Aug 8, 2019 - Boats and Carbon

I took a few good photos the other day, on a run along the south shore of Burrard Inlet to Canada Place. I'm afraid I must dip into politics, as the first photo neatly shows my big beef with pipeline opposition.

It's not that I don't want to see carbon out of the air ASAP, it's that I believe it's a complete waste of time to oppose oil production, rather than consumption. If we oppose production while letting consumption continue, people won't magically find a new way to farm, transport, light, and heat themselves; we have to find those alternatives first, then the production will die away naturally as people switch over.

So, I'm listening to a (very good) podcast, CanadaLand, about the horrors of a new tar sands mine and all the damage the mine will do to the environment. About the local environment, no question; but about the atmosphere - the damage doesn't happen until somebody buys and burns their product. So I'm just hitting the point, jogging and listening, where they say the amount of carbon the mine will somehow put into the air, as I come up the ramp to Canada Place and see this:

At far left, a thirty-metre superyacht, that transports one family a few weeks a year, guzzles up a thousand gallons or so of gasoline at the floating Chevron station in the harbour. At far right, three...count 'em, THREE ... ninety-thousand tonne cruise ships are stacked up in port, with one refuelling from the giant tanks of thick black bunker fuel that these monsters burn in thousand-tonne lots.

The problem is not the pipeline, or the mine; it's the customers that drive them. If these things ran on hydrogen or biofuels, the mine would never open. But: nobody will switch over these engines to alternatives because a mine never opens and oil goes up a buck a barrel. It didn't happen when oil went up a hundred a barrel. It will never happen because of production shutdowns. It has to be a strategic decision we just do.

Nobody likes to point the finger in the mirror; it's easier to pick out somebody you don't know and scapegoat them. (The original meaning was a tradition where all the sins of the village were heaped upon one goat; it's a pretty perfect analogy.) But they aren't holding a gun to our heads to buy tickets on those cruise ships so that they can go on digging tar sands mines.

But, moving along from politics...

There's a very prominent boat in the marina beside the Vancouver Rowing Club; it may be the most-visible boat in the harbour, because the bike and walking paths there are so packed, and it's the first boat along the dock:

For years now, that boat has been triggering a feeling of familiarity every time I went past, and I finally figured it out last summer:

It's remnisicent of "The Busted Flush", the fictional but beloved houseboat of John D. McDonald's great detective, Travis McGee. I was able to find an artist's rendition of it online, and one of the book covers that filled my brother's bookshelves when I was growing up. It's that stripe of wood along the side that made me think of it, I guess.