hated rock, and some didn’t care. Some like surf music. Some liked country or classical. Some still listened to swing, for goodness sake. But we didn’t ask them that.  And underneath they are still human, with feelings and emotions based on a million years of humanity. Why do we latch onto the merest, thinnest skin of our being and label people X, Y and Z? Because it’s easy. Because it makes targeting markets easier. We can spin a convincing story around a product and say it targets “generation Y” and throw our dollars into youth websites and viral campaigns. And because we are fond of joining clubs, especially clubs we have automatic membership of, we accept our labels.

The biggest thing to take away from my ranting and raving is that people remain people. Our environment is important, sure, but we remain human. And we continue to learn and grow and adapt throughout our lives. It may be easier for young kids to adapt to and use the latest techno-gadgets but they aren’t the only ones to use them or to see the usefulness. Not all young people are gadget-focused, either. Old or young, each and every one of us is individual – so let’s de-emphasise “generations” and just treat us all as equals.

Which brings me, perhaps surprisingly, to the future of video games. If you click on the link you’ll see that the Nintendo Wii has outsold its competitors from Microsoft and Sony. How has it done so? By de-emphasising the “generational” focus and simply becoming easier to use. With fewer controls, a more natural action and a broader (read less male-centric and techno-focused) approach it appeals to more people. You’d imagine that someone would have thought of this earlier… now if they applied this thought to more techno-gadgetry imagine how quickly we may all adapt to new technology, irrespective of our generation or our labelling?

From Forbes mag: http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/08/future-video-games-tech-future07-cx_mn_de_0211game.html?partner=alerts

You need more than just a word processor with a spell check function in this world. This tickled my fancy…from a trashy Aussie car mag on line… From the moment Subaru announced the new Impreza WRX STI last year we’ve been on the edge of our seats and waiting with baited breath.

The image of that devoted journo waiting with “baited” breath for a car to finally spring forth is a poignant one. Wonder what bait he was using? And what an ugly, pointless car it turned out to be!

Folks, if you were thinking that biofuel was the answer to our substitute-for petroleum, easily-transportable fuel source needs in a post-oil world, you may be surprised to read that the draw-backs outweigh the pluses for ethanol and the like. Now this is no surprise really – if you watched certain West Wing episodes from a couple of years ago it was explained explicitly that converting corn to fuel was a sop to farmers, nothing more, and used more fuel in manufacture than it actually produced. Now when a TV drama already has this sussed, why should we still be surprised? Ahhh, politics and lobbying strikes again! When you add up the costs of clearing land, fertilising and watering the crop, moving and storing the crop after harvest, processing it into fuel… you begin to see that the fuel needed to power the process itself is quite substantial, if not potentially greater than the energy harvest itself. And then you have to transport the final fuel to the petrol stations…

This is well known, but not often discussed or publicised. Yes, biofuels do have a role to play in our energy needs, especially if they are manufactured and distributed locally; but as a long-term replacement they do more harm than good. At least at current efficiency rates and models of distribution, anyway. And the last thing we want is to convert more land from forest to crops, for food or fuel.

Here’s a report on this via Carconnection.com:

n recent months, a number of sources, including the U.K. magazine The Ecologist, have suggested that all of the supplementary (and necessary) processes around biofuels production may actually emit more carbon dioxide than if we were to keep using fossil fuels. Now two studies, published in the journal Science, confirm that. While biofuel crops, such as corn or sugar cane, help absorb CO2, they absorb far less than forests, or even scrubland, according to the study, which uses a worldwide agricultural model to estimate the emissions associated with the change in land use. Bottom line, the study concludes that the use of corn-based ethanol nearly doubles greenhouse-gas emissions over 30 years, while switchgrass — long thought of as an ethanol-producing alternative crop, would increase overall emissions by 50 percent if grown instead of corn on U.S. lands. To cut to the chase, nearly all crop-based biofuels used today end up causing more greenhouse-gas emissions than ‘conventional’ fossil fuels do.

I’m hooked on data – and futurism. (I think there’s a correlation there.) I love trends, even Google trends. And What’s Next is a good, insightful read, as is the allied Top Trends blog.

It’s summer in Australia and it’s – cool? So much for global warming, I hear you say. Hey, not so fast… just because we get one cooler summer out of the last decade doesn’t mean that global warming has become global cooling. I noticed on the TV news someone already claiming that Australia is back to its “normal cycle” of drought and flooding rains after a long – perhaps the longest – drought. Well, maybe, but isn’t it hard to be certain with just one sample? It’s certainly raining now, and raining like crazy, but isn’t that also a prediction of global warming? That our rain will come in bucket loads with ever more powerful and unseasonal storms? Hmmm. It’s rather a bit more complicated than ‘it’ll just get hotter and drier and it’ll never rain again’.
After all Global warming is global, not regional, for starters. We are looking at the overall heat balance of the planet, not your particular country, state or city. The naysayers still believe that ‘puny’ humans can never influence climate and that we are arrogant to even imagine we have such power. They are looking at tiny humanity and contrasting our weak force and size with the immensity of our planet, its atmosphere and its oceans. They are drawing the conclusion that no matter what we do there’s so much water and air on the planet that our emissions are barely noticed. And yes, they are relatively small in percentage terms. But they are growing and have been doing so in abundance since the beginning of the industrial revolution. China and India are still emerging in this regard and many people remain without the means to pollute, at least to the degree that the rich western nations can. Imagine what happens when the rest of the world catches up.
The second argument is that “we have always had cycles of heating and cooling”, which is true. The contention is that the global warming theorists have just mistaken the warming phase of a natural cycle to be caused by humans, which is again a reasonable thing to propose and investigate. The trouble is that the naysayers don’t seem to go out and investigate. They say “wrong” really fast but don’t back it up with any research. None that I’ve seen, anyway. As I’ve already documented in earlier posts it’s clear that we humans have raised the carbon dioxide levels to a higher but still small percentage of the overall atmosphere, but that this level is actually accelerating faster that ever before and is already at higher levels than have ever been found. This is corroborated by samples taken from ice cores, for example. It needs also to be mentioned that there have never been over 6 billion humans on the planet before, let alone the number of cars, houses, factories and power stations we have these days. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that by ceaselessly clearing land and burning coal and oil we will at some point have an effect on local patterns of weather, if not regionally. And if El Nino/La Nina is anything to go by then these regional influences can have intra-regional effects. And if Australia and affect Peru in that fairly large way then it’s likely that we are impacting climate generally in at least some small way.
I won’t go on. You’ve read it all before. But here’s an article in Science mag that notes the rising temperatures in the North Atlantic over the last 50 years and quite fairly mentions that the human cause – or otherwise – is hard to prove. Indeed. So do we sit and wait and continue to clear land and churn out pollution, or do we take action against a sea of troubles? Your call.

