The weekday vegetarian movement is a good one, but people are unlikely to stop eating meat when the vegetarian alternatives violate the first commandment of food photography: thou shalt not let thine food look like roadkill.

'Hen of the woods mushrooms' dish by Treehugger's resident weekday vegetarian correspondent, Kelly Rossiter.

Often a description alone can provide enticement enough for people to want to eat something. Vegweb.com user Keyja had at least partly the right idea, by choosing to call their dish “Yummiest seitan ever”, rather than “Yummiest mock abalone duck ever” as might be more appropriate. Why then did they not think twice about this photo?

Seitan: who dares wins.

In general, photographs of food should be faintly recognisable – something which is often facilitated by ensuring that photos are posted upright.

This, apparently, is "College Girls Easiest Cheesiest Tamales", submitted by vegweb.com user tamaraschance.

Finally, a note to baypuppy, that food which looks like post-consumer waste is not appetising, even if it is New & Improved Smooth Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge.

Fudge. A British startup plans to harvest by-product gases from its production for use in the town gas network.

People, let’s not forget that meat production accounts for up to a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases, that high-meat diets are more likely to kill people, and that ultimately, there are few things more abject than eating the shit-infused remains of an animal that lived its life in a factory farm.

It’s easy for meat eaters to forget these things when the alternatives look like hell.

"Lentil soup", by laurel4 on vegweb.com.

Embeds aren’t working at this particular moment, so go here and gasp…

There are many descriptions for what Ambi Pur does.  They are referred to as providers of home fragrance, as ambience creators, and as being in the air care business.

In practice, they manufacture little canisters which plug into power points and periodically squirt chemicals at you, giving your sinuses a coat which prevents you from smelling properly, and might also give you cancer for good measure.

The flavours offered in the new National Geographic range give a glimpse of the future, with the Nevada Desert fragrance and a fragment of a vanishing past with the Glacier Bay fragrance, but there’s no whiff of irony in any of this.

What the hell is going on?

Have the National Geographic marketing team been reading too much Baudrillard?

I think it’s missing something.  Where’s Jonah when you need him?

Intellectual property laws are rearing their heads behind the scenes, and the question is how they should apply to ‘green technologies’.  It’s also a question of what differences there should be between the way IP law applies to the developed and developing worlds.

It’s a debate which has been happening in other areas for decades.  Drug companies and western governments have been accused of holding back treatments from the developing world to protect their patent rights.  The argument goes that by vigorously protecting patents in drugs such as anti-retrovirals, and refusing to allow generic versions to be produced, they are refusing care to millions of people.

Does the same argument apply over green technology as well?

The Intellectual Property Watch blog thinks it might:

The position of the Group of 77 plus China is fixed on saying that IP is important and represents a barrier to technology transfer, some delegates said. For developed countries, IP rights are not seen as preventing technology transfer but rather providing incentives for innovation.

In other words, developing countries are arguing that they need access to green technologies (presumably at cheap rates) if they are to control greenhouse emissions.  Developed countries (who are generally responsible for inventing the technology and who stand to gain from the Intellectual property in it) say that without them having strong rights to charge for their inventions, the inventions simply won’t be made.

The presence of China amongst the Group of 77 certainly complicates things – no doubt the US and EU will be rather sceptical of China crying poor over green technology, but it’s a very interesting source of debate.

When boiled down into brutal terms, it’s rather different from the debates about drugs.  In the realpolitik of trade debates, countries which hold IP rights can afford to sit by and do nothing about providing drugs to the developing world – they feel they have nothing to gain on the balance sheet from helping.

But in the case of climate change, the effects of pollution in the developing world have an impact on the rest of the world – it’s a problem which doesn’t respect national borders, and everyone has an equal interest in access to green technology being as widespread as possible.

Let’s hope that important debates like these are had out in the open and get some media coverage, instead of the same old arid talk about whose job it is to fix the climate.

And after such an appalling rehearsal with the drugs debate, let’s just hope the west gets the balance right this time around.

Image from tim tolle on Flickr.

Indeed, given the antics of musical car horns, whistle tips, and large mufflers, the idea of artificial noise being installed in hybrids is not an appealing one.

But there does seem to be a genuine problem here, and Radio Netherlands Worldwide’s rather endearing Earthbeat program brought in Lawrence Rosenblum – a perceptional psychologist from the University of California Riverside to talk about it.

