Today, as never before, the tramps, the down-and-outs, the shopping bag ladies, the drifters and drunks. They range rom the merely destitute to the wretchedly broken. Wherever you turn, they are there, in good neighbourhoods and bad.
Some beg with a semblance of pride. Give me this money, they seem to say, and soon I will be back there with the rest of you, rushing back and forth on my daily rounds. Others have given up hope of ever leaving their tramphood. They lie down sprawled out on the sidewalks with their hat, or cap, or box, not even bothering to look up at the passerby, too defeated even to thank the ones who drop a coin beside them. Still others try to work for the money they are given: the blind pencil selles, the winos who was the windshield of your car. Some tell stories, usually tragic accounts of their own lives, as if to give their benefactors something for their kindness - even if only words.
Others have real talents. The old black man today, for example, who tap danced while juggling cigarettes - still dignified, clearly once a vaudevillian, dressed in a purple wuit with a green shirt and a yellow tie, his mouth fixed in a half-remembered stage smile. There are also the pavement chalk artists and musicians, saxophonists, electric guitarists, fiddlers. Occasionally you will even come across a genius, as I did today.
Paul Austen, City of Glass.
Oh catastrophe; is that what we saw? How was it that this had happened, that things had come to this? He didn't answer the phone yesterday. Was he back in hospital? Was he dead? Were these normal concerns for a dying friend? Why can't we stop time? Go back, you are going the wrong way, read the road signs, and he often expressed the sentiment: he wished they could grow younger by the day. Or return to that wonderful, chaotic past, to be back there in those musty inner-city rooms shrieking "Not well dear not well" and "Get her!"
But our own adolescence was so long ago, so thought disordered, so calamitous in intent and design, that shards of memory were enough. Welcome my loved one, welcome death, welcome oblivion. He drew deeply on his cigarette, and knew all these breaths were coming to an end, knew that lost lovers, all those who died under such terrible circumstances, would soon be joined. He was going to a better place; a place where his suffering had ceased, where his tears over Tom, and Howard, and Bill, had ceased to flow, where the cruelties of this terrible disease could no longer wrack his physical form. They keep them alive for so long now. Oh shadow earth, oh shallow place, dust to dust, equal me.
Quiet dignity was the call of the day, a gentle embrace, the dignity of old friends, a strange cackle at shared memories. What was the best time of your life? What was entered into, could not be forsaken. Broken condoms, broken lives. They fought so courageously, so many of them, too young to die. They stared in the face of the evil tide, and withstood everything. He sat on the rock like just another old man, painfully thin, and the families playing on the sand had no idea how close to death he was, that this could be the last time he looked out to sea, saw the coal ships waiting to go into port, saw the colours of the sunset lighting up the pollution haze.
What was the best time? The seventies, when we were all fabulous and fabulously stoned? The eighties, when he was settled and in love? The nineties when surprising things began to happen, after he became positive? When AIDS began to dominate his every waking moment. When he had to be careful, when the thought of casual sex slid away, when his gaunt frame became even gaunter. Or the noughties, when, finally, tragedy stalked another generation, and his young love Tom died in a way that no one could believe; and his own corrupt practices and creeping, corrupt hands took another life, spreading disease, spreading pestulance. When there was no magic left; only the tiny peace of the dying, only the calm he had created around him, the cactus garden he had nurtured at the front of his Housing Commission unit.
We aren't just sad, we're devastated. There is no way through this to anything but a funeral, a passing, a sad day of relief and tears. These were the pioneers, the social adventurers who were going to change everything. These were the poeple who dared to be different. These were the souls that partied and drank and drugged their way through a different life, bohemian without the thought out belief system, just determined to party. There's no party left now. There's no drugs now. Who can afford them on the pension? Wash them away on a river of morphine, that's what he strongly recommend. The Endone wasn't working any more.