You know how I feel about the cult of personality, that pseudo-scientific urge to label us all by ‘type’ and put us into the appropriate pigeon-hole. By this we ‘understand’ ourselves and can ‘perfect’ our lives. Or so the story goes. It’s like all of those other mildly convincing labels – like Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Scorpio, Virgo, and so on. It never tells the whole story, does it. Instead it promotes labelling, something that humans do particulary well.

OK, this rant is about teams and terminology and personality. We like to think we need ‘teamplayers’ in our business, and in our lives in general. They sound like assets, don’t they? People who are cohesive, get along, absorb instructions and lead others in the designated direction. They follow the rules, don’t make trouble and work as one with the group to generate the desired result. All goodness, surely?

Mind you, to most of us our vision of a team is based around sporting analogies, tinged with military terminology like tactics and strategy. So we tend to see our manager as a coach, our team leader as a captain and the team working in different positions on the field but playing to the same rules and game plan. Which is all sweet and lovely within a context of strictly enforced rules, clearly delineated roles and an end result (ie winning games, winning the season finale etc) that’s a self-reinforcing common vision.

If we are to critique this just a little, what exactly do we have in common here with modern work practices? Perhaps it was a stronger analogy in the 20th Century’s time-and-motion-manufacturing and typing-pool-style of regimented labor, but does it hold true in a world of increasing role diversity and the blurring of who-does-what-when. Do you see yourself in such a team? I don’t. I work in a geographically dispersed, virtual team, do everything myself (from typing to reporting to creating graphics; scheduling my time, prioritising as I see fit) as and when needed. I set my own hours around a work and life balance and rarely find myself boxed into anything like regimentation. It’s more fluid, organic and diverse, and very flexible.

Sure, I’m just me, just one example. But the shift in work practices – from full time to more part-time work; from office or factory to home-based work; from clearly delineated single-task-based work to multi-tasking, is as real as the shift to a service-based economy. Not everyone works likes this but a heck of a lot more do today than yesterday.

So what does this mean for teams? To some, nothing at all. They cling to old ideas with new labels. They divide people up by ‘personality type’ and advise that you need one of these and two of those and lots of these worker bees to make it hum. Which is great if you are a bee, and ant or maybe a wasp. But what do insects know about teamwork outside of their genetic endowment? What about insects, sorry people who need to generate new ideas to improve the business and match – or beat – the competition? We don’t want to make the same stuff the same way over and over again, do we? Well not if we are making incandescent bulbs in a world that is switching to energy-saving LEDs and fluoros.

In this new 21st Century world we need flexible, adaptable people who think and act on the run. They are assets to the team as well, in fact they are the new team. And if they uncover problems and devise and implement solutions within the overall team context and direction then they are invaluable. So we don’t want mere followers, we want action-thinkers who network with their peers. We don’t want them to buck the system for no reason, and we need a way to accommodate valid dissent, too. We don’t want managers to have to micro-manage, either. So it’s not just the team player per se but the team organisation that needs to allow free thought, innovation and a way to generate and propagate new ideas, quickly. In fact in a lean organisation, and I mean Lean in a particularly business-oriented way, the team player will contribute incremental improvement to process, procedure and organisational design quite naturally. So they are truly a thinking, doing, trying-out-new-ideas kind of beast. Sure, not all of the team members will shine to the same degree, or generate the same caliber or type of idea; but they will support each other and provide an environment of contribution by which the team overall prospers.

So it’s a cohesive environment of contribution that is important, coupled with flexible, empowered individuals. Perhaps thinking about ‘personality types’ and trying to build teams around a shopping list of personalities is too blinkered in this new world. Maybe we need to expect everyone to do a bit of everything, but in their individual way.

OK, I love cars and bikes. I love wheels, basically. I love the ability to travel much further, far easier than on foot. (And I love walking, too.) Trouble is, cars take up too much space, spew fumes and their drivers act like it’s a personal affront to slow down and give pedestrians and cyclists a chance. The ‘modern’ world is simply unbalanced in its love of roads, parking and ever-bigger cars and has forgotten that people actually live here, too, and want to (a) breathe (b) not be intimidated by traffic to the extent where simply crossing a road or even walking alongside one is an ordeal. At this point I publish in toto and excellent riposte by Sydney’s Lord Mayor to the numbskulls at the Aussie National Roads and Motorists Association (of which I am a long-standing and increasingly disenchanted member):

Clover Moore January 11, 2008 “THE NRMA, unsurprisingly, claims that few cyclists use the Epping Road corridor each day. The NRMA, like the big oil companies, has a vested interest to protect, and it is depressing that private car use in Sydney is still rising, with vehicle kilometres travelled increasing at twice the rate of population growth. We are past the day when we have any choice but to pursue alternatives: oil is running out and global warming is increasing at an alarming rate. Our streets are becoming impossibly congested, polluted and unpleasant to use. The health costs, in respiratory disease and obesity, to name but two, are well-documented. Many people choose cars over bikes because they can get directly to any destination. Get on a bike, and you’ll be lucky to find continuous safe passage. Cyclists are expected to levitate through impassable gaps in the network and risk their lives inches from tonnes of speeding metal on car-dominated roads. Despite this, nearly 1.5 million bicycles were sold in Australia last year, 40 per cent more bikes than cars. And this is the eighth year in a row that bikes have outsold cars.

