Adam Clare

UK: Uber Drivers are Employees not Individual Entrepreneurs

Uber drivers in the UK will now get better treatment from Uber thanks to the courts ruling the company can’t as robustly exploit their drivers. The way drivers get gigs and subsequently paid by the company structurally mean the company has control all aspects of the process, which means the drivers are workers since they actually have no control over key aspects of the job. This is a blow against Uber which skirts the laws in multiple countries and this decision in the UK will resonant throughout the entire gig economy.

The court considered several elements in its judgement:

Uber set the fare which meant that they dictated how much drivers could earn

Uber set the contract terms and drivers had no say in them

Request for rides is constrained by Uber who can penalise drivers if they reject too many rides

Uber monitors a driver’s service through the star rating and has the capacity to terminate the relationship if after repeated warnings this does not improve

Looking at these and other factors, the court determined that drivers were in a position of subordination to Uber where the only way they could increase their earnings would be to work longer hours.

Highways Make Traffic Worse, Transit Improves Traffic

Regular readers of this site already know that highways are amongst the worst ways to move people effectively and also a way to ensure urban development is built to cater to cars instead of human beings. Yet, in Ontario the government wants to build a $6 billion highway to promote low-density car-based development and increase the region’s carbon output. The utterly incompetent Conservative party is set on destroying the efforts of environmentalists and farmers to conserve prime farming land.

Building a highway isn’t good. If you want to actually improve transportation in Ontario – or almost anywhere – build better public transit. Vox explores this concept in a recent video.

The concept of induced demand has been around since the 1960s â€” nearly as long as the inception of the federal highway system â€” and has been proven by several studies since. But it still hasnâ€™t stemmed the tide of big, expensive highway infrastructure projects as a Band-Aid to congestion.

The Argument to Shrink the Economy Keeps Getting Stronger

The idea that we can eventually decarbonize our economy to keep it growing has been talked about for decades; sadly we’re far away from a carbon neutral economy and even it we did achieve such an economic system we still need to shrink it. What makes a “good” economy is up to us since we create the rules and laws around economic practices. Currently we designed our economic systems to be inherently unsustainable since it’s based on growth for the sake of wealth production. Instead we can make economic systems that favour environmental protection, economic equality, or any other good idea.

Regardless, we can start making more people aware that we need to shrink, rather than grow, the economy.

Green growth, Hickel concludes, is an ecologically incoherent â€œfairy tale.â€ If this seems harsh, consider what the ecomodernist position asks us to believe. The current system requires annual growth of roughly 3 percent to avoid the shock of recession. This means doubling the size of the economy every 23 years. The economy of 2000 must be 20 times larger in the year 2100, and 370 times larger in the year 2200. The green growth position rests on the assumption that this can go on, basically forever, because innovation will â€œdematerializeâ€ the economy. Yet 2000 was the first year that, according to experts, humanity used more energy and materials than the safe limit. And the growth economy, far from dematerializing, remains geared toward expanding future markets for extremely materials-heavy products like Tesla cybertrucks and Apple iPhones. Comparing this to a fairy tale is, if anything, too generous, since childrenâ€™s stories usually involve some kind of moral lesson applicable to the real world.

Condos Looking to the Ground for Energy

When you think about geothermal power you may think of giant installations benefiting from the heat the earth produces; however much smaller geothermal setups exist. These smaller systems are often called geoexchanges since they cycle heat from the ground to the building above or vice versa. Small residential systems can take a long time to recoup the costs of installation and demand for these small systems keeps increasing. Larger installations for condo buildings can see positive returns very quickly due to the sheer quantity of energy those buildings need. The good news here is that more and more condos are looking to this more sustainable source of heating and cooling.

Lloyd Jacobs, general manager of FortisBC Alternative Energy Services, which has installed geothermal systems in dozens of multi-residential buildings in B.C., said there is “a huge demand” for alternative heating systems in large buildings that might have been heated by fossil fuels or baseboard heaters in the past.

Traditionally, a challenge for geothermal energy is the high cost of digging and installing the borefield â€” that is, the liquid-filled underground loops that store and supply the heating and cooling to the system.

But Martin Luymes, vice-president of government relations for the Heating Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Institute of Canada, said those upfront expenses are now offset by savings from things like lower energy and maintenance costs in as little as three to five years for large buildings.