It is solved by walking

 

Went to see the Richard Long exhibition at the Tate Britain.

At first there seems something banal, too cool and reductive about it – but then like settling into the rhythm of a long walk…

Relativity and measurement

Straight lines and meanders

Stone and water

Movement and stillness

Outside and Inside

The transient and the long lasting

The physical and the temporal

Circles and squares

Limited and liberating

Chance and intent

Walking, eating, sleeping

And always the walk

Of his walks I dreamt most about walking until the first cloud appears in the sky, walking from Stonehenge to Glastonbury on June 21st, and walking every track and road within a certain radius of the Cerne Abbas Giant

solvitur ambulando

Plug in cars on their way – but too little too late?

 

 

I’ve posted some fairly upbeat posts about tackling climate change recently – but there was a less than optimistic message about the latest climate change science from Dr Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change to this year’s big low carbon vehicle event and conference held at London’s City Hall.

Here’s what came out of it…

Health warning: this was based on my notes – plus the issues are highly technical, and many of them are moving so fast that it’s difficult to for anyone to provide a settled overview.

The context is scary…very scary

Dr Kevin Anderson, Research Director for the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research presented on the latest climate change science.

It’s looking very unlikely we will manage to reign in GHG emissions to prevent dangerous climate change of 2 degrees. The science says we will have to make monumental efforts to rapidly reduce GHG if we are to avoid far worse than that including the serious risk of runaway climate change scenarios based on a series of possible tipping points and feedback loops (including the land mass becoming a carbon source rather than a carbon sink)

GHG emissions are still rising. The time for action on a scale we have never achieved so far is now.

We need to stop thinking about long term targets and start acting now – as given that carbon hangs around for 100 years it is cumulative amounts that matter – not what we may do in the year 2049.

You want more challenges? By 2050 the population of the world is forecast to be 9 billion (up from 6.7 billion today) and the number of light duty vehicles is expected to triple.

Is the Government providing enough leadership

According to the poll of LCVP members – not enough.

According to the car and oil industry – yes. Government is setting a clear direction and the car industry is only heading in one direction now – which is lower carbon.

But…there’s a view from the car and oil industry that regulation and target setting needs to go global. There are too many different targets and standards for car emissions in different parts of the world.

General feeling was perhaps that yes the Gov was showing leadership – but not enough given the scale of the challenge. This is not a problem that can be solved by consumers exercising moral fibre and informed choices alone.

Car industry – dinosaurs or innovative thinkers?

Well…the overall view from the industry appeared to be that they will keep pushing the boundaries on these new fangled technologies and options but incremental improvements to petrol and diesel power would inevitably be the main focus for the short to medium term. And the EU targets for car emissions (that they helped water down) were very tough and challenging.

However, the sudden demise of the reactionary US car industry and its partial take over by Obama is a sign of paradigm shift.

Toyota rep also suggested that the future was e-transport and that the current model of car ownership could fragment into car clubs, leasing, rental and smartcard access to different travel options.

So where are we going on low, and ultra low carbon vehicles

Unfortunately it’s too early to know what the winning technologies and fuels are…and there’s no ‘silver bullet’. At the conference were exponents of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and Shell made a strong case for advanced high tech bio-fuels. However, plug-in cars have emerged as the option that everybody wants to talk about.

Bring on the plug-in cars?

The technologies are coming on leaps and bounds (outside were electric, fuel cell and hybrid cars and vans that had just completed a London to Brighton demonstrator run). An electric four seater Mitsubishi car will be available for purchase in November – there was also an e-Mini which is currently being trialled by BMW. Many of these vehicles now have a range of 80 to 100 miles and look and increasingly perform like regular cars.

They may not be competitively priced though – either for the vehicle or fuel. Ford rep reckoned it would be another decade before they were.

And they need the infrastructure (ie the charge points). Denmark and Israel are racing away on this but Boris Johnson told the conference that he wants London in the mix and will be aiming to have the infrastructure in place for 100,000 electric cars in 2015. Though will there be the affordable vehicles to take advantage of that infrastructure (see above)?

Then there’s the batteries. Hard to tell from the claim and counter claim at the conference (plus it’s a technical area in which I’m not at expert) but there are further issues relating to weight and charging. You will never be able to charge them up rapidly – so garages where you can change the used-up battery for a charged-up one (rather than have the car out of action for hours while the used-up battery is re-charged) might also be needed.

