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… I just got in from smoking some heavy duty weed — “Jackrabbit”, and then some White Widow. Thanks to Helko (“because my mother is Helen and my father is Koln”) at The Jolly Joker for his advice.

[Update: We had to convince the girl behind the counter to sell us Dutch grass -- she was worried it was too strong for foreigners. Saying we came from Vancouver, Canada was enough of a "smoking credential", but it didn't actually prepare us. Dutch weed is both stronger and more fresh. We ended up getting a spliff each and then just sharing one. Photos of our leftover high-tech Dutch grass capsule, cone-rolled joint, and my crap Bavarian lighter to follow.]

I just landed in Toronto and got settled in the Air Canada lounge (which is sweet).

On the flight over we were seated in front of a family with a cute young podling. He was behind me, with curly blond whisps, and — wouldn’t — stop — kicking.

The flight attendant, kindly, moved me up to an exit row to avoid the onslaught. I saw that my new seatmate-to-be was a fat man with muscles and a crew cut. His legs were crossed across the empty seat, now mine.

Me: Hey, I’m your new seatmate.
Hurly: Why?
Me: There was a kid behind me, kicking my chair. The hostess moved me.
Burly: Bad luck for me. Why didn’t you tell him to stop?

He uncrossed his legs, finally letting me sit. He appraised me, looked at my beard and long hair.

Hurly: No chance you’re in the army, eh?
Me: I thought about it out of high school, but I don’t take direction very well.
Burly: See that? Right there — that’s why our country is going down the tubes.

Uncomfortable! He continued:

Hurly: It’s because of your parents. They raised you with too much freedom.
Me: Excuse me.

At that I turned on (the screen), tuned in (my headphones), and dropped out (of the conversation).

I actually felt bad for him: so full of repression and hate, filled with longing for a country that either never existed, or that we’ve left behind. He’s still fighting a half-century-old culture war, and the sign said long-haired freaky people now run the show.

Get with the program, Marine! Drop acid and give me twenty poems, STAT!

Airplane travel is incredibly damaging to the climate and should be costed accordingly, but it’d be nice if middle-class people could still travel. What are the options?

Passenger airships (blimps, etc.) have the potential to do intercontinental transport in days. One of the coolest designs I’ve heard of is for a helium-shielded hydrogen blimp to double as a tank for fuel-cell-powered propellers. But airships are a far-out idea: we need other plans.

Cruise ships have much higher emissions per kilometre than passanger planes, but that could be because there hasn’t been much pressure on cruise ships to decrease emissions. For example, the handful of nuclear-powered surface ships are all smaller than most major cruise ships.

Freighter travel is currently considered carbon neutral because the passangers are just hitching a ride with a freighter that’s already full of cargo. Mixed passenger-cargo ships would not be as environmentally friendly.

Ships do intercontinental transport in weeks, so how do you do an intercontinental vacation when you only get 2 – 4 weeks off per year (I know people who have gone to Hawaii for a weekend)? Similarly, if you were to pay the full cost of airplane travel, you’d probably only be able to afford an intercontinential vacation every few years: how can you make it count?

The solution is obviously sabbaticals / career breaks. Apparently these are common in Australia because of the time it used to take to visit family in Britain by sailing ship. Essentially we will all go back to that rhythm of life.

If you have more time in a place, you don’t need to consume sexed-up, inauthentic exoticness. Tourists will become embedded in a culture by volunteering, working or studying. We need a cultural and legislative shift to support sabbaticals for all workers.

Would it be bad if we couldn’t cheaply and freely fly all over the world? Well, it would dampen tourism for one thing. Would that be good or bad?

When a tourist goes to a foreign place, they consume exoticness produced by the native people. Is exoticness an infinite resource that the underdeveloped world exploits, or is there a marginal cost to producing more of it?

One possibility is that tourism is a force for globalization: tourists bring homogeneous, dominant culture with them. Starchitect Arthur Erickson thought so:

Worldwide tourism looms on the horizon as the gravest threat to human cultures – a threat because its ultimate result will be to destroy the very reason for its existence – the variety and interest of the world at large.

The tourist, far from being a sensitive explorer, transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease decimating whatever values existed before.

…at some future time [tourism] may even be considered crimes against mankind.

But this assumes that tourists seriously engage with natives. I think that even backpackers mostly consume exoticness without bringing much of their own culture to the table.

Tourists don’t just consume any exoticness offered to them; they have specific preferences. They arrive with expectations and comfort zones (yes, even backpackers). What they consume is filtered through their existing beliefs. I know this because tourists tell standard narratives from it-was-so-convenient-having-prepaid-drinks to shopping-in-that-market-made-me-realize-how-much-we-take-for-granted.

In order to get maximum tourist dollars, native people perform exoticness (within comfort zones). Their cultures become inauthentic, hyperreal. As George Monbiot says:

[Tourism] extracts the differences between our land and culture and those of the nations we visit, until they scarcely exist. Remote and romantic beaches become mundane resorts. Remote and remarkable people tailor their culture to suit those who pay for it, until, in the words of a Maasai man, ‘We have ceased to be what we are; we are becoming what we seem.’

The inauthenticity opens these cultures up for globalization. Tourists, in consuming exoticness, deplete that resource. If you think diversity is morally good, then tourism is bad.

Can we reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing our standard of living? Apparently George Monbiot’s book Heat (which I haven’t read), details how technology can be used to green every activity in our civilization except one: airplanes. This is because keeping something heavier-than-air aloft cannot be made low-energy without violating the laws of physics.

For this reason, Monbiot never flies (except to scold Canada). But it seems that there is little chance the people of the developed world will willingly give up flying:

When I challenge my friends about their planned weekend in Rome or their holiday in Florida, they respond with a strange, distant smile and avert their eyes. They just want to enjoy themselves. Who am I to spoil their fun? The moral dissonance is deafening.

So short of massively reducing our emissions in every other area to pay for our flight addiction, we must force people to stop flying. This can be achieved with carbon pricing. We will return to a period when “air travel is too expensive to waste on your wife”, as in Mad Men. No more short, sunny vacations. No more zipping between Canadian cities (+$325 for Vancouver to Toronto).

Cheap air travel is one of the biggest advances in human history: one of our modern conveniences most like magic. Our generation could be the last to enjoy this power. But when I look at how much people love flight, I am skeptical that we will support the policies necessary to reduce carbon emissions. Although as Monbiot notes in Heat:

An 87% cut in emissions requires not only that growth stops, but that most of the aeroplanes flying today be grounded…These privations affect only a tiny proportion of the world’s people. The reason they seem so harsh is that this tiny proportion almost certainly includes you.