There are at least three striking things about it:

1. That left hand section showing that a significant chunk of CO2 abatement is cost-negative.
2. How many of the high-profile efforts to reduce emissions are way off to the right, meaning that they’re much more expensive than other things we could be doing.
3. Even if we did everything on the chart, we would still have more CO2 in the environment than is safe for human civilisation.

My emotional reaction to the first point is conflicted. On the one hand, there’s a huge opportunity here to make more progress than we’ve made so far, at no net cost to society. On the other, we still haven’t done it, and that report is now at least 5 years old and not particularly controversial. How are we going to get people to do the more difficult work that requires actual sacrifices, if we can’t even organise and overcome entrenched interests to get the easy stuff done?

But perhaps I’m wrong to see this as “the easy stuff”. Most of it still requires the mobilisation of large amounts of capital, for a start. There are also plenty of small but worthwhile steps that have a much lower barrier to getting started. Sightline’s been doing sterling work over the last couple of years compiling a list of such things, framed as the Making Sustainability Legal project, because most of the suggestions simply involve getting rid of pointless or poorly-written laws that stop people from doing socially-desirable things. Here’s their full list of ideas:

1. Democratizing Trails: Outfitting rules and dwindling budgets keep working-class and inner-city kids from enjoying the Northwest’s national forests.
2. Unleash Personal Car Sharing: An obscure change in insurance regulations stands in the way ofmaking money on your car’s idle hours.
3. Delivering Ourselves from Unwanted White Pages: State law requires phone companies to litter your doorstep with the White Pages, even if you ask them not to.
4. Decriminalizing Green, Affordable Car Insurance: State rules make it difficult for insurance companies to charge by the mile or give people who drive less a break on their rates.
5. Unfettering Food Carts: A thicket of city codes stunts the growth of food carts in Seattle and Vancouver, BC.
6. Exempting Bars from Parking Requirements: Nearly every city and town in North America bans drunk driving but requires bars to provide parking.
7. Repealing Bans on Clotheslines: Homeowners and condo associations continue to ban clotheslines, even when state law says they can’t.
8. Letting Cities Slow Traffic: State law tangles cities that want to lower speed limits and improve street safety in red tape.
9. Allowing Communities to Innovate for Clean Water: Arbitrary state limits require cities to spend billions to fix combined sewer overflows, when cheaper stormwater investments could also reduce pollution.
10. Freeing Taxis: Cities’ rules that cap the number of available taxicab licenses create high fares, low availability, and a barrier to greener urban travel.
11. Unchaining Bike Sharing: Mandatory helmet laws are the single biggest barrier to creating public bike sharing programs.
12. Replacing an Unsafe Fire-safety Test for Couches: California’s 12-second-rule coats your furniture with toxic chemicals, and won’t keep your house from burning down.
13. Getting Out of Work’s Way: State rules that require thousands of hours of cosmetology training for African hair braiders are onerous, and arguably racist.
14. Welcoming Strollers on Transit: Transit rules that require parents of young children to fold strollers on buses get in the way of car-free families.
15. Liberating Couchsurfing: Renting out a room in your house shouldn’t be like harboring fugitives, or paying taxes as a hotel.
16. Legalizing Used Pickle Jars: National codes prevent stores from sanitizing and reusing food containers.

These things aren’t going to “save the world” or anything grandiose like that. But each of them would make some peoples’ lives better, with a positive net impact on society. What are we waiting for?

So I’ve started photographing houses and condos for sale. So far, I’ve done some freebies to build the portfolio, and some work for the agent who’s listing my own place for sale. I have my first job for someone I didn’t already know coming up this week, and I think it’s about time to start showing off the portfolio:

I would really appreciate feedback on both the photography and the portfolio site itself, as well as referrals if you know anyone who could use my services. So far, I’m thinking the obvious clients are realtors, builders and stagers, but I’m certainly open to other ideas.

And finally, a massive thank you to Kevin Hanes for helping me make the portfolio look waaaay better than it did before his input, and Jeff Prescott for helping me find my feet in this business. For the sake of Kevin’s reputation, I should mention that he’s not satisfied with the website yet—he’s quite rightly pushing me to replace the text links at the top with something more graphical & visually appealing—but while I will be acting on his suggestions before too long I think the site’s at least good enough to start showing people now.