“At last year’s C40 Large Cities conference in New York, I cycled with the mayor of Copenhagen. In the Danish capital 40 per cent of people use bikes to get to work and study. International experience shows that if you provide the facilities, people will use them – but it does not happen overnight. Our top need is for a clean, efficient, sustainable and integrated transport system that includes cycleways and mass transit to move the million-plus people who use the city daily to their destinations. Recent research by the City of Sydney indicates that Sydneysiders would be more likely to cycle if there were dedicated cycle lanes and better awareness by motorists of bicycle safety. Even under the present, less-than-ideal conditions, the Roads and Traffic Authority has reported a 45 per cent increase in bicycle traffic in the CBD in the three years to 2005. The city’s own counts show that about 500 cyclists use Oxford Street each weekday between 7am and 9am – a sixfold increase over the past decade. While there are major recreational cycleways – such as the Sydney Harbour route and the planned Alexandra Canal path – the city’s cycle strategy aims to create an effective and accessible network with major routes less than five minutes’ cycle from every residence. It also includes strategies to increase community awareness about the benefits of cycling, to provide better signage and safer, separated cycle lanes. We are encouraging end-of-trip facilities including the provision of parking, storage, change and shower facilities – which progressive firms like Lend Lease are now providing in their headquarters. On the other side of the harbour, North Sydney Council has its own proposals for getting cyclists safely to the bridge, and local governments across the metropolitan area are looking at ways of creating a cycling network that can get people to work, recreation and educational destinations.

“According to the British urbanist Charles Landry, the average US male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car – driving it, sitting in traffic, parking it. Adding in the time spent working to pay for it, for petrol, tolls and other charges, he calculates that same person spends over 18 per cent of his life on his car. Sydney people have surely got better things to do with that 18 per cent of their lives.”

Clover Moore is Lord Mayor of Sydney and the independent state MP for Sydney.

OK, you didn’t ask, but here I go. Some thoughts and questions to consider for today.

1. Why is it that the bicycle industry can make frames that are compatible with the drivetrains of at least 3 major manufacturers and the componentry of just about everyone? Doesn’t that (otherwise very sensible) component commonality impinge upon product differentiation?
2. Why is it that automotive companies can barely get it together to share wheels and tyres and sundry hidden mechanicals and electricals? Sure they have tried to share platforms and engines, and there are plenty of exceptions, but generally they keep reinventing the wheel; or in this case the complete drivetrain and monocoque shell. Does this more complete individualism grant some competitive advantage or are they simply blind to the savings that they could make for themselves, their customers and the world?
3. Why is it that the PC industry is split so unevenly between the bespoke “locked-up” designs like Apple’s and the open, modular and shared componentry that the “IBM-compatible” (or perhaps ‘Intel/Microsoft architecture-compatible’) makers comply with? What can we take away from the far greater market penetration of the latter approach? Or the higher prices and possibly ‘cooler’ designs from the low-volume makers?
4. What is the best approach for the world (including our living environment as well as our economic one)? To evolve shared componentry in all cases and thereby reduce overlap and waste; or to instead foster maximum competitive differentiation with bespoke, individualised design? Or to balance the 2 approaches? Or to find a 3rd way?
5. If there is ‘a better way’, should governments mandate it? Car safety legislation would be one example when government has enforced a common standard of safer design, however I have the sneaking suspicion that there are better, lighter, cheaper safety systems than the amazingly contrived explosive ‘airbag’ system that car companies have foist upon us. Airbags are of course less intrusive than helmets, harnesses and the like – but are they ‘better’? Is this an example where the compromise reached favours maximising car sales over implementing good sense? Or do the practical problems of getting people to wear harnesses and helmets outweigh the benefits?

These are the questions on my mind right now. More later, I’m sure…

It seems that way, like it’s a war between people and cars. The cars are simply inanimate objects, sure, but they behave like angry bees looking for a fight. Or like the worst sort of human bullies, pushing themselves and everyone else out of their way. How did we get into this state? Why do we allow this anti-social behaviour to continue? Of course the root of this evil is simple – “drivers” are no longer people, or so it seems; instead they are themselves a collectivist entity known as “cars” or “traffic”. Yes folks, step inside this tin can and de-humanise yourself. Become as one with the machine.

OK, it’s a broad brush but as a person, a pedestrian, a cyclist and a driver I see otherwise “nice” people suddenly take on bizarre aggressive traits whilst driving. And they defend their anti-social activities to the death, sometimes literally. “Bikes should not be on the road, roads are for cars”. “We pay road taxes and registration and licence fees, and they don’t”. “It’s not right to slow cars down or to blame them for pedestrian stupidity, instead pedestrians should take more responsibility”. “Speeding fines are just for revenue raising.” And so on. It’s a litany of denial, of abdication of responsibility and a dereliction of due care. And they believe it, too.

I am prompted to write this because of what another rider – Cadel Evans, the number 1 professional rider in 2008 – has been reported to have said, namely: “I’ve cycled in every continent in the world, other than Antarctica, and it’s incredible. Drivers in America and Australia just have attitudes. I don’t necessarily say attitudes towards cyclists, but towards other road users … . people just don’t realise the danger they’re causing other people.” In Evans’s experience, the worst offenders come from the ranks of very young and very old drivers. He despairs that cyclists have to contend with people throwing bottles and driving dangerously close to them.

And I can but agree. It’s been like this in Australia for some years. I gave up commuter cycling for a while because of it. Bullying drivers who leave no room (despite clear laws about keeping to your own lane) and who intimidate, or simply abuse. I had a can thrown at me in a quiet backstreet and a speargun aimed at me at 6:30 in the morning. For no reason. At 5:30AM a bus swerved across 2 empty lanes seemingly to  simply scare me. Several times buses have ignored my presence and just cut in front, barely, and trapped me against the kerb. Cars turn in front of me, or sweep me into the gutter. Or overtake where it’s not safe out of some misplaced desperation to “get ahead”. One friend had a gun pulled on him – he escaped down the Cook’s River canal.

You can see the problem. These are not people, these are “cars”, “buses” and “drivers”. At worst they are arrogant owners of the road. At best they grudgingly give some space. If you met them face to face there’d be no problem. But in their steel tanks they take on a new, angry outlook that leaves no room for anyone else.

Well, I ride, walk and I drive. I pay taxes. I see mistakes being made by people in cars as well as on foot or on bike. Yet I can calmly share and give a bit of space to all, and can slow down and give others some room. Now if I can see all sides of this, and plenty of other people can too, and we can all get along fine, what’s your problem?

I’m being bleak again. So many people, such a large enviro-footprint for each of us (especially we ravenous Westerners). Let’s sort one thing out. Paper. OK, we need to use some paper, but why so much?

