Author Archives: Adam Clare

Driving Kills the Planet, Here’s How to End the Obsession with Cars

Intersection

Smoking is bad for your health, yet people still smoke. Driving is bad for your health, yet people still drive. Over the last half century we’ve worked hard to help people quit smoking and deter people from engaging in the behaviour in the first place. It’s time we help people quit driving and deter them from even starting.

The reasons people think they need are a car stem from many directions. The way cities and suburban locations are built are designed for limited mobility (car focused), cities don’t provide non-car options, and just like tobacco there’s big money encouraging everyone to drive. Over at Vox they’ve outlined multiple approaches to getting people out of their cars and into the world.

End single-family zoning to encourage mixed-use development
On its face, single-family zoning is a housing policy that creates quiet, uncrowded neighborhoods by restricting the development of apartments, townhouses, or any other dwelling that’s not a freestanding home. It’s incredibly prevalent in the US (75 percent of residential land is single-family zoned), and, as my colleague Jerusalem Demsas points out, it is incredibly harmful. It has had a racist impact, having been used to exclude people of color from certain neighborhoods, and it overall increases the cost of housing by limiting supply.

Read more.

Battery Electric Freight Trains can Help Reduce Emissions

Trains are great for efficiently moving freight long distances and are used the world over. Many regions already have all electric rail systems, but in North America electric adoption hasn’t happened. Historically, this has been due to the installation and maintenance costs for the vast distances of overhead electric wires. Advances in battery technology hopes to change this.

An American company, Wabtec, built and tested their FLXdrive engine last year and found it worked rather well. The engine is built on the same platform as their Diesel engines but runs off of batteries more powerful than a Tesla’s and can regenerate energy with braking.

However, the environmental benefits of rail have been undermined by the heavy reliance upon diesel to fuel freight trains, as well as a widespread preference among businesses to move goods via trucks rather than trains. This is a problem globally beyond the U.S. — the International Energy Agency has said that freight rail is “often neglected” in climate debates and currently carries only seven per cent of all freight moved around the world.

…

A greater tonnage of goods is now moved by trucks on roads than by rail, however, and the rail industry hopes action on the climate crisis will prove advantageous to its own prospects. “If we decarbonize all of the locomotives and decrease the number of trucks, we will get to where we need to be,” said Gebhardt. Medium and heavy-duty trucks are responsible for about a quarter of all U.S. emissions from transportation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than double the pollution emitted by aircraft.

Read more.

Canadians – Go Vote!

vote sign

Slap on that mask and get out to you local voting location! This election may be the most. boring in a long time, but it’s important to exercise this very important aspect of democracy. Check out the recap of the election on Wikipedia. Remember this time voting may take longer than normal due to the pandemic.

Over at Settlement.org they have an overview of what you need to vote:

To vote in a Canadian federal election you must be:

  • a Canadian citizen (temporary and permanent residents cannot vote)

  • 18 years old or older on election day

  • a resident in the electoral district

  • registered on the Voters List (also called the list of electors)

If you meet the first 3 requirements but are not on the Voters List, you must add your name to the list using the online voters registration service or by handing in a Registration Certificate at your local polling station or Elections Canada office.

Don’t like the way democracy is practiced in Canada and what to explore better, more democratic, ways to vote? We’ll, you should check out Teardown, it’s an absolutely fantastic book by Dave Merlin that explores tried and true alternatives to our current system.

Go vote to make things even gooder!

To Revive Main Streets Let’s Make them People Focussed Instead of Business Focussed

Since the proliferation of big box stores and malls small cities have been struggling to keep their downtowns engaging and profitable for businesses. What if we rethought our downtowns to be about people and making a community instead of profit centres? That’s the very question a small city in the UK asked and found the answer was to make the city for people. They converted old stores to community spaces and sure enough more people kept showing up. Now their city is vibrant and businesses want to be there to capture all the foot traffic. If you put people first then the rest will follow.

The Stockton vision is to buy up, repurpose, restore and reconfigure the heart of the town, emphasising events, independent enterprise, green space and conviviality. As a glamorous statement of intent, in just over a fortnight one of the finest art deco theatres in Britain will reopen its doors. The Globe, a Grade II listed building, has stood derelict on the high street for a quarter of a century, rotting from within. Built in 1935, in its heyday it hosted the Beatles, Little Richard and Stevie Wonder. On 6 September, McFly will play the first gig of a new era, at the biggest venue of its kind between Newcastle and Leeds.

The cost of the lavish and exquisite restoration – funded by council borrowing and a lottery grant – soared close to £30m and has generated political pushback. But according to Claire Frawley, the council’s town centre development officer, it will provide jobs, a revitalised sense of place and a footfall of up to 200,000 visitors a year, acting as a regenerative hub for the new Stockton.

“People are desperate to get involved,” says Frawley, “they’re desperate to come and work here. There will be public tours soon, and the local demand is huge. This place is part of the town’s heritage and you can feel the pride.”

Read more.

Digital Violence Exposes NSO’s Tools Targetting Activists

computer screen

NSO made the news again due to their tools being used to spy on Bahraini and Hungarian activists, which obviously isn’t good. NSO is a cyber security organization that focuses on offensive rather than defence; they sell hacking tools and exploits to target individuals. Anyone with enough money can buy their attack tools, including rich individuals or companies. In Mexico their spying tool was used to intimidate campaigners asking the government to regulate sugar content in sofas.

We know spying on human rights activists is not good for anyone, and three organizations teamed up to expose how NSO supports such spying (and thus abuse). Forensic Architecture, Amnesty International, and Citizen Lab all worked together to create a neat website called Digital Violence which explores the complexity and reach of NSO’s tools.

First detected in 2015, the NSO Group’s Pegasus malware has reportedly been used in at least 45 countries worldwide to infect the phones of activists, journalists and human rights defenders. Having learnt that our former collaborators and close associates were hacked by Pegasus, Forensic Architecture undertook 15 months of extensive open-source research, interviews assisted by Laura Poitras, and developed bespoke software to present this data as an interactive 3D platform, along with video investigations narrated by Edward Snowden to tell the stories of the individuals targeted and the web of corporate affiliations within which NSO is nested. Supported by Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab, our analysis reveals relations and patterns between separate incidents in the physical and digital sphere, demonstrating how infections are entangled with real world violence, and extend within the professional and personal networks of civil society actors worldwide.

Check out digital violence.

One way to defend yourself from NSO group and other malicious agents is to keep your software up to date. Apple released a patch this week, so update your Apple devices.