He argued that pedestrians are being hit by hybrid cars in greater numbers than other cars, because they don’t have car noise to warn them of approaching danger.  He argued in very reasonable terms for hybrids to make an artificial sound when they are traveling at less than 20 miles per hour.  This is the speed at which hybrids are almost silent, and also a common speed in pedestrian zones.

Lotus has been looking at installing sound devices in hybrids. Image from Lotus, via Treehugger.

As cars travel faster, sounds associated with wind resistance and tyre movement start to take over.  He noted that the sound would help the blind, but also be a much more subtle cue for people with full sight.

It’s a bit annoying to think that we have to artificially make things more noisy, but not such a big deal in the scheme of things, and surely a debate worth having.

Enter Paul Scott from Plug-In America…

His main objection to the idea was that it would drive him “crazy”, but he then carried on with some real craziness…

He resorted to saying the way to save peoples’ lives is to not burn petrol and diesel.  Not a very productive contribution to a clear question of whether to put a noise into a car to reduce pedestrian deaths and injuries.

When he eventually conceded that such an artificial noise could save lives, he said that it would be the lives of people who step out into traffic without looking, and that in this age of ipods, people should take personal responsibility.

He then started talking about the Darwin awards.

If this sort of cold dismissiveness came from a captain of industry it would be rightly slammed.  Why do people who are generally on the right side of the environmental debate think it’s ok to say things like this?

It’s a view which is self-righteous and unthoughtful and it’s also appalling advocacy.

The environmental movement has far too much of these things already.

The project initially had a much broader scope on IP-related debates – particularly questions of the role of IP law in encouraging development of clean technologies while also ensuring their deployment in the developing world.

Those issues didn’t end up making the cut, but during my interview with Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig, he drew an interesting bow between his until-recently pet issue of copyright and IP policy, and the problem of climate change policy.

Extracted here in full:

We have IP – copyright and patent, to deal with what economists call the problem of positive externalities, meaning I do something which creates a benefit to you, without you and I necessarily having any kind of agreement about that.  So we solve that problem by having monopolies granted by the state to what the economists call ‘internalise’ the positive externalities, so I get all the benefit and I create lots of good.

But as well as positive externalities, there are also negative externalities, so I run a coal-fired power plant, I produce carbon, I produce mercury into the atmosphere, these are all negative harms which I impose on my neighbours without necessarily compensating them for that.  And the government has a role there too in internalising negative externalities.  Global warming is a classic example of a negative externality, and the government has in my view an essential role in making sure that that negative externality is internalised, just like if works so hard to make sure that positive externalities are internalised.

The paradox is positive externalities, or the lack of dealing with positive externalities has never killed anybody or hurt anybody in the world.  And yet negative externalities like mercury in the atmosphere have caused enormous harm to the world.  But the United States government at least spends a significant chunk of its time worrying about internalising positive externalities while ignoring the negative externalities.

In the last 20 years, there have been 15 bills passed to deal with copyright, and internalising the positive externalities.  Not one bill to deal with the problem of global warming.  Now that’s just completely skewed priorities, right.  If anything we should be worried about the negative externalities first, and then get around to the positive ones, but not before we’ve dealt with the most critical negative externalities like global warming.

Image thanks to pawpaw67 on Flickr

At least he was wearing a helmet.

My cab driver had his own stories about cyclists and the strong view that “they’re all jerks, and should be licensed like everyone else”.  He then outlined some of the warcraft he uses to deal with the bicycling plague.

But no sooner had this calmed down, than an even more vigorous diatribe came – and this one was rather more interesting.  The cabbie was outraged at the latest corporate skulduggery from James Hardie and its reluctant administration of victims compensation.

To me this was very encouraging.

Surely if people understand corporate skulduggery, then they can understand the corporate paw prints which are all over climate change.  Surely if people can understand the evil of corporate profits being put before the futures of the familes of asbestos victims, they can understand the evil of corporate profits being put before their own children’s future.

Why then did my cab driver see cyclists and their environmental ideals as almost as much an enemy as the board of James Hardie?

Why, in an age when corporations lose other PR battles so spectacularly, do they perform so well on climate change?  Perhaps if the green lobby spent a little less time on the small things like cyclist/motorist sectarian violence, we’d have a better shot at the real miscreants?