One of the car industry reps says that battery cars are where mobile phones and laptops were a decade ago – in other words before they became light, reliable and convenient.

And of course if the electricity that feeds the plug-in cars was generated in a dirty, carbon-intensive way then the carbon gains from plug-in cars are significantly reduced.

The attraction of plug-in cars to politicians appeared to me to be that it doesn’t involve tough, complex and often unpopular policies like LEZs or road user charging – you can tell people they get to keep their cars and the culture that goes with it – but now it’s green. Plus plug in cars are just that little bit over the horizon – so no immediate political downsides or tricky practical issues to be dealt with now.

All of which helps explain why electric cars are so hot right now for Politicians in the US and round the World. This includes our own Lord Adonis who majored on plug-ins in his speech to the conference (though unless I’m missing something there’s no clarity on how precisely we get from DfT support for the concept to a worked through plan for achieving it on the ground)

I may well be wrong on this but is there a danger that by going for an over the horizon technology is a displacement activity for getting on with mass conventional hybrid introduction??? Or will we end up with plug-in hybrids as the intermediate stage (the third generation Prius will be a plug in Hybrid)???

And finally on electric cars – there was a film out a few years back called ‘Who killed the electric car?’ A docco about how the electric car was sabotaged by the industry. Now the makers of that film are making a new film about the return of the electric car.

What about buses?

Buses hardly got a mention at the conference – which underlines what we’ve heard elsewhere which is that the Gov and industry focus will be car and light vans. Because of their volume and because they are easy to decarbonise (because they are lighter)

Not good news for the environmental credentials of the bus (already the largest source of NOX emissions in many town centres and when its carbon advantages are not as significant as perhaps many might think).

However, there was some interesting stuff on how some cities are forging ahead on bio-gas powered vehicles from municipal waste. Lille and Graz for example have been powering their entire bus fleet with gas from municipal waste for years. I’m not sure why other than for regulatory reasons – why we couldn’t have a similar pilot here.

Indeed one speaker argued that municipal authorities are the right unit of Government for piloting significant low carbon vehicle fleets – as the nation-state can be too large but a city that knows where it’s going can give the market and innovators the confidence to invest.

Green Alliance Climate Change debate

Went to an interesting debate hosted by the Green Alliance last night, which featured leads from the three main parties on climate change.

Key themes:

- the biggest issue on climate change is can a global deal be done (given this requires the developed world to support the developing world)?

- there is a consensus between the three main parties on climate change (all three supported the Climate Change Act) and there will need to continue to be an anti-democratic conspiracy between the three main parties as tackling climate change will require a radical, dramatic and sometimes unpopular thirty year strategy which is systematically followed through

- this is a debate that’s moving fast (thank god). Less than a year ago carbon trading was the sole answer. Now its carbon trading plus direct intervention – for example the recent moves on carbon capture for coal-fired power stations.  Some of this more interventionist policy is also a good example of politicians over-riding the civil service which in many Departments suffers from ‘producer capture’. It’s a good sign -  but it’s a shame its taken so long for a Labour Government to start to do this.

- the Climate Change Act is revolutionary because it is not based on economics or cost benefit analysis – its based on regulation, and it has the support of all three parties

- should climate change continute to be labelled and marginalised as an ‘environmental’ issue by the media anymore?

- one of the next phases of the climate change debate will be that climate change is coming and this is what it means for the UK. This will bring people up short.

- NGOs and the green movement are important in this debate because they play an important part in forming and informing public opinion. The politicians on the panel appealed to the green movement to move from a negative, doomy stance (which promotes a feeling of helplessness among the public) to an Obama-style, we can rise to this challenge approach. Hilary Benn used a Martin Luther King analogy. King’s speech was ‘We have a dream’ not ‘We have a nightmare’

There was some good insights from a Mori pollster on the pannel on public opinion.

- The public are fatalistic about climate change – it’s now seen like death and taxes. Undesirable but what can you do?

-  One of the very few things that pollsters can find consensus on among the public is that one of the best things about England is its heritage – and that includes the landscape. Is there a way in which this can be utilised in the climate change debate?

- The public want and expect the Government to take on climate change and be innovative about it. But they want it to be done fairly. Fairness is key. As an aside it struck me that a perceived sense of the lack of fairness of Manchester’s road user charging proposals could be one factor in why the vote was so heavily against. 

All in all a very thoughtful and high quality debate – and encouraging. As in my previous post on the mass introduction of CNG vehicles in Delhi I think fatalism about climate change is a cop out. It’s now a practical challenge so let’s gone with it – win or lose. 

