Cameron Roberts

Don't worry, we will. We're quite happy over here winning elections.

I think you came to at least a few of mine! 😂😂😂😂

It could actually be a lot of fun to watch them flail. The fake tactical voting org gave me a good laugh.

Side note: Remember 10-15 years ago how the respectable opinion to have at any dinner party in centre-left-ish company was that drug prohibition doesn't work? What happened to that?

They've kinda already been doing that though, haven't they? Starmer announced the gloves were coming off months ago.

I'm sure they'll get more desperate. But I don't think desperation will be a vote-winner.

You're absolutely correct and it says a lot about Starmer that he didn't see this coming years ago when he purged the left from the party.

"If you don't like the changes we've made, the door is open, you can leave."

Alright. We did.

Technically there are 11 but not all of them are very relevant.

Today I'm weirdly obsessed with a by-election happening on the other side of an ocean. To be fair I did live in Manchester for a time.

Mostly I'm just excited at the possibility of real hope in a country that has had a very rough time politically over the last decade.

"Shah Alam got lost and ended up on the porch of a woman’s home...The woman called police...When Shah Alam did not follow police commands to drop his curtain rod [he used as a walking stick], they Tasered and beat him, then arrested him."

This story was grotesque long before ICE even got involved.

Somewhat more the case for public transit, although it doesn't have to be. Especially if transit is free.

(Also obviously I'm not blaming any trans Kansans for being dependent on a car while living in a place that makes it essentially mandatory.)

And there's no way around this. You can't have people driving big machines around at 100 km/h without some form of administrative accountability. And that means chaining them and their car to a bureaucracy which can be weaponized.

This is not the case for walking, and wheeling, and biking.

There's an anti-car angle to this.

A car dependent society gives the government, via the driver's licensing system, a veto power over whether you can go about your everyday life. This is very easy to weaponize against vulnerable groups.

Not to mention the smug, London-centrism of it. Why not Lebanon-on-Mersey? Lebanon-on-Humber? Lebanon-on-Clyde? There's a whole big island they can scaremonger about and they're making people feel left out.

That has such a ghoulish implication. Nobody would use that kind of framing for any other cause of unnatural death. Can you imagine talking about violent crime that way?

I had a colleague once who made the really unfortunate comment that we shouldn't count road deaths as a downside of cars because weighed against the benefits of driving they are a small price to pay.

Sounds like some councilors share that attitude.

Also 20% of collisions is not a small number! Even 4% of collisions is not a small number!

The issue is that hype about technological solutions reduces the impetus for social, political, and economic solutions. People can avoid hard conversations about frequent flying if they can just shrug their shoulders and say "it'll all be electric soon anyway".

We've seen this exact thing with cars

If you can do both of those things at the same time without one effort undermining the other.

Sure. But you're talking about throwing in the towel on a major emitting sector for a generation. Not to mention the existence of tipping points.

We can reduce air travel right now, with no need to upscale a whole new complex technical system.

Sure but by that point the planet will already be cooked.

Yeah, that's a pretty accurate description of how the transition might happen.

I just think you're badly underestimating the timelines.

You think the airline industry would just voluntarily allow that to happen? It would be very bad for their business to have to do that.

Sure, but prototypes are a long ways from a viable system, much less a dominant one. New aircraft take a very long time to design and build, and then once built, they fly for decades before the airline replaces them. An A320 built today will likely still be flying in the 2050s.

I said nothing of the sort. I just said I had questions about that one company you cited.

A private sector promotional page does not qualify as scientific findings. If you have a published paper about their methods, that would be interesting.

I AM a climate researcher. I studied carbon removal for 2 years, and published papers about it.

Asking for a little bit of transparency is not unreasonable. There are serious questions about the effectiveness, durability, and scalability of these technologies.

Capitalism is bad for beer.

Losing Doom Bar for the sake of Carling Black Label?! what kind of topsy turvy nonsense is this?

Man I hate Molson-Coors.

So they claim. I'd like to see a bit more detail about what those removal techniques actually entail

I haven't yet seen any viable model of effective carbon offsets.

It's possible that the only solution here really is to reduce air traffic. Maybe that's impossible and we're screwed. But we might as well try. And that means not prematurely accepting defeat.

I don't think the ideal client for a place like Sparks Street is a Zellers. The Rideau Center isn't far away. A walkable street like that is better suited to bars and restaurants, small grocery stores, and boutiques. And of course touristy stuff.