Discuss.

1. I’m back from holidays in Japan where I ate a chicken’s arsehole because no-one in my family speaks Japanese and we wouldn’t take advice from people who do.
2. Chefs in Australia are starting to serve parts of animals which haven’t been served for a while.
3. I find this gross.
4. Environmentalists are to blame.

Eating organs and feet and ears and stomach linings once used to be penance for the poor. It became a badge of elitist gourmandising last century. Today it is a political statement – on the one hand it is a giant finger to the animal rights lobby and on the other it is a bow to green militancy which makes such a meal of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.

Environmental warrior? Image: www.smh.com.au

Bile, hysteria, and the politics of “eew gross” are one thing when directed against one’s ideological opponents.  But to accuse hedonistic foodies of environmental militancy is just plain odd.

The offal eaters are no environmentalists.  They just like offal, as have many cultures around the world for thousands of years.  To reproach them for the incidental (and marginal) environmental boon which it provides is to show a particularly eager commitment to vandalising the planet.

Forgive them Miranda, for they know not the environmentalism that they do.

The news that the ETS fable has remarkable parrallels in SuperTed and the Stolen Rocket Ship is somewhat newer.

Watch the episode, and imagine that the rocket ship is climate change policy.  Note the role of Ian MacFarlane.  Do not collect a prize for figuring out who plays Skeleton or Texas Pete’s other fat offsider.  Watch as the rocket ship spirals out of control.  Note how much more comfortable Skeleton becomes when he ends up in a skin-tight space suit.  Enjoy the exchange of;

Get off my legs skeleton, you’re pulling down my pants!

But I’ve got nothing else to hold on to.

Imagine the same exchange taking place in the shadow cabinet room.

If only the name of ‘SuperKev’ was actually deserved when it comes to climate change policy…

The day was the 22nd of June 2005, the place was the top floor of the Shangri-La hotel in Sydney, and the highlight of Minister Nori’s life was the announcement that Emirates Airlines would build an ‘eco-lodge’ in the middle of national parks in the Blue Mountains.

Emirates had summonsed Sydney’s media to hear about plans to, in the words of the company chairman, HH Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum,

“take this beautiful, but sadly distressed rural farming site and turn it into a sanctuary to further showcase Australia to the world.”

Since then, the costs have blown out from $50 million to $125 million, there has been a delay of two years, local environment groups have complained, green politicians have made some feeble noises, the state government gave Emirates an award for the project even though the development hadn’t been approved, and the certification process has been shoved along under the rather opaque Part 3A of the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act.

Along the way a chopper pad has been built in the middle of a national park area, so that guests can get straight down to the work of saving the planet, one Sodashi Thermal Infusing Facial at a time.

Would you trust this man with your UNESCO-listed national parks? Emirates' Joost Heymeijer receives a Certificate of Recognition from the Hon Sandra Nori. Nevermind that the resort hadn't yet been approved, let alone bought or built.

But this is not a post about the rather tired facts of poor governmental transparency, fraudulent environmental credentials, or the cruel ironies of an airline building an ‘eco-resort’ for predominantly overseas tourists who will fly here in business class, private jets and helicopters.

The biggest problem is the press hoopla which the resort has attracted and the amount of kudos which is given for the environmental credentials.

Let’s not forget that the resort is in a highly sensitive area of national park – regenerating the area and preventing sewerage flow into local streams should be a basic entry requirement, not a cause for praise.

Let’s also note that prices per night start at $1950, and go up to $5500.  If this is really the best Australia has to offer in ‘eco-tourism’ it leaves little hope for mere mortals – particularly ones who vote Labor.

At the press conference in 2005 I asked Sandra Nori whether this model was really the ‘future of environmental tourism’ if no-one on anything below an executive level salary could stay there?  Surely for the resort to be a real career highlight and environmental boon, it would need to be more affordable and accessible and not require more staff than guests to run it?

The answer began with “I don’t understand your question” and continued with a recap of the environmental PR.

The Emirates resort’s green credentials could be a lot worse.  But the marketing of the resort and the way the press have bought it gives a clear message – that sustainable holidays cost a month’s average wage per night.  In the meantime, it seems news of genuinely interesting and affordable environmentally sound building practices will continue to be presented as little more than an oddity.