The great SUV bait-and-switch

Malcolm Wicks, MP for Croydon North and energy minister, may well have felt particularly self-satisfied as he let slip the governments latest plan for appeasing environmentalists. According to Mr. Wicks, the government is considering the imposition of higher road taxes on SUVs, in order to help persuade drivers to switch to more energy-efficient motors. As the proud owner of a Toyota Prius, the car of the moment for the eco-concious fellow who doesn’t want the trifling matter of genuine environmentalism disrupting his busy life, Wicks will have been quite pleased with his gumption. Speaking in The Times, he described urban-dwelling SUV owners as demonstrating “crass irresponsibility” in their choice of motor, what with the distinct lag of mountains to climb and muddy bogs to traverse in the major cities.

They are quite an easy target, these ‘Chelsea tractor’-driving types. Without trying to get too much purchase off a hackneyed stereotype, they are all too often amongst the most aggressive of motorists: surly-looking men with a copy of the latest Jeremy Clarkson toilet-paper substitute stuffed in the leather-lined glove box, or Sloaney women dropping off Chloe at her clarinet lesson before spending the afternoon rear-ending lesser cars in endless shopping expeditions.

The kind of smugness that Mr. Wicks hints at is endemic. Yet it is nothing more than a smokescreen. It is entirely facetious of this government to decry the increase in SUV ownership whilst single-handedly seeking to increase the crowded British skies with a rampant increase in air traffic that will render the meagre CO2 emissions of large cars irrelevant. New runways are planned for Heathrow, Stansted, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and a recent leaked report suggested that the EU is considering a treaty in which the US government would be able to veto any planned measures to reduce the environmental impact of airlines.

In his Guardian article today, George Monbiot takes the government to task for its craven capitulation in the face of the airline industry:

Already, one fifth of all international air passengers fly to or from an airport in the UK. The numbers have risen fivefold in the past 30 years, and the government envisages that they will more than double by 2030, to 476 million a year. Perhaps "envisages" is the wrong word. By providing the capacity, the government ensures that the growth takes place.

As far as climate change is concerned, this is an utter, unparalleled disaster. It's not just that aviation represents the world's fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions. The burning of aircraft fuel has a "radiative forcing ratio" of around 2.7; what this means is that the total warming effect of aircraft emissions is 2.7 times as great as the effect of the carbon dioxide alone. The water vapour they produce forms ice crystals in the upper troposphere (vapour trails and cirrus clouds) that trap the earth's heat. According to calculations by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, if you added the two effects together (it urges some caution as they are not directly comparable), aviation emissions alone would exceed the government's target for the country's entire output of greenhouse gases in 2050 by around 134%. The government has an effective means of dealing with this. It excludes international aircraft emissions from the target.

Read the full article here

Monbiot goes on to state that the only way to constrain the industry is for the government to start closing the runways and taxing airline fuel. Yet this would be electoral suicide; the first minister to suggest that the era of bargain flights to Barca for the price of a loaf of bread will be hung, drawn and quarter by first light. It is much safer for the government to take pot-shots at urban SUV drivers, risible as they are, instead of tackling the real problem.

Review: "The New World" (dir: Terrence Malick)

This review first appeared on the Culture Wars website

For a man who disappeared for the best part of twenty years after first emerging in the 1970s Terrence Malick's second film in less than ten years (following 1997's The Thin Red Line) suggests that with old age he is becoming almost prolific. The New World, despite a clunky title and a trailer that places it close to Last of the Mohicans territory, is quite simply a masterpiece of visual and aural storytelling, as inherently cinematic a film as can be imagined.

Set in early 17th century Virginia, the film depicts the founding of the first British settlement in the Americas - what would eventually become known as Jamestown. A trio of British warships land in a lush cove at the mouth of a river, on a mission to discover a sea passage to the Indies. The mission's leader, Captain Newport (played imperially by Christopher Plummer), decides to establish a camp. Before returning to England he charges a disgraced soldier - John Smith (Colin Farrell), whose life the captain has just pardoned - with taking care of the fort, and also with establishing trading links with the local indigenous population.