Isn’t it up to us to choose a paperless, or vastly reduced paper-use world? Why do people claim that the promise of a paper-free office is impossible? Because they themselves are the problem?

Being the saint I am I haven’t printed anything out at work for almost 10 years – I read on screen and prefer it now – and read most newspapers and magazines on-line as well. Indeed the company I work for transacts everything digitally and stores it digitally. It can be done. There’s nothing stopping us but fear of change. Email and IM has almost totally replaced snail mail. I view my photos on-line and have more confidence in my multiple digital backups than with my faded paper ones. It’s a choice, just embrace it and ditch paper except for purely historical interest or to show kids how it used to be done.

OK, sometimes paper is best, but not often; and less so all the time. We have actually made big progress. If you look back 40, even 30 years ago you’ll see far more paper was used in business and government processes than now – it’s actually vastly different because we have largely replaced paper trails and literal carbon copies with electronic pathways and storage. Many banks, insurance companies and government bodies once stored all info and account details, application forms and even signature records on cardboard or paper, and we transacted 100% with paper checks and paper withdrawal slips. That was cumbersome and wasteful, and it’s largely gone.

So there. We’ve moved on, why are you dragging your heels? If you go back far enough you’ll see just how much paper has been ditched by government and business already, but in terms of individuals printing out paper copies of documents ‘just in case’, you have to ask ‘why do it?’. Because you can’t read off a screen? Kids seem to adapt OK. Because you can’t remember what you read online? Maybe you need to concentrate harder. Do you really need a paper copy of something that’s editable, enlargeable and searchable on-screen? Is it just a habit? There are ways around these things, but people still like to hold it in their hands don’t they? Bizarre.

And of course the truly paperless world will never arrive whilst we need to wrap presents…. and send cards. Oh well. Bleakness returns (although it’s nice to get mail, isn’t it?). Have a nice end-of-year, if you are into that sort of Roman/Gregorian calendar thing.

Well things do change, don’t they? When I started my working life in the mid-’70s modems were quite literally huge boxes offering staggering throughput around 1200 bits/second. Let me think that through for a moment. These were big boxes commonly mounted on walls in banks which tied distant computer terminals to mainframes via telephone lines, so that transactions could be completed “instantly” and printed in passbooks. At 1200 bits per second. Hmmm. Amazing anything got transmitted at all. Fast forward to 1985 and I was connecting at just 300bits/second but using a modem a bit smaller than a shoebox, or about 10% of the size of the first modem I ever worked with. By 1987 I was hooking up to bulletin boards using plug-in PC cards at 1200 bits/second, and a year later at 2400 bps. And shortly thereafter 9600bps. Things were certainly zooming along. But I got bored and drifted away.

At that sort of connection speed the world was really just sending text and numbers. For that it was fast enough. But it was very much a call-pause-respond sort of thing, especially over any distance. It wasn’t replacing face-to-face meetings or threatening to send couriers and the post office to the wall. But it was magical, and we could all see the future possibilities. And in 1990 I saw the Internet for the first time and thought, yes please. Suddenly we had a real world-wide platform to play on and email (with attachments) was workable. But it was still a geeky thing. But by 1994 it was in the daily news, big-time, and the world was shifting under our feet. I can remember my stunned amazement when the world of geeky text and numbers transformed itself into the World Wide Web of graphics, colour and motion. And I jumped back into the world of modems.

So in fast succession we went from 9,600bits/second to 56,000bits/second, yet we wanted more. Now I sit here at home connecting at 7,616,000bits/second and I still want more! And of course we will get more. And with every increase in speed comes an increase in quantity and a change in nature. Things become do-able. Video gets better and better. VoIP becomes clearer. Instant Messaging becomes more instant. Graphics get bigger and better (or worse!). And we inch a bit closer to true virtual reality.

Which is where I start thinking about work, life and friendship. We are quite accidentally teaching our kids how to submerge themselves in a virtual world, where even the nature of friendship is changing. You can see and feel the generational gap. Kids just do it, they connect by phone, face, IM, SMS, chatrooms or Web2.0 – whatever it takes. Old fogeys like me embrace it, sure, after all we are here too – but we also remember the ‘good old days’ of actually having to meet people, to see our teammates and friends face-to-face and to engage in different, human ways. We remember the old ways of facial expressions, of hand gestures, of shared jokes and raised eyebrows. But kids these days use avatars and emoticons as much as expression and eyebrows. Sure, not everyone is ‘into’ it, just as not everyone does everything in life exactly the same. But you can see the shifts happening.

Some of this is good. Working from home can be isolating or it can save petrol. It’s up to us to make it work, to identify when we need to do better. I can easily fall into a lament about the passing of the good old days, when teams were groups of people in one physical location, not avatars roaming around a virtual world. But as bandwidth increases and applications get better at being virtual I can see a day when it all becomes seamless. A day when being virtual is just as engaging as being real. Now it could sound scary, but it could just be what we need to do to survive and prosper. Sitting on our hands crying about change won’t bring our past back to life. It’s time to move on and make the future work for us.

OK, OK, I’m part of the problem. Like G.W. Bush I have an MBA in my back pocket, so I can streamline manufacturing processes, organise effective marketing, think strategically and tie my own shoelaces. Which brings me to modern low-cost manufacturing, famously Toyota and “lean”-style. Yes folks, MBAs are taught how to organise production lines, strip things down to the basics and to cut out waste. Duplication – bad. Re-doing stuff – bad. Too many steps, especially redundant ones – bad. Why? Because waste, duplication and redundant steps in manufacturing all cost money. If you can cut them down, or even completely out, you end up with a cheaper product. And a cheaper product can either gain you more marketshare or more profit – or both. And for the consumer a cheaper product must be a better product, surely.

Well, no. If you are an old-timer like me you will remember ‘the good old days’ when you could pull something apart and fix it. You will remember being able to buy even the tiniest spare parts at reasonable prices and to take them home and to fix things, so they lasted longer. Now whilst the manufacturer makes some money out of spare parts it also costs them a lot in warehousing and distribution. To get parts to little shops near you and me takes up a lot of time, money and effort. It’s actually very costly. And you know what MBAs love to do, right? Yep, remove costs. Gradually we have moved from a world of repairable manufactured goods with ample supplies of spares to a world of ever-more-modular manufacturing. Yes, you can still “fix” things, it’s just that you can’t simply fix the broken bit – you have to replace the entire module.