Also it wasn’t the kind of debate that you normally get to hear as it’s unlikely the mainstream media would ever be likely to cover it unmediated by reductive cliches. But then right now the mainstream media is obsessed with politician’s expenses rather than climate change - the public’s reaction to which underlines how reassuring important to Brits is the notion of  ‘fairness’.

Telly Savalas confesses his love for 1970s Birmingham

Jacque Derrida cannot find anything to say on the subject of love

On resisting becoming a hollow careerist…

Am writing something for print publication about Barbara Castle and the fortieth anniversary of the 1968 Transport Act – which will appear on here later. But one quote from her that I came across in the research struck me.

‘There are great temptations to play safe, and then I think a slow moral corruption sets in…the higher you go the more you’ve got to lose. It becomes easier to argue with yourself. And it can be a very tricky thing indeed, this. You need timing and you need judgement and you need courage’

Which reminded me of a Julian Cope quote from his autobiography, ‘Repossessed’

‘The road to enlightenment was an uphill cycle path with a maximum speed of 5 mph. And every day was getting steeper. The road to narrow-mindedness was an eight-lane freeway, downhill all the way. It would have been such a pleasure to drive on. But I couldn’t take the risk – there was no f******g speed limit at all’

Waking life

Watched Richard Linklater’s ‘Waking Life’ on the laptop on an evening train from Euston to Liverpool tonight. I’d seen it before so I knew broadly what to expect and let the animated talking heads undulate and philosophise as my eyes drifted from the screen to the views out of the window, and back again. The train was quiet and the landscape seemed to empty out into the long summer’s evening. I fell into some kind of hinterland between wakefulness and dreaming. A sense of possibility, of unknowing. A welcome interlude. Just as the train was pulling into Liverpool Lime St the film ended.

Some Tilda Swinton sites and connections

My favorite portraits of Tilda Swinton – by Kim Andreolli

The blessed Tilda is now better known after winning an Oscar…and how cool is this for a morning after winning an Oscar pic?

She’s also been attracting more attention recently for her domestic arrangements in the far North of Scotland. Her husband John Byrne was the creator of the lost classic ‘Tutti Frutti’ comedy drama about the reunion tour of a washed up rock and roll band which featured the then relatively unknown Robbie Coltrane and Emma Thompson. Richard Wilson was great in the show as the band’s manager, Eddie Clockerty. Love to see it again (it was only broadcast twice – twenty years ago, though the net suggests it may yet be re-released on DVD). Richard Wilson would be far better remembered for this than the godawful one-note, ‘one foot in the grave’.

I was lucky enough to see Tilda Swinton on the stage in 1988 (she prefers cinema to the stage) at the Royal Court theatre in ‘Man for Man’. A one woman play by Manfred Karge about a German woman who survives the worst of the 20th Century by pretending to be a man. Roaring and owning the stage in a donkey jacket and construction worker’s boots.

Though I never did see her in ‘The Maybe’ – where she slept in a glass case as part of a Corneila Parker instalation at the Serpentine gallery in 1995.

Tilda was also Muse to St Derek Jarman and she’s been keeping the flame alive in a series of valedictions, letters,

lectures and a recent documentary (which I haven’t yet seen).

One of these lectures is an extra feature on the BFI DVD of ‘Last of England’ - the text of which went something like this.

A second lecture was published in Vertigo magazine and echoes some of the same themes.

You can also see her here giving a wider talk about her ‘life in pictures’ for BAFTA.

So British yet so other worldly. Those eyes and that voice, are encapsulated in this…

Belgium – Jonathan Meades investigates

Ive got a soft spot for some of the traditional travel essays, like Palin and Coast but find it increasingly hard to accept the central conceit of these programmes ie that Palin has just turned up at some village and met some interesting characters by chance – when everyone knows its all been researched to an inch of its life and there’s a huge crew in tow.

Then there’s the default TV position now that if the material is anyway challenging then it needs an alternative comedian, or an all-purpose TV personality with limited knowledge of the subject, to condescend to them about it, and ensure that the irony quota is met.

Or if they do know something about what they are talking about they tend to be a breathless Poshos – like Cruickshank – sucking all the life out of what should be fascinating topics with his heavy breathing ‘you are an idiot’ guides.