Birds in a cage. Cactus in a garden. They all leave something, something they tried to do in their final days, to make amends, to compensate for their past wrong doings. They tried to leave the world a better place, in their own minute ways. There was the smell of vomit around the toilet, the smell of AIDS. There was parchment skin and gaunt frame and a catastrophe that daunted him. He didn't know how he was going to deal with that day. He just wanted to slip away. The virus had entered his brain now, and he repeated things. Calamity Jane, he joked, you've become a Calamity Jane. Too true, he smiled, rolling himself a cigarette of chop chop, the Housing Commission tobacco of choice. Outside the night stirred, young forms slept, other, happier lives stirred in the depth of their blankets, reached out for comfort, embraced their beloved. Here, he could feel the night stirring and his own life slipping away, and his old friend tried to cheer him although they both knew there was no point, and he prepared himself quietly, resolutely, for his coming time, the time of his own death after all these years of struggle. Welcome stranger, you may take me now.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=1b14e7ec-a54c-4485-9830-ca28022da23d
One commonly repeated argument for doing something about climate change sounds compelling, but turns out to be almost fraudulent. It is based on comparing the cost of action with the cost of inaction, and almost every major politician in the world uses it.
The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, for example, used this argument when he presented the European Union's proposal to tackle climate change earlier this year. The EU promised to cut its CO2 emissions by 20 per cent by 2020, at a cost that the commission's own estimates put at about 0.5 per cent of GDP, or roughly $90 billion Canadian per year. This is obviously a hefty price tag, and it will likely be much higher (the commission has previously estimated the cost to be double its current estimate).
But Barroso's punchline was that "the cost is low compared to the high price of inaction." In fact, he forecasted that the price of doing nothing "could even approach 20 per cent of GDP." (Never mind that this cost estimate is probably wildly overestimated - most models show about 3 per cent damages.)
So there you have it. Of course, politicians should be willing to spend 0.5 per cent of GDP to avoid a 20 per cent cost to GDP. This sounds eminently sensible - until you realize that Barroso is comparing two entirely different things.
The 0.5 per cent of GDP expense will reduce emissions ever so slightly (if everyone in the EU actually fulfills their requirements for the rest of the century, global emissions will fall by about four per cent). This would reduce the temperature increase expected by the end of the century by just five-hundredths of a degree Celsius. Thus, the EU's immensely ambitious program will not stop or even significantly impact global warming.
In other words, if Barroso fears costs of 20 per cent of GDP in the year 2100, the 0.5 per cent payment every year of this century will do virtually nothing to change that cost. We would still have to pay by the end of the century, only now we would also have made ourselves poorer in the 90 years preceding it.
The sleight of hand works because we assume that the action will cancel all the effects of inaction, whereas of course, nothing like that is true. This becomes much clearer if we substitute much smaller action than Barroso envisions.
For example, say that the EU decides to put up a diamond-studded wind turbine at Berlaymont headquarters, which will save one ton of CO2 each year. The cost will be $1.5 billion, but the EU says that this is incredibly cheap when compared to the cost of inaction on climate change, which will run into the trillions. It should be obvious that the $1.5 billion windmill doesn't negate the trillions of dollars of damage from climate change that we will still have to pay by the end of the century.
The EU's argument is similar to advising a man with a gangrenous leg that paying $50,000 for an Aspirin is a good deal because the cost compares favourably to the cost of inaction, which is losing the leg. Of course, the Aspirin doesn't prevent that outcome. The inaction argument is really terribly negligent, because it causes us to recommend aspirin and lose sight of smarter actions that might actually save the leg.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24337067-30538,00.html
THERE'S one blinding flash of clarity and honesty in Ross Garnaut's latest draft report on climate change which fatally undermines the entire report itself.
Even more, it undercuts the very own tactical game Garnaut proposes Australia play to achieve the fundamental strategic objective of an international agreement to reduce emissions.
And I quote from page 21 of his Target and Trajectories supplementary draft report: "The optimal level of Australian mitigation effort -- the level that maximised the incomes and wealth of Australians -- is easily calculated. It would be zero."