Now these modules exist because it’s cheaper to make and stock one large bit than a larger number of much smaller components. Fitting such individual components costs money and time for each manufacturing step, so doing away with the “bits” removes lots of steps and makes it cheaper to assemble and to stock. It saves the manufacturer everywhere. You are happy because manufactured stuff is cheaper.

But there are hidden costs, aren’t there? Repairing a manufactured good is now either impossible – it’s just not designed to be taken apart again – or much more expensive as large modules are involved. So you either pay through the nose and replace the module, hack at it with a saw, or give up and buy a whole new “thing”. And as new “things” are so cheap we don’t mind so much. And as new consumers are born they are born into a world of consumerism, waste and excess and don’t realise that there once was ‘another reality’. And as we get into the swing of just buying another thing to replace the old thing we bring down the cost of “things” generally. It’s called mass consumption.

But it gets worse. By ramping up this overall consumption of “things” we are burning more oil, digging up more raw materials and generally just throwing more and more stuff out. OK, OK, it sounds bleak. Well maybe it is.

And the saddest part – we are taught to do this in our graduate business schools. It’s modern manufacturing folks.

Al has made a bit of cash along the road to Climate Change salvation, after his near-miss tilt at the US Presidency. Now I don’t really mind, that’s his good luck. I do care about the environment overall and carbon-pollution is still pollution, irrespective. So good on him for waking up and seeing the greenhouse gas light. Here’s one useful insight from an SMH article on Al Gore, Inc: One problem he had in politics, he says, was identifying an issue too early – “‘predawn’ is the term I use” – to be able to act on it. But “in the business world, particularly at a time when things are moving so swiftly, if you can see it early, you can make a business opportunity out of it.” He pauses. “For whatever reason, the business world rewards a long-term perspective more than the political world does.”

You may have noticed the recent DARPA-organised robotic car competition. If you didn’t you can read about it here in a Forbes article. It’s certainly impressive and looked like a lot of fun. Aside from enhancing research into practical robotics, competitions between robotic cars completing ‘races’ in urban environments is an interesting look into a Sci-fi future of immense wonder. There must be a business model here for someone.

Just imagine: robotic sports, anyone? Google-search your way to an urban pleasure robot for hire, perhaps? Replace human-driven taxis with robots and cut down on those inane cab-driver conversations? (Unless the robots get speech chips as well of course.) Or robotic buses that eliminate the end-of-shift grumpy-driver syndrome? Or more seriously, competent robotic day-surgery in remote locations without the need for expensive, highly-trained human surgeons “on-site”. It’s potentially a mix of good and bad, isn’t it? More programmers and robotics experts, fewer jobs for real people.

Now I’m not a Luddite, but I do wonder about whether we think these things through. Like Einstein wondering whether his work opened to door to nuclear war.

And sure enough these harmless-looking robot games have a military goal as well, with lives saved if you can send more robots into battle instead of warm bodies. The downside to robotic wars, however, are grim. Without the appropriate programming robots will not show human mercy or simple judgment, and may indeed be programmed to be exactly that – inhumane killing machines. And war with ‘thinking’ machines instead of people at risk may lower the barriers to war itself. So we get more war with fewer consequences – well, if you are on the winning side, anyway.

Meanwhile Google’s ‘first privately-owned car on the moon’ competition is a bit wacky – and certainly way-out – but hints at where we may be going next in our personal transport. Despite the fun of it all it’s possible that our obsession with cars will end on Earth when we run out of accessible, cheap resources; equally it’s hard to see how lunar exploration and exploitation will solve our immediate problems. But that’s humanity – pressing on, pushing the boundaries and fixing up the broken stuff later.

Well it’s obvious to me, anyway. Of course land clearing has made our climate hotter. You only have to go for a short bike ride or simply walk in the right places to spot the difference. Whether you travel the hot plains of suburbia or the shadeless wastes we call farmland the only blessed relief from the heat is the shade of the uncleared forests. Around my part of Australia the temperature can drop 5 degrees in the blink of an eye as I pedal through remnant tall gum forest. Now it’s the shade effect, sure, and that’s stating the bleeding obvious. But there’s more to it than that. Forests conserve water by raising the humidity of the air captured under the canopy. Forests also keep the blast-furnace northerlies at bay. Forests are also less likely to radiate the heat back into the atmosphere, unlike our black bitumen roads and red-tiled roofs. They also sequester carbon.

Now plenty of people think we humans are too puny and insignificant to affect global patterns of climate – whilst offering no proof of that other than their blind, optimistic faith. On the other hand I can’t prove that human activity is to blame for climate change on a global scale, either. But I do think it plausible that over 6 billion humans chewing through our planet’s resources will have some effect on the planet’s weather – although the degree of effect is probably still small. I hope. What I am certain of is that human activity – especially land clearing – drastically alters patterns of weather, including rainfall. Now if enough people in enough places are doing the same thing…

From the SMH:Land clearing has led to climate change in Australia, a University of Queensland-led report says. UQ’s Dr Clive McAlpine said their research showed the clearing of native vegetation had made Australian droughts hotter. “Our findings highlight that it is too simplistic to attribute climate change purely to greenhouse gases,” said Dr McAlpine of UQ’s Centre for Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Science.

Really, by now they should know better. They call some cars “green” or the saviours of the world because they do a little better than the others in fuel consumption, but forget that cars need infrastructure and resources other than fuel to get around. And that ‘other stuff’ stuffs the environment, too. And they call old stuff, like hybrid engines (think diesel-electric locos on our railroads) or combos of super and turbo chargers (think piston-engined airliners like the Super Connie), new. And then they write stuff like this: But what happens if one of these automotive gods descends from the stratosphere and into the reach of the only moderately well-heeled? It’s a dangerous path to tread. Mercedes and BMW have been there, trading the exclusivity of the badge for the lure of sales growth. But no one from the top shelf of supercars had tried it until Porsche released the Cayenne 4WD in 2003. This vehicle has certainly lifted Porsche sales (the company says it will make up about 45 per cent of total sales with the new model) – but how has it affected the long-standing Porsche formula? Just how fast (or slow) is the cheapest Porsche money can buy? To find out we grabbed two other popular six-cylinder cars as a benchmark.