• Erin’s comment is really important. Even though the situation she’s describing is one I had already suggested must be happening, it’s more powerful to hear about real people suffering it. There’s a broader lesson about storytelling here, but in the specific context it’s just a reminder that we are talking about real peoples’ lives being ruined, not just some vague ideal.
• Here’s a beautiful post by someone much more directly affected by yesterday’s vote than me, who yet managed to be far more compassionate in his response: A challenge to both sides of the Amendment One debate. His is the example to follow, not mine.
• And this piece argues, very plausibly I think, that the broad generational shift away from homophobia is happening within Christian groups too. Most encouragingly of all, it seems to be part of a broader shift away from any interest in pursuing the Culture Wars, even among young people who are highly conservative in their personal morality. I wish we could fast forward that trend by a few decades, but at least it brings the end into sight.

But the big news is that as I was writing yesterday’s post, Obama finally came out in favour of gay marriage. Now obviously this is progress. He’s the first U.S. President to say such a thing, and many people seem to be overjoyed about it. But all I can find it in myself to respond with is “What took you so long?”, or as a friend put it:

I’m supposed to be happy that someone supposedly progressive stopped being a bigot years late?

— Eleanor Saitta (@Dymaxion) May 9, 2012

I’m honestly not sure how much of my annoyance is (or should be) directed at Obama here, and how much at the electorate that makes this still a somewhat risky position to have taken, but either way it’s clouding any sense of triumph.

In my own experience, as much as it’s about publicly sanctifying a relationship, marriage is about the right to live in the same country as my beloved. Since every year we also get politicians falling over themselves to be more vicious about people who didn’t have the foresight to be born in the same country as them, this right keeps getting scarcer and more important. It makes me angry to see it pushed further out of a group of peoples’ reach. Not to put too fine a point on it, if I were gay and had fallen in love when I did, our relationship would have been doomed by other peoples’ prejudice.

Also in my own experience, marriage gives literally life-saving access to medical care. At least on this issue the current trend is one of improvement, as the Obamacare provisions gradually take effect, but to be without health insurance in the U.S. today still means being mostly without health care. The improvements underway are only a partial solution, though, and they’re fragile: one of the few remaining reasons that I will vote for Obama if I have a vote by the coming election is that if he loses we can expect all of this progress to be torn up. Until this country fixes its brutal health care ‘system’, a vote against gay marriage is also a vote to deny a group of people access to health care.

I don’t pretend to understand the mentality that makes people cast a vote like that. I don’t even particularly want to understand it. I generally prefer to understand and have compassion for people I disagree with, but there’s a senseless hatefulness to this that makes me suspect I might even be a better person for being so unable to get it.

There is one small part of this which I think I am able to understand, though. It’s that most people simply can not imagine being in someone else’s shoes. For instance, I saw this on Twitter today:

Presumably people aren’t voting on whether to allow gay marriage. They’re voting on whether they want their son to think being gay is okay.

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) May 9, 2012

I rather suspect Adam’s right about that, for at least some voters, even though my first reaction was to find it utterly preposterous. My second reaction was to follow up with: “but what if their son actually were gay – would they still want him to think being gay was not OK?”

I do think that’s a logically sound argument, but it’s not going to work on the majority of people who don’t already agree with me. For one thing, there’s the completely incomprehensible group whose hatred of homosexuality burns so hot that they actually would want their gay son to hate himself. I don’t know how many people that accounts for, but I have a hard time believing it’s enough to win a referendum. I strongly suspect that the larger group is people who because they happen not to be gay, and not to have gay children that they know of, can’t imagine things being any different, so the hypothetical gay offspring are just completely unreal for them. In the same way, the person without ready access to their own health insurance, and without the convenient fortune of having been born in the country they wish to live in, is simply not a real individual to them.

Clearly it would be better if these people had compassion for others unlike them. But I can’t see how to help bring that about, when I have no compassion for them.

First, in FeverBee’s Online Community Guide: Using Data To Prevent Rules Violations. The blog is narrowly focussed on managing online communities about products and brands, and I started following it back when I worked for the Happiness Initiative and we were contemplating starting an online community about happiness science. We realised we didn’t have the resources to do it well, and I’ve gone on to do other things, but I kept reading that blog because it’s so often relevant to a much broader definition of a community.

This post was perhaps the broadest example, because the approach they suggest for the rules of an online community strike me as perfectly applicable to the laws of whole countries. To that end, they distinguish between repeat offenders, who need to be given a limited number of chances and then dealt with by measures ranging from shaming to banning, and multiple people violating the same rule. The key point is that if many different people keep breaking the same rule, then the rule itself is broken in some way, whether people just aren’t aware enough of it, or the rule itself needs changing. I’d love to see the same approach applied to laws; as it is laws that are routinely broken by everyday people (marijuana prohibition; private gambling restrictions; 20-year-olds and booze, etc) just chip away at collective respect for the law itself.

