Smooth sailing, er, driving

This was quite the smooth afternoon and evening, all told; to Toronto, for a concert of Bartók and Brahms with the Toronto Symphony Hall.

...If you're in the GTA, interested in the Symphony, and you're under 30 or you have a friend who's under 30, Tsoundcheck is a steal. We went with mtffm & the_infamous_j, (only briefly tussling over who was whose date for the evening). Our tix were $12 each. They put us in the fourth row of Roy Thompson Hall. Awesome.

We had a fairly smooth drive to Toronto, and melted_snowball handily navigated us to Roy Thompson Hall. 90 minutes door-to-door. Parking was... right there, and reasonable. Dinner was... right there; with about four options, we chose Indian, which turned out to be a pretty good buffet. Some dishes I'd never tried, like a hollow corn-ball which you're supposed to drizzle a slightly sweet sauce inside. Yum sag paneer. Great dinner conversation, plus live Bhangra music. As we were preparing to pay, the waiter told us we had a Symphony special price, to boot. We zipped across the street, picked up tickets, and listened to Rick Phillips (sp?) give a lecture on the concert we were about to see. It was... reasonably useful for context, though not exactly crucial.

The concert space- woah. I've never been in Roy Thompson Hall before, and neither had any of the other three guys. It's... a lot bigger on the inside, probably because it's half sunk under ground. Our seats were roughly here. It was prettier than those photos, though you get a good sense for the size. I just looked for more photos, and failed to find anything useful. Anyhow.

The Bartók was a bit challenging; I liked the first and third movements, and melted_snowball liked the second. The musicians were superb. Apparently part of this was tuned to quarter-tones. Eek. I should listen to more of his work; especially the more folk-influenced earlier stuff, since I'm not particuarly experienced with it.

The Brahms was super. (In the car afterward, at least two of us thought we'd heard it before, though neither of us are sure of when. The first movement might've been used in a movie score?)

We happened to be sitting in front of the cellos, which lent it a bit more boomy sound, which I will admit I liked. I think that if I were listening to a CD, I'd think it was OK; but what a joy to be up close and seeing them produce this music.

The last movement, which was described as "heavily tragic" in the program, seemed heavy. Not so exciting, that.

Then, a quick stop by epi_lj's house... where they were just finishing up a game of Civilization. We only stayed briefly, which turned out to be the right choice since the roads were getting more snowy by the minute. Still, melted_snowball got us home again safely, again with great car conversation.

And now, I think it's bedtime for me.

Climate Change Football

The recent UN report on climate change released in Paris last week seems to be affecting Canadian politics much more strongly than those in the US, though I was interested to see that the NYT article on that report is currently their most emailed and blogged story. But not so for a few other papers I just looked at, namely the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the LA Times. (Chosen somewhat unscientifically).

It's frustrating that this seems to be an "elitist issue" as much as ever in the US; and the Associated Press seems to be casting the report as a French statement, highlighting Chirac's statements, when the Canadian papers (Globe and Mail, Toronto Star) are casting it as an international coalition of scientists, as it seems to be from looking at the actual report.

Anyway, the environtment and advance notice about this report has been front-and-centre on the Globe and Mail for the last two weeks, and according to their reader polls, Canadians have plunked Climate Change at (or near) the top of their list of governmental priorities. This has made for an interesting political football, since the current minority government was elected on a platform of not particularly caring about the environment, including proposing to pull out of the Kyoto Agreement, and now Harper is scared of not looking green enough.

I liked an article I read in yesterday's Globe and Mail. It showed up in the Business section of all places. I think the author hit the essentials that politicians should consider, for the near and long term.

I would love to send something like the following to federal, provincial, and local representatives. (A major problem is that I can't vote here at all, so the first paragraph is disingenuous, at least for the time being).

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Yesterday's Globe and Mail had an article by Eric Reguly with five suggestions for a Canadian response to climate change. These are great ideas, and I would sincerely like to be able to vote for whoever was able to make all of them happen.

• The first point is essentially that increasing gas taxes would be political suicide. Instead, mandate increased product standards. We should be using the technology we have. Mandated standards would push development of better technologies.
  
  The remaining four points are excerpts from the article:
  
  
• Rail, not roads: Canada was built on the railway. It's time to recreate it. Shipping by truck emits five to eight times as much greenhouse gas per tonne of freight than rail. Shifting the freight onto rail for medium- to long-haul routes would work wonders for the environment, for highway safety and for infrastructure maintenance budgets; it is trucks, not cars, that do the most damage to roads.
  
  
• There isn't a road built on the planet that cured traffic congestion. They're highly skilled at achieving the opposite. Keep the maintenance budget and axe the capital budgets for construction. In the latest fiscal year alone, Ontario's construction budget was $1.4-billion, up from $1-billion in 2002. Imagine if that money were put into public transportation.
  
  
• Insulate homes: Mr. Harper's Tories killed the EnerGuide program, which paid for home energy audits and reimbursed owners for the cost of better insulation, more efficient furnaces and the like. Realizing their mistake, they have just launched a program inspired by EnerGuide. But it's not ambitious. An ambitious program would retrofit all of Canada's 1.6 million or so low-income households. At, say, $5,000 a pop, the bill would come to about $8-billion.
  
  
  
• Kill ethanol: In Canada and the United States, ethanol, the fuel additive made from corn, consumes vast amounts of taxpayer subsidies. If ethanol were the miracle cure for greenhouse gas emissions from transportation fuels, the expense might be worthwhile. But, at best, the environmental benefits are inconclusive. It would be far better to divert Canada's hundreds of millions of dollars of ethanol subsidies to technologies of proven environmental benefit.
  
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  I can't say I disagree with any of these, and I'm glad to see them appearing in the Business section of the more conservative national paper. [ETA: hm, not sure why I just thought the G&M was more conservative than the Post. Must've been thinking of the Star? Donno.]
  
  The complete article is behind the globe and mail's paid subscriber wall. The rest of the article is mostly lightweight. But give a shout if you want a copy.
  
  I wish I thought the Canadian government were sincere about making real change. But, even more, I wish that citizens in both the US and Canada had the political will to elect politicians to make real change. I don't think that's there yet really, in either country. (In a month, will climate change be replaced here by Quebec as the biggest issue facing the nation? Or US relations? Sigh.)