First up, who cares? Well I care because the resources squandered by hulks like these mean less resources around for the future. And the basic premise is wrong. This is just a brand issue, and it has been done to death. According to the hacks at drive.com.au Porsche has never trod this path before. Yeah, right. In these lame moto-journalistic eyes Porsche never made a truck-powered 924 or – what was that earlier effort with the flat-four? Well it was firstly the 356 but that was cool, and then the subsequent 912 was bigger and not-so-cool. And then there was the 914. With the parts-bin 924 and 914 they really made affordable, economical performance cars that competed with Alfa Romeo’s GTV and its ilk. Oh for the days when sports cars – all cars – were small and fiesty, not fat and fusty.
But watered down Porsches didn’t really work and they were worked over relentlessly until Porker gave up and kept the 911 going and going instead. Which has led us to today, when the hacks are going ‘gosh, a cheap-ish Porsche’. Again. And the thrust of it all is business, not passion or sustainability. Porsche are once more broadening their range, not with sports cars but with fat but powerful iterations of the 4WD from hell. You could say it’s diversification, and it’s been a success. It’s also risky in that it is polluting and diluting the brand. It may be that in these times when everyone has an overpowered 4WD that Porker can get away with it – seemingly so. But it’s neither new nor original. And definitely not something a ‘traditional’ 911 owner would want to know about.

And let’s not beat it up into something desirable, either.

I can’t help but watch the cars go past. We live on what is almost an island, just a ridge of mountain with a swampy strip on each side connecting us to the mainland. In the old days there was no road in, all traffic was via the wharves on the southern side of the peninsula. As the settlement grew and the land cleared it became viable and desirable to connect the the old Yow Yow settlement to Kincumber parish, and the first road (Elvy’s) was driven up over the ridge. It’s still there but impassable in places, at least by cars. Bullocks would’ve been the ‘heavy’ traffic, carting timber from Kincumber down to the boat builders at Davistown. And then the road was pushed to the west along the swampy strip, connecting us to Green Point and Erina, and by punt from there to East Gosford. So as I say, there’s now just one road into the place.

So when I stand at my front door I can see all of the traffic to Saratoga and Davistown. In what passes for peak hour it’s a constant stream. Car after car, plus buses and trucks. The buses are full of schoolkids, at least by the time they roam around and collect a load, then quite empty. The cars are mostly driver-only, no passengers. By my rough count we see 50 cars a minute for 2 hours, and 40 a minute for another 3 hours, then 10 a minute for 10 hours. Much less overnight but at a constant trickle.

Now this is a small community. One set of about village shops for Saratoga, another much smaller set of shops for Davistown. One small grocery shop, a fruit shop, a butcher, a baker, a hairdresser and some estate agents at Sara and a newsagent and a take-away in each. Yet when you look at the traffic it’s at least 50*120+40*180+10*600 vehicles during the bulk of the day. That’s 19,200 vehicles passing by every working day and somewhat less at weekends. Let’s be generous and forget weekends. So that’s 96,000 vehicles per week, in and out. The speed limit is 50kmh but most do 60. All of them buzz past houses, children, pets and wildlife and either disturb their rest, their play or just their daily lives. Kids can’t play in the street, nor can they cross the road safely. Even adults have to wait for a break in the traffic before crossing and cyclists are blasted by horns for daring to venture forth.

Now we chose to live here, and it’s relatively quiet behind our screen of trees. We could live in a cul-de-sac. But not everyone can live in cul-de-sacs, or afford the premium paid for a quieter street. And whilst Davistown Road is a funnel that concentrates the traffic, plenty of other streets here and elsewhere have either more or somewhat less traffic to deal with.. and to be honest I am wondering why we allowed this to happen. Why are we encouraging these immense numbers of vehicles to terrorise communities? Is terrorise too harsh? Well imagine a world where kids could play in the street safely and where anyone could just cross the road when they wanted, without waiting for 10 minutes or more. Yes, we love the utility of jumping into our cars are going places but is the traffic, the exhaust, the noise and the fear generated really worth it? Have we blinded ourselves to what we are doing when we swap feet, boats, buses and bikes for cars?

Absolutely.

We say we want safer vehicles. We say we are concerned about global warming. We say we are concerned about mixing ever-bigger vehicles with smaller cars on our roads, and about the extra space consumed in car parks by these family trucks. So why do we get stories like this one (from Fairfax online): According to the information leaked in the magazine report, the six-speed-automatic-only F6 X should be capable of accelerating from 0-100km/h in about six seconds. This kind of straightline performance puts it on par with more expensive, high-performance 4WD wagons from Porsche, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The report confirms that the FPV F6 X scores a number of firsts for the FPV brand. The two-tonne wagon is fitted with Brembo six-piston front brakes with a unique anti-lock-braking tune, and is the first FPV model with electronic stability control and curtain airbags. The F6 X gets firmer suspension and unique 18-inch alloy wheels to improve its road manners .

And why do car makers think this is good? They all do it. They love their hero cars, and bigger and brasher is better. But would you actually buy one, or be so arrogant or unaware as to drive it?

We tend to focus on the energy we put into the car – you know, that liquid energy we currently use as fuel – rather than look at the total energy budget of the car. Which of course would be fuel over lifetime of car+car manufacture+car repairs and maintenance+fuel to move raw materials+share of cost of infrastructure and so on. That would include roads, ships that transport cars, port facilities for cars, car parks and even the family garage. It would include opportunity costs as well (you know, what you could have done with all of that land and money if it wasn’t tied up as freeways and so on). People install fluoro lightbulbs and offset their petrol expense and then declare themselves ‘carbon neutral’, when of course they are not even close. Worse still they buy a hybrid car and think ‘job done’. Baloney, it’s just job started.
Now it has been said that roughly 40% of the total energy budget of a car is expended just in its manufacture. Other people have suggested 60%, some much less. It depends of course on the size of the car, the cost of raw materials and fuel and how far that car travels in its life time. But is it true? Could so much of the energy expense actually occur just in manufacture? Now if you extend the life of the car (and continue to drive it, of course!) you increase the likely absolute cost of the fuel whilst diminishing the proportion of energy used in manufacture. But of course nothing is ever that simple, is it? You should factor in a share of the infrastructure, too. Can’t drive a car without roads after all (even off-road vehicles end up on road at times).
Unless of course we make it simple, just to prove a point. So let’s calculate how much energy is expended in making a car by setting aside the (probably!) much larger infrastructure costs for the moment. We could calculate this by breaking the car into material types by weight and looking up melting points of metals and so on and calculating back from there, but let’s just do a rough calculation simply based on retail price. We will assume that there are no energy subsidies (when of course there are) and that the price is fair, i.e. not below cost (or “dumped”). Big assumptions, yes. But we can’t be too far off, surely? (He writes, hopefully.)
Anyway if we choose 3 cars – a Hyundai Getz, a GM Commodore and an Alfa Romeo Brera and make a few more rash assumptions we may get some answers. The recommended retail of these cars in Australia is $A15,490 for the Getz 1.6l; $A39,900 for a Commodore Berlina V6 and $A87,990 for the Brera AWD v6. We will assume that the dealer makes 3% on the Getz, 8% on the Commodore and 15% on the Brera. (I’m assuming a very competitive market where more money is made on servicing and value-adds than selling the car itself – I could be way out!) There are many such layers of margin and tax to peel away, so here’s a table to show my calculations…

