Voyagers

The Golden Record

Dario Robleto’s presentation at the Systems of Sustainabilty Symposium in Houston earlier this year explored extinction through stories and archival sound.  One portion of his presentation has not left my mind: The Golden Record.

The Golden Record

The Golden Record is a phonographic record that was included in the two Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977.  The record was intened to provide insight into life on earth for any extraterrestrial life forms or far future humans who may find it.  In 2008, the Voyagers escaped our solar system.

The Record, for me, represents the sustainability of a life and culture in the form of archive.  At the time of launch, President Jimmy Carter is quoted to have said, “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings.  We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

The Record’s sounds include a message from the Secretary General of the UN at the time, greetings in 55 languages, a lovely track titled ‘The Sounds of Earth,’ and music from around the world.

You can view ‘Images of the Earth’ and listen to all of the tracks at www.goldenrecord.org

Bring on the electric cars?

Last week in New York the sculptor Seth Kinmont unveiled the first of three electric cars, bodywork made from wood. For three days he invited people to ride around the block in his new hand-built horseless carriage. Beautiful, huh?

I mention this because a) it forms a tenuous artistic link to the following story, and b) Kinmont’s work underlines the quixotic nature of electric transport.

The latest voyagers on this quixotic journey are Jeff Hoon and Peter Mandelson. Today they will announce a £250m scheme to kickstart the UK’s electric car infrastructure.  You might think they’re unlikely travellers on this road, given the fact that this are the pair who were most vocal about the impracticality the green movement’s objections to Heathrow expansion.

But no, Geoff Hoon in particular has retooled himself as the champion of green in this morning’s Guardian.

Hoon said yesterday that decarbonising road transport had a big role in helping the UK meet its targets of reducing CO2 emissions by 26% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. “Something like 35% of all our carbon emissions are caused by domestic transport,” he said. “Of that, 58% of the emissions are caused by motor cars.”

The implication is that electric cars will help cut that figure. And they might, but… Big but.

As a recent report commissioned by the Campaign for Better Transport suggests, if everyone in the UK moved to electric cars we’d need four times as much capacity in our electricty generation than we have at present, and even the government’s recently unveiled plans for nuclear generation aren’t enough to plug that gap.

Even a modest rise in electric car use doesn’t automatically reduce CO2 emissions – it just shifts emissions from the exhaust pipe to the power station. For those who use their cars only for short urban journeys, the CO2 reduction can be significant, but for average car use the figures are much less clear cut.

A few weeks ago the government let it be known that they were considering a scheme to encourage people to buy greener cars by offering an incentive for people to scrap their old ones. In reality, this was an attempt to boost the UK’s failing manufacturing sector, not a green scheme; given the embedded carbon costs of manufacturing, scrapping working cars in favour of newly built ones is about the least green strategy of all. That embedded energy calculation is the same for electric cars too.

This initiative is the start of Gordon Brown’s much touted green recovery plan; for a cabinet who have dismissed green concerns as impractical, they’re going to have to work extremly hard to demonstrate that this really is a practical scheme, not just another sop to industry.

Hat tip to Bad At Sports for the Seth Kinmont story.

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