For example the BFI’s version of the Mitchell and Kenyon films treats its material, and the people depicted, with dignity and gives it the footage the space to speak for itself. The Cruickshank version is scared to let the pictures and the facts speak for themselves. It has to keep us distracted with pre-masticated intepretation.

As the TV channels successfully prosecute the war against intelligence (you can have middle brow or popular culture and that’s your lot) – it feels like it must be a result of some contractual error that Jonathan Meades still ever appears on terestial.

What Meades does is what all good film and TV essayists does which is to explore and play with the constraints, conceits and potential of the medium in a way that helps them to provide a distinctive take on an issue that fascinates or obsesses them.

There should be a channel for them. Patrick Keiller, Adam Curtis, Humphrey Jennings, John Betjeman… Has there been anything better on TV recently than the Power of Nightmares? Going further back John Betjeman’s Metroland is 50 minutes of TV that is hard to beat.

Fortunately there is now a channel of sorts of Jonathan Meades essays – Meades Shrine on You Tube.

There’s plenty to go at – but the programme he did on Belgium stuck in my memory from seeing it the first time round.

I can never make my mind up what I think about Belgium – never mind whether I like it or not. And Meades just adds more layers to disorientate you. Belgium manages to be both scruffy and slightly louche, conservative, bureaucratic and morose whilst being serious about sensual excess and reveling in artistic and architectural styles that feel like dreaming following too much cheese and alcohol. A place where ludicrous minor laws are rigorously enforced but where paedophile killers can go on the rampage indefinitely.

Confused you will be…

Atmospheres 2 at the London Museum of Garden History

Lectures are the new rock n roll, or the new indie, or the new alt cinema or something.

I’ve got no interest in laborious formal education. Tedious. People who have taught the same stuff too many times to people who are only there for a secondary reason – like they need to do a five year stretch of it before they can get a half decent job. Usually all you learn is that you should have had the confidence not to feel that you needed to take the class in the first place. I never want to do another exam again.

But I do like these informal, temporary free universities. Where people congregate for no other reason that they are drawn to the subject. Looking for leads and following threads in areas that lie adjacent to conventional academia.

Atmospheres 2 focused on ‘Hauntology’. Various definitions of this slippery concept can be found on the web. I liked this one: ‘Derrida in his Specters of Marx …reflects on the persistance of the concept of (utopian) revolution despite its apparent eradication from the scene of politics and history (the book is ‘work of mourning’ published in the early 90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inaugeration of the ‘end of history’). As such the concept of social and political revolution takes on a ghostly aspect – present and not present, eluding the categorical definition of western metaphysics, apparently erased yet still palpable in traces and echoes and uncanny visitations.”

At the event Mark Fisher was the only speaker to take us deep into hauntological ideas. What I took from his talk is that hauntology is some kind of unauthorised crackle and hiss in the background music. Some surviving memory of consciousness within the all enveloping spectacle of global capitalism. In the utter and unprecedented cultural stagnation and inertia this is not endlessly repackaged nostalgia but flashbacks flaring in the gloom.

‘Can we be guided by these lights…instead of the the ultra bright strip lights drawing planetary destiny into an eternal shopping mall surrounded by a sweatshop?’

Somewhat at a tangent Paul Devereux’s talk set out the latest developments in the unifying theory of pre-historic sites.

That these sites operated on all levels.

- The stones sang (you hit them – they ring)

- The caves and tombs respond to noise at mind-altering frequencies

- The stones themselves were understood to have healing properties

- These sites are physically located at the epicentre of the landscapes

- The accompanying cave paintings or rock markings are made up of trance-friendly dots

- Psychedelic plants are found nearby these sites

Some of these ideas are emerging at the Preseli Hills end of the Bluestones’ journey to Stonehenge where Paul Deverux and his merry men are plotting out the landscape in this new multi-dimensional language of the Neolithic landscape.

One of the reasons why I too have been to the ruined sites of the Preseli Hills sites. And why so many people are attracted to ruins – was illuminated in a talk by Christopher Woodward, author of Ruins.

We like ruins because we us our imaginations to fill the gaps.

The overgrown ruins of Rome inspired countless poems, paintings, essays and novels. Once they were cleaned up in the 20th Century the flow of creativity stopped abruptly.

These ruins also help in powering societies cyclical periods of anxiety. Rome being the uber ruin. The most powerful warning particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries – as the Coliseum was still one of the biggest structures in the world right into the early Victorian era.

In the evening there was music – but we left.

We’d done the lectures.