I have to tell you I was somewhat surprised at the estimated factory cost of the Alfa Brera. It must be wrong, surely? Somewhere my assumptions have gone awry, because seemingly the prestige European sports luxury car has a lower base cost per vehicle than the locally built sedan. But then I wondered if the still-somewhat protected nature of the small Aussie car manufacturing industry may have distorted the real cost of manufacture. So I bumped up the factory margin for the GM Commodore; but perhaps I should also knock the Alfa factory margin down somewhat? I thought a prestige car must attract a good margin, but maybe not so much when it’s an Alfa?

So let’s peg the Alfa back…

OK, these figures are still fantasy and probably out of kilter all over the place, but it’s still remarkable that the $80K+ RRP Alfa Romeo comes so close to the factory costs of the local Aussie sedan and the imported Korean small car, but there you go. You can play with the numbers yourself and get a somewhat different result – but it does illustrate how taxes alone distort pricing. And I didn’t even factor in the now-small import duties. Oooops – well you can do it yourself, and it just shows again why we probably shouldn’t be making cars in Australia. It may well say something similar if we chose to decompose US car prices, but I’m too lazy to go to further trouble.

Anyway, our aim here is to estimate energy costs, and you can see immediately that the factory’s raw material + transport + energy costs are going to be quite small individually, but proportionately larger for the ironically more economical small car. If I was to hazard a guess I’d say transport of resources currently would be 20%, energy 20% and raw materials 60% – but that is a guess.

Which would in any case give us this result:

If that breakdown is even close it means that the fuel cost will quite quickly overtake the cost of the energy used in manufacture. Of course we aren’t dealing with a level playing field at all, in fact various governments at times make decisions to subsidise development and infrastructure for export industries, so the real numbers are probably a few – maybe many – percent higher. I’m still surprised at the moderately low manufacturing costs overall, but that’s modern manufacturing at work isn’t it? Note also that if we ramp up energy costs we’d certainly change the nature of the whole manufacturing game. Transport costs would go through the roof for starters and the percentages will go south. But so will fuel prices…

It’s not easy, is it? We want to include everyone in our society, to extend our care and concern generally across the community, so that all share equally in the greater good of our civilisation. Everyone wants that, or they say they do. They want us to have our freedom, to do as we like – as long as we don’t hurt others in the process. From that grow our laws, be they enshrined in public legislation or religious text. And as everyone also knows, the law is an ass.

I recently wrote this: And as a consequence we go lightly on both driver qualifications and reprimands for driver ‘infringements’. If we applied tougher rules, or even applied our existing rules in a diligent manner then we’d actually remove that accessibility for a large number of people and hurt them socially and economically, and as a corollary hurt the politicians who act on our behalf. And I believe it’s true. We want everyone to have access to the freedom of personal transport. However as a western society we have ploughed far more investment into car ownership than public transport, so we have ended up with a society where logistically it is difficult to get everywhere and anywhere, easily, without a car. And we have made it easy to get a drivers’ licence, and cheap and easy to buy a car. So we all go out and get cars, and our expectation is that car ownership is a right, not a privilege. However we want to make driving reasonably safe (and we have settled for a dangerous level of accident and injury in our compromise, too, may I add) and thus we impose laws to control errant behaviour. Some things are perfectly obvious, like stopping for red lights and keeping right or left. But other laws are contentious or simply difficult to enforce. People like to speed, car manufacturers like to make ever faster cars, and some people seemingly lack the skill or judgement to not monitor and control speed. We then catch them and fine them until they lose their licence, their job, and their social status. We create enemies within, with a grudge against law makers and enforcers.

It’s akin to setting people up to fail. We encourage and reinforce car ownership and freedom with easy access to licences, cars and roads on one hand, then crack down on people who lack the skill, talent, experience, maturity or judgement to obey the laws. We let them in, then punish them for coming onboard. Why not raise the licensing and ownership bar and keep them out in the first place, so that they don’t go through this agony and loss of privilege? Because we want to be seen to be inclusive? Because we are all sadists at heart? Or because we don’t want to pay for the public transport infrastructure that supports non-car-drivers?

Well it’s a thought, anyway. Another option is to make cars fail-safe, so they cannot exceed posted limits. The technology is certainly here, with GPS, RFID and car-based computer power and ‘fly-by-wire’ controls. It’s just a matter of political will. Who is prepared to take on the car makers who sell speed as well as function with their “hero” car marketing? Who will stand up and be prepared to save thousands, if not millions of lives, by simply rendering cars safe from law-abuse? Whoever takes this on will be called undemocratic for starters – the “freedom fighters” of this world will say that it’s not the car that breaks the law, it’s the driver. And haven’t we heard that line before?