The opening twenty minutes in which this takes place establish the tone of the film, and indeed this opening is a microcosm of the startlingly organic approach that Malick takes to his work. The director's great strength has always been his commitment to the utter beauty of nature when captured on celluloid. For aficionados of great cinematography, The New World doesn't disappoint. Impeccably realised shots of verdant forests, deep rivers, waving fields of grass and poignant sunsets, all captured with naturalistic lighting, make this film an astonishing visual experience. It is difficult, indeed counterproductive, to convey the experience in words; it is Malick's tangible feel for the very essence of cinema, the way he overlaps sound and image in confident brush strokes, like an Impressionist painter, that lends the film its quixotic beauty. Each frame feels like a Renaissance masterpiece, such is the detail of composition. This diligence is carried over to the sound design; Malick overlaps dialogue with a personal narration that sounds as if it is being whispered, innocuously, into the listener's ear. A third element - the orchestral score - completes the piece, and the three drift into and out of each other, rising and falling in a manner that echoes the rhythms of nature itself. The overall effect is like waking from a pleasant dream, with the unprocessed images and sensations lingering fresh in the mind.

Malick hangs the relatively thin plot on the emotive faces of his lead actors, carrying the storyline on their features. It is a potentially dangerous method. The grim, sour features of Colin Farrell remain expressionless throughout, presumably to convey intensity and gravitas, yet he soon becomes tiresome; his eyebrows, seemingly inching hair by hair towards each other, don't quite convey the brooding quality that his character requires. The choice of Q'Orianka Kilcher to play his lover, however, ranks as a spectacular success. Her strikingly bold beauty captures every shot, and is incredibly evocative, capable of a range of emotions yet embodying each one with a noble dignity. She is entirely plausible as the daughter of a noble lineage, and her acquiescence to the ways of the colonisers - symbolised by her stuttering walk when forced to don the constricting British dress - is a quiet tragedy, finalising the sense of loss that the arrival of Europeans on the continent heralds.

The only real criticism is the film's length; after Rebecca's assumption of the colonial way of life, the story sags a little, as she marries a Brit (a low-key performance by Christian Bale) and settles into a comfortable, yet essentially loveless, relationship. By the end, however, where the couple visit London and Rebecca is afforded a brief reunion with her one-time lover, the journey is complete: the new world will soon be ruined, and Malick's final shots of the lush, lost Eden only highlight this tragedy.

In a world in which directors are feted for making films that even slightly challenge an audience's intellect (I'm talking about you, Mr Clooney), it is both surprising and ultimately inspiring that a film as simple, beautiful and as uncharacteristic as The New World can still be made.

The future of blogs

Apologies for the absence of any new content on these pages in recent weeks - the pressures of a new job (rewarding, but nonetheless busy) and a domestic situation that can only be described as opaque have meant that time is short. Normal service should hopefully be resumed at the beginning of next month when I move into a more permanent form of accommodation.

In the meantime, here's a link to an interesting article from the Sunday Times about what blogs could represent in the brave new (media) world that the 21st century heralds...

Within days, much of the blogosphere had declared, from the distance of several thousand miles, that we were witnessing an “intifada”; there was even talk of France being on the verge of civil war. When the wicked MSM failed to go along with this hypothesis — largely because it couldn’t find any evidence — the reaction among some bloggers was to suspect “another MSM cover-up”. The notion that the disturbances might have been linked to unemployment or racial discrimination was dismissed as just one of those sappy liberal myths.

Eventually, the “intifada” hysteria did abate. But I was still struck by how fiercely some people wanted to cling to conspiracy theories even when there were few supporting facts. The absence of conventional editorial gate-keeping — one of the great advantages of blogs — also has the effect of creating an echo-chamber effect. Newspapers and TV reporters succumb too, of course, but bloggers are not immune.

Read it all here