The second article was a much longer piece in the Village Voice: Bail is Busted: How Jail Really Works. One thing that struck me reading it was the reminder of when the NYPD arrested 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge. It was far from the only instance of a massive draconian response to the Occupy protests handing us the ugly visual of the police treating a mass arrest like a cattle round up, and each of those felt like a sign of just how broken the police’s approach to the protests was. If you find yourself literally arresting multiple busloads of your citizens, it’s probably time for a rethink.

The key point of the article, though, was about how horribly broken the bail system is. The article presents pretty persuasive evidence that many innocent people end up pleading guilty to get out of a bail trap, and wrongful convictions ruin lives, yet there’s huge institutional resistance to changing it. Given that, I have huge admiration for the new initiative coming out of Occupy Wall Street to circumvent the system, not only for their own but for random defendants. If the system worked properly, I’d oppose circumventing it, but I think they can prevent a greater evil here.

Every year we have this ritualised set of photo-and-sponsorship opportunities, in which every politician and every company wants to reassure us that they care deeply about the Earth and we are supposed to be impressed. But what happens the rest of the year? It’s as if I only phoned my mum on Mothers’ Day, and then tried to pretend I was anything but a terrible son.

Having a designated Earth Day seems to reinforce the message that there’s this “environment” box, that can be safely detached from the rest of our lives, and as long we pay our respects from time to time it’ll all be OK. But it’s a bit like having an annual “Yay breathing” day: we still need to breathe through the rest of the year, and we still need not to be fouling our own nest.

Now if either Earth Day or the awareness it’s supposed to raise were new things I’d be inclined to be patient. But this event is older than me, and we just don’t have the time to be messing around with empty gestures like this.

If you want to make something meaningful of this Earth Day, don’t bother going to any of the publicity events. They are all a distraction. If you want to volunteer at one of the many cleanups and habitat restoration work parties—if you’re willing to actually get your hands dirty and make something better—that’s worthwhile, but don’t pretend your responsibility ends when you leave. If you really want to make it mean something, think about what you can do the rest of the year.

What can you start tomorrow and then keep doing to make your own impact less destructive to our shared life support system?

Midrash teaches that, while watching the Egyptians succumb to the ten plagues, the angels broke into songs of jubilation. God rebuked them, saying “My creatures are perishing, and you sing praises?”

In this spirit, I’ve always used this festival to commemorate the struggles of other people, not only my distant ancestors. This year, our Seder included a couple of passages from Jewish Solidarity with the Native American People, about the travails of the Navajo and the hopes of a Wabanaki chief. I know I’m not the only person who draws this connection; here’s a great piece Melinda found drawing the links between Exodus, the end of the Holocaust and the Emancipation of African Americans, and in the past week I had the honour of meeting the founder of the Jewish Abolitionist Movement.

And yet, for all that grand universalism, the prior inhabitants of the Promised Land are just an enemy to be shoved aside. Here’s the passage where God tells the Israelites how they’ll get their land:

Exodus XXIII:20-24 “Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Beware of him, and obey his voice, provoke him not; for he will not pardon your transgressions: for my name is in him. But if thou shalt indeed obey his voice, and do all that I speak; then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries. For mine Angel shall go before thee, and bring thee in unto the Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites: and I will cut them off. Thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do after their works: but thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their images.”
…
Exodus XXIII:32-33 “Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin against me: for if thou serve their gods, it will surely be a snare unto thee.”

So we mourn the Egyptians—even the soldiers who chased the fleeing slaves into the sea—but these people whose only crime was to occupy land the Israelites wanted are damned for it. It gets more explicit when the Israelites finally invade. The first conquest is of Jericho, and it’s amazingly awful:

Joshua VI:17-26 “And the city shall be accursed, even it, and all that are therein, to the LORD: only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent. And ye, in any wise keep yourselves from the accursed thing, lest ye make yourselves accursed, when ye take of the accursed thing, and make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it. But all the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, are consecrated unto the LORD: they shall come into the treasury of the LORD. So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword. But Joshua had said unto the two men that had spied out the country, Go into the harlot’s house, and bring out thence the woman, and all that she hath, as ye sware unto her. And the young men that were spies went in, and brought out Rahab, and her father, and her mother, and her brethren, and all that she had; and they brought out all her kindred, and left them without the camp of Israel. And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD. And Joshua saved Rahab the harlot alive, and her father’s household, and all that she had; and she dwelleth in Israel even unto this day; because she hid the messengers, which Joshua sent to spy out Jericho. And Joshua adjured them at that time, saying, Cursed be the man before the LORD, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.”