That is to say, simply and bluntly, anything we do to reduce our carbon emissions is going to cost. And cost however you measure the mix of costs and (any) benefits.
You can engage in all the fantasies you want about reinventing the energy wheel, so to speak. That we can move seamlessly to a new world of energy from the sun, the wind, the waves and, presumably, fusion power. But not its older sibling, fission.
Fantasise away, but the simple, real, bottom line is that it is going to cost. Our national and individual incomes will be lower than if we stuck with carbon.
Now Garnaut was obviously not stating this as a basis for arguing we should be a "free rider" on the global effort to reduce emissions. But the exact reverse: to deny exactly that course as a policy option.
In doing so, the muddled thinking that infects his entire approach is exactly if unintentionally captured.
He postulates that if our mitigation efforts had no effect at all on what others did, we could define our own targets and trajectories, independently of others' perceptions or reactions. We could enjoy the benefits of reduced risk of climate change from others' actions without accepting our share of the costs.
He rejects this. "Whether we like it or not, Australia matters."
Yet his central policy recommendation is to embrace the exact opposite. Not the "free rider" opposite, but the pointlessly damaging one.
That we should define our own targets and trajectories independently of others' perceptions or reactions.
That we should cut, by a pretty thumping 25 per cent in per capita terms by 2020, even if the rest of the world refuses to agree to a deal. That we should in effect allow everyone else to be a "free rider" on us.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24351152-5017771,00.html
Michael Stutchbury, Economics editor | September 16, 2008
IT is too risky for the environment and the economy for Australia to take up calls to commit to cutting our greenhouse gas emissions by up to 40 per cent in little more than a decade. It could be even more dangerous in the unlikely event that Kevin Rudd convinced the rest of the industrialised world to sign on to such ambitious targets in the name of saving the planet.
Although this would be Nobel prize-winning form, such promises simply would not be credible. It may feel good to hope otherwise, but too much of the industrialised world has broken its Kyoto Protocol promises.
It quickly would become clear that the rich world would not deliver on even more onerous vows. The ensuing disrepute and disillusion would provoke global political fractiousness, economic tit for tat and even raw aggression, particularly if a warmer planet became increasingly uncomfortable.
By going it alone, Australia could even make things worse for the global environment by sending its emission-intensive industries offshore to dirtier regimes.
Unilateral steep cuts could be achieved only at an economic cost too large for Australia's political system to digest. The likelier outcome of missing the target by a wide margin would trash Rudd's hopes for Australia to lead the world on tackling climate change.
This has been evident enough for long enough to predict that Ross Garnaut eventually would reject steep unilateral targets for reducing Australian emissions. It is similarly predictable that Rudd will broadly follow suit. Australia's political class has spent the past generation locking in economic reforms that finally allowed Australia to exploit its comparative advantage in mining and energy. Just like John Howard, Rudd will not risk junking this.
Just as predictably, climate scientists and activists are dismayed by Garnaut's proposed targets, instead calling for Australia to commit to cutting emissions by 25 per cent to 40per cent below 2000 levels by 2020. But such targets would not have the credibility needed for creating durable new property rights - the right to emit carbon into the atmosphere - that can be traded between countries. Business will not invest in less carbon-intensive production if it does not believe the system for pricing carbon will stand up as advertised over decades. Without investment in cleaner capacity, the economic costs of meeting the targets will increase, along with the potential political backlash. And developing countries such as China and India will not buy into a global scheme if the developed nations assuage Western guilt by making promises they patently won't keep.
So far, the most industrialised economies have broken their Koyoto promises to cut emissions by 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. The former Soviet bloc looks good because of the post-Cold War collapse of its dirty industries, although Russia's emissions are rising on the back of its oil and gas boom. In lower-growth Europe, France will meet its target because it has gone nuclear. Britain is on track because it closed its uneconomic coalmines. But others will exceed their Kyoto targets by embarrassing margins. Japan hasn't developed its nuclear industry as foreshadowed and hasn't got the expected returns from technology investment.
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