Here’s one less pollutant to worry about – for now. From Sciencemag.com:

The 100,000 or so ships that make up the global commercial and military fleet collectively travel billions of vessel-miles every year, producing a large fraction of the pollution contributed by fossil fuel burning in the transportation sector. In addition to the direct radiative effects of their emissions, caused by the light-scattering properties of the particles themselves, aerosols from the exhaust plumes can produce thin lines of very low clouds in the marine boundary layer, an example of the aerosol indirect effect. It has been shown that the local effects of these clouds can be large, up to 100 W/m2 (for comparison, the average solar flux at the top of the atmosphere is about 340 W/m2), but how large an influence they exert on the global albedo has been an unresolved concern. Schreier et al. analyzed a full year of satellite data derived from ENVISAT AATSR (Environmental Satellite Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer) in order to estimate the size of the radiative forcing caused by ship tracks. They found that, contrary to fears arising from previous global model estimates, the global annual mean radiative forcing from ship tracks was small, 0.4 to 0.6 mW/m2, and negligible compared to estimates of total net anthropogenic radiative forcing, 0.6 to 2.4 W/m2. Thus, it seems that ship tracks are too inconsequential to affect the rate of anthropogenic global warming.

It seems like a big one to wipe of the list, but it’s just one of many “big ones”. Just off the top of my head, how about (in no particular order):

1. Jet exhaust at altitude
2. Jet-related contrail formation at altitude
3. All fossil fuel exhausts at any altitude
4. Methane release from garbage
5. Methane release from cows
6. Carbon release from land clearing
7. Carbon release from intentional fires
8. Carbon release from unintentional fires
9. Diesel particulates
10. Wood stove and wood heater particulates and carbon release.

Here’s a list, for starters… anyone reckon any of this represents a valid, logical and reasoned argument for speeding?

1. I’m in a hurry
2. I was overtaking
3. I’m rich
4. It’s my right
5. It’s a democracy
6. I’m a good driver
7. I don’t want to hold up traffic
8. I don’t get caught anyway, so what’s the problem?
9. If I do get caught I just pay the fine, it’s like a toll not a punishment
10. It’s revenue raising (see below for police conspiracies against me)
11. What harm can I do by speeding?
12. Everyone does it
13. Fuel’s so cheap, I can do it without real cost
14. Breaking the law gives me a buzz
15. I like to go fast, it feels good
16. My mates told me to
17. Sometimes you have to speed to avoid an accident
18. I wasn’t watching the speedo
19. It’s dangerous to watch the speedo
20. I was on the phone
21. I was distracted
22. I missed the sign
23. There are too many signs, it’s their fault
24. This car’s too quiet
25. This car’s too powerful (ie blame GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Hyundai, whoever, but not me)
26. The laws are too complicated
27. The police were hiding, I shouldn’t have been caught (see below for police conspiracies against me)
28. You should catch the bad drivers who get in my way and stop writing this trash (I just can’t stop writing this trash!)
29. I’m not well, I just can’t stop doing it
30. It’s my medication (hey, that’s not a bad one)
31. They are out to get me and it’s all set up to trap me, so I’ll let them get me anyway (perhaps it’s the medication)
32. The police are revenue raising and forced me to speed past their cunningly disguised traps (conspiracy theory 1)
33. The police are revenue raising and out to get me, no matter what I do, so what the heck (2)
34. The police are revenue raising and have poorly calibrated measuring instruments, so how do they know anyway? (3)
35. I was only just over the limit, that’s not speeding (see also ‘everyone does it’) (4)
36. The law is an ass.

It’s a side issue to my pet subject of global warming, or to society generally, but one I find curiously unexplored in the media. It’s treated as a joke, a laugh, something of little consequence rather than a clear case of inadequate lawmaking and ongoing civil disobedience. It’s the question of why we let virtually anyone drive, and then let them do practically anything once they are driving. Yes, we expect them to keep to the left or right, and to not actually hit anyone else (but they do). But generally we just let them go off and do what they like within some very broad guidelines. However the road laws are indeed law, and laws are meant to be respected. So why do we let people hit each other, to speed, to park wherever they like, fail to indicate, fail to stop at stop lights and stop signs, and often to just disregard the rules of the road? Why is that?
Do you disagree? Did you just cop a speeding ticket and are indignant about it? Well being caught may hurt for a short while but honestly you have been getting away with it for years, haven’t you? What did you expect? A public service medal? Most people simply get away with it, most of the time. More than likely you have been ‘getting away with it’ for years yourself and have habituated speeding or other sloppy habits. Just check out any public street, and watch the lawbreakers as they zoom past or park haphazardly. OK, so it’s not that I am advocating a police state, and yes, road rules like other laws are also there to be challenged, but the challenges have to be scrutinised and pass muster on a broader community level, surely. So why do we treat core safety issues like speeding, that is disobeying the posted speed limit, so lightly? Now if a transport professional breaks a reasonable and related law they are reprimanded, punished and disciplined until they conform. And the media comes down on them like a ton (or perhaps tonne) of bricks if they don’t. Whether it’s a airline pilot, a train driver or a bus driver, they can expect to be brought into line, generally, and swiftly. And certainly not let off lightly like it doesn’t really matter. Yet the unprofessional driver is let loose, largely to just get on with it. If they get caught and fined it’s often portrayed in the media as ‘revenue raising’ and written off as something that we all do and, well, ‘what the heck’. Only if they are elderly (and by definition doddery and therefore a danger to us all) or young (and surely inexperienced, menacing hoons, and thus also dangers to us all) are they castigated on a regular basis. But why is it so, and should we let it be, or should we actually do something about it?
Well the answer’s obvious, and it comes in 2 parts. Firstly we can’t afford to police the entirety of the wide open road. It’s too broad, with too many miscreants out there to catch them all, all of the time. Secondly we’ve created a (western) world where we need to travel by car. Shops are often too far away to walk, jobs are no longer confined to ‘traditional’ working hours and are scattered about, and public transport is often patchy at best. So economics alone dictates that we make cars simple, cheap, easy to use and available to all who need them. And as a consequence we go lightly on both driver qualifications and reprimands for driver ‘infringements’. If we applied tougher rules, or even applied our existing rules in a diligent manner then we’d actually remove that accessibility for a large number of people and hurt them socially and economically, and as a corollary hurt the politicians who act on our behalf. If they hurt the number of people they’d have to hurt to fix the problem they’d simply get voted out. Cars have been democratized, it’s effectively enshrined as a freedom.
We could try education. Or praise rather than punishment. And we could move the punishment closer in time and space to the actual law-breaking, but this is just the trimmings. Fact is that most people choose to break these laws, knowing the consequences, or the lack thereof. There’s a disconnect here, between what we see as unacceptable when it happens to us, and how we perceive our own actions when we ourselves are breaking the rules. I’ll prattle on some more, later.