No possible doubt that the city and people of Jericho are destroyed as completely as the invading army is able, and looted, and in this victors’ history it’s all retrospectively justified with a curse. Much of the rest of Joshua’s story is smiting and conquest and inheritances, with no hint of remorse that people are suffering. How can we justify this, when we mourn even the Egyptian soldiers?

I don’t claim to have an answer. I think this has a different sort of lesson: I don’t know what the Bible is trying to teach us here, but I see it as a warning about how untrustworthy victors’ history is. Acknowledging the original inhabitants of the Holy Land would have forced original Kings of Israel to make concessions to them, so the history they wrote studiously avoids doing so, just as the US government did to the Native Americans until relatively recently.

I don’t need to say much about the parallel with contemporary Israel. All I really can say on that subject is that just as this willful blindness is a stain on Biblical Judeah & Samaria, so plight of the Palestinians is to modern-day Israel. I hope that thousands of years from now, people will be telling that story with a happier ending.

Exodus I:15-17 “And the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrews’ midwives, of which the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah: And he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the stools; if it be a son, then ye shall kill him: but if it be a daughter, then she shall live. But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive.”

Read that again and parse it fully. These two women risked their lives by defying their despot’s orders to conduct genocide. Their counterparts in the last century were honoured with the title “Righteous Among The Nations”, a special section in Israel’s Holocaust memorial, and this rather nice park in Tel Aviv:

Yet Shiphrah and Puah just get a throwaway mention and no further recognition at all. Moses himself is saved by his mother & sister’s scheming and Pharaoh’s daughter’s compassion:

Exodus II:2-8 “And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink. And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him. And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river’s side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews’ children. Then said his sister to Pharaoh’s daughter, Shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, Go. And the maid went and called the child’s mother.”

I don’t think Pharaoh’s daughter even gets a name. Moses’ mother is introduced elsewhere as Jochebed, but the two mentions of her name in the entire Bible only tell us whose wife and whose mother she was. Miriam, Moses’ sister, at least gets to play a more significant part later, but even then it’s to sing the praises of a distinctly masculine God, and later to be punished alone for a sin she jointly committed with Aaron:

Numbers XII:1 “And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman.”

Numbers XII:9-11 “And the anger of the LORD was kindled against them; and he departed. And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam, and, behold, she was leprous. And Aaron said unto Moses, Alas, my lord, I beseech thee, lay not the sin upon us, wherein we have done foolishly, and wherein we have sinned.”

There’s not a word about Aaron being punished. It’s enough to make one channel Mrs. Lintott.

Tzipora also gets a notably raw deal: “given” to Moses as a wife in Exodus 2, she bears his children and then seems to get left behind either when he goes back into Egypt or in the flight from (that I can’t make out which it was speaks volumes about her narrative treatment). You get the idea.

I raise this not to draw out some lesson that the Torah is teaching us, but rather as a reminder of its limitations as a guide to modern life. It’s full of good stories, the significance of which has been magnified by its status as a holy book to many people, but for it to make sense to my life I do have to cherry-pick extensively. My emphasis on Passover is itself a case of such cherry-picking: I give it far more importance than any other religious holiday, because it celebrates the bit of the Bible that speaks to me the most.

Exodus XVIII:12 “And Jethro, Moses’ father in law, took a burnt offering and sacrifices for God: and Aaron came, and all the elders of Israel, to eat bread with Moses’ father in law before God.”

It’s not expanded upon, but this strikes me as a pretty big deal. He’s not just fed and given shelter, but actively invited to take part in his hosts’ rituals, which he does. His second reward is not so much bestowed by Moses as by whoever wrote the Torah, in that he, rather than God himself, a priest or an angel, gets to be the voice who introduces the giving of the law:

Exodus XVIII:15-20 “And Moses said unto his father in law, Because the people come unto me to enquire of God: When they have a matter, they come unto me; and I judge between one and another, and I do make them know the statutes of God, and his laws. And Moses’ father in law said unto him, The thing that thou doest is not good. Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone. Hearken now unto my voice, I will give thee counsel, and God shall be with thee: Be thou for the people to God-ward, that thou mayest bring the causes unto God: And thou shalt teach them ordinances and laws, and shalt shew them the way wherein they must walk, and the work that they must do.”

It’s significant because so much of the rest of the Torah is devoted to enumerating laws that it’s clearly a primary function of the whole document, and yet it’s a foreign commoner who suggests to Moses that this be so. And not only is he a foreigner, he actually chooses not to join the Israelites; the final verse of this chapter simply says:

Exodus XVIII:27 “And Moses let his father in law depart; and he went his way into his own land.”

I find that a rather lovely bit of teaching by example. Not only is it incumbent on us to be gracious hosts and to welcome outsiders into our community, but we also have to accept that they may choose not to stay. There’s no offence in this, and it doesn’t even preclude the guest from being greatly honoured or their stay from having been a great honour to the host.

This is on my mind right now for a couple of reasons. One is that I had lunch at Hillel yesterday, where I was made to feel very welcome. I’ve made no effort to connect with a Jewish community anywhere I’ve lived since leaving my parents house, and that’s partly because I didn’t feel at all welcome at the synagogue where I had my barmitzva. I always had the sense that I just wasn’t going to be pure enough for them; a sense that was only confirmed when the Rabbi threatened to not carry out the barmitzva if we didn’t undertake to prevent any guests from driving to the service. My dad quite rightly told the Rabbi that it was a religious obligation to perform a barmitzva for anyone who was interested, and ultimately the Rabbi relented, but having to convince him to perform one of his basic duties for us was a very powerful way of telling me this community didn’t want me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be all that involved in the Jewish community here, but it feels really good to be shedding that particular piece of baggage.

The other is that I’ve recently become a “community host” at Hub Seattle, the coworking space where I spend most of my work time. This means that once a week (on Thursdays, so today) I sit at the front desk and my main job is to greet newcomers, make them feel welcome and introduce them to people. I’m very conscious that a space like this can be great for long-timers without being anywhere near welcoming enough to new people, and this feels like a great way to put my values into practice and help us get it right.

Exodus XVI:35 “And the children of Israel did eat manna forty years, until they came to a land inhabited; they did eat manna, until they came unto the borders of the land of Canaan.”

Then in chapter 17 we have a rather brief description of a battle with Amalekites, and some of the earliest literary descriptions of what is now known to many Anglophones by its Yiddish name: kvetching.

Exodus XVII:1-3 “And all the congregation of the children of Israel journeyed from the wilderness of Sin, after their journeys, according to the commandment of the LORD, and pitched in Rephidim: and there was no water for the people to drink. Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with me? wherefore do ye tempt the LORD? And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?”

Beyond that, the remaining 20 chapters tell us about the giving of laws, and go into incredible, excruciating detail about the precise specifications of altars, sacrifices and priestly garments, but they aren’t really telling a narrative any more. The 40 years of wandering in the desert aren’t exactly accounted for, and yet what little is said about them makes it clear that they were difficult, so why such a long period?

I can think of at least three possible accounts. The first is if we take this as history. I’m quite wary of taking the Bible as literal history, but I do think that at least from Exodus onwards it has the broad outlines of a real history (I’m much more skeptical about Genesis, not least because the most likely origin story for the Jewish people strikes me as “everyone who escaped from Egyptian slavery in this big revolt”, rather than the version given there). Cairo and Jerusalem are less than 300 miles apart, making the direct route from any likely location for the slave revolt to the Promised Land shorter than the Navajo Long Walk or the route taken by the Mormon handcart pioneers, both of which were done by people with little more equipment than the Israelites would have had, across similarly harsh terrain, in far less than one year. So it’s pretty notable that the Israelites needed so much longer. If we do take this as historical, then my best guess is that there wasn’t really a specific, known Promised Land at the outset, and it took the Israelites two generations of wandering to find somewhere to settle down: another elaboration on the “making it up as they go along” theme from the escape itself.

The second explanation is the one I’m used to seeing in the Haggadah: that two generations needed to be born outside slavery before the people could be ready to settle and really be their own masters. There needed to have been enough people born without the memory of slavery before the nation could have an identity other than “the ex-slaves”. This makes a certain amount of sense to me, though it’s also kind of a raw deal for the original escapees, who took a great personal risk to get out, only to spend the rest of their days wandering around in the desert. No wonder there’s all that complaining.

I prefer a third explanation, which owes a lot to the first two. I see this part of the story as a warning that revolutionary change is extraordinarily difficult, and real progress is not won overnight but across generations. Without the wandering in the desert, this whole thing would have been too easy to be believable as a story, and too easy to serve as a useful preparation for future people. With the interminable wandering, it becomes a reminder to be patient about today’s problems. Not to give up and accept intolerable situations—if there’s one simple message from the whole Exodus story is that things can be made better—but to accept and be ready for the inevitable long periods of ambiguity, uncertainty and lack of visible progress along the way, just as we are seeing happen right now in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and we will with every such upheaval.