Robert Couse-Baker/CC BY 2.0
Lost art of the driveway tune-up.

DC StreetsBlog documents a major car culture tipping point in: U.S. PIRG Report: Young Americans Dump Cars for Bikes, Buses . Though there are few real surprises, interesting data are offered to back up the common observation that young people prefer driving less, are walking and biking more, and take public transit more frequently than older people do. All of which points to youth favoring a life where live/work/play is possible without car ownership.

Read the story from DC Streets for a well reported overview of the research. Like all such broad culture changes, this one has multiple, linked factors behind it. Those linked changes are what I’ll focus on in this post.

Planets lined up for powerful anti-car ownership force.
Young people have lowered their expectations for high salaries, a career path, and easy credit. Finding the meaning of life and being a success no longer depends on four wheels-expensive.

Early environmental activists – we late 60′s types – typically got some feeling of personal redemption from recycling, a practice which has lately turned out to be largely bullshit. Environmentally committed young-uns of today focus instead on lowering their greenhouse gas ‘footprint.’

“Sixteen percent of 18- to 34-year-olds polled said they strongly agreed with the statement, ‘I want to protect the environment, so I drive less.’ This is compared to approximately nine percent of older generations.”

As always, there’s more sex in the city, better restaurants, and a far better music and theater scene than can be found in any suburb. If you can no longer afford to fly to Tortugas for a vacation, life in the city is a reliable way to keep life interesting for the long haul – especially important once you decide TV sucks. This is a given.

Fewer people are getting married and, thus, there is less net movement of couples to the suburbs where public schools will be better for the kiddos. Anyhow, that dream is disappearing rapidly, what with Republican governors and state legislators attacking school teachers and cutting school budgets.

Young folks, most of whom probably grew up in the burbs, know that there you must drive the kids everywhere because – you know – sidewalks are not worthy of taxpayer support and deviants lurk in every shadow. This added protective driving greatly increases cost of living. Somehow, in the cities of America, where unregistered Glocks are as common as dandelions in the suburbs, kids can ride public transit or bike couple of blocks to a friends house. Most of them miraculously do not get shot or run over.

DC Streets directly cites three items as the critical factors.
“Some states now require “graduated” driver’s licensing, making young people pass multiple driving tests and hold learner’s permits longer before they earn full privileges.”

“Higher gas prices, obviously, help put owning a car out of reach for many younger Americans, especially as the age group struggles in a less-favorable job market.”

“Finally, technology, specifically smartphones, and their incompatibility with (safe) driving, help make alternatives that much more inviting.”

I’d like to expound a bit on the smart phone effect because I think it is far more significant than acknowledged.

Generational contrasts
When I graduated from college in the early 70′s I used my first paycheck to buy a really rusty Ford sedan with a cracked exhaust manifold. It was loud and burned a quart of oil every 300 miles or so but it was all I could afford. Having no phone at the time, using my car to pop in unexpectedly on friends and check out happening night spots was the only way, really, to be social.

The next year I bought a run down Chev Corvair on the theory that at any given time one would be running and I could take my time repairing the other. (This phenomenon is the origin of the legendary American ‘yard car.’) A person can’t manage that way now unless they have free access to advanced diagnostic tools and an engine hoist which, with today’s cars, is needed just to change the freaking spark plugs.

Contrast that ancient history with young people who zig zag back and forth from Mom & Dad’s to the apartment where the next job is. To communicate from the apartment, they no longer first have to give Ma Bell a $500 deposit, prove credit worthiness by snail mail, and then wait 3 more weeks to have a land line connected. The smart phone moves with them. They can plan for meeting up with friends without having to pop in unannounced, etc.

It goes to motive.
I have to believe that major car makers have done their own market research on this trend and, seeing the market dividing radically between young and old, especially among the educated and well to do, will take parallel defensive actions.

One market-preserving defense would be to integrate smart phone with automotive functionality so that the car remains relevant, perhaps indispensable to youth, by keeping a drivers eyes on the road instead of on the phone. To close the lock then…lobby Congress to make it a legal requirement that all new cars sold in the USA must be smart phone integrated and, conversely, new phones be integrable to the automotive standard.

The lamest defense would be to just let that young urban demographic go and focus on short term profits from very expensive and inefficient SUVs and trucks sold in the exurbs.

The third path would be to stealth lobby against government subsidies of bike lanes and mass transit. Give piles of money to stink tanks, which can be relied upon to develop and pass along the clever anti-bike anti-mass transit talking points to news directors and astroturf groups.

Really, you think that last one already happened? And they already focus on the exurb market for short term?

Google this week expanded its popular Street View feature to the forests of the Amazon basin, posting more than 50,000 photos that allow online users a virtual tour of the world’s largest tropical region. The photos, taken last summer in the Rio Negro Reserve, provide a panoramic view of tropical forest trails and village pathways — and a “virtual board ride” down the Rio Negro. Like many areas of the Amazon, the Rio Negro Reserve is under strict government control and has restricted access to the public, Amazon project leader Karin Tuxen-Bettman wrote on the Google blog. “We’re thrilled to help everyone from researchers and scientists to armchair explorers around the world learn more about the Amazon, and better understand how local communities there are working to preserve this unique environment for future generations,” she wrote. The project is part of a Google partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation.

Watch a video

Download the Siener here: www.vancokekartel.co.za.

Short and sweet and full of great local music!

You see, a band that promises to play blues rock “from London by way of Lafayette, Louisiana” might just seem to have an identity crisis and not know how to work out an equation, because those two subjects normally don’t add up.

But, dear Scoundrels, I doubted you momentarily, and I’m sorry, for wherever you come from, wish you came from, or would like to pretend you’re from, you’re a truly magical musical act and I hope our paths will cross again.

The term “blues rock” is a little bit misleading in the Scoundrels’ case, because most people probably jump to some howlin’ anguished Delta blues at first mention of that, which is what I did, but this British quartet plays a lively, sultry mix of honky tonk, jazz-influenced swamp blues and it’s sexy as hell!

During the recording of their debut album, Ned, Alex, Josh and George “slept on a houseboat in the Louisiana swamps, lived on a diet of Crawfish and Gumbo, watched two or three bands every night, most of which invited them up onstage with them and gorged themselves on a diet of zydeco jazz, blues and modern rock. And by day they laid down the songs that were growing and evolving with every minute, growing rich in the Louisiana spirit.”

God, aren’t you jealous? I sure as hell am.

And if you’re South African, I know you’re busy wondering if Scoundrels are anything like Shadowclub right now. Well, yes and no. They’re similar genres obviously, but while Shadowclub’s music feels like it’s blues that one watched, admires, and doesn’t completely take part in – as evidenced when they play a slow song and the beat is so goddamn technical, you can’t find a hip-shaking groove in there – Scoundrels’ music feels like a crowded, sweaty dance hall that has got it’s mojo working every second of every beat.

(I don’t know if that paragraph came off right – I love both bands dearly, but want to show you just how groovy Scoundrels is.)

So the gig I mentioned at the beginning was in Pretoria a few weeks ago, and it was after this song that I believe there was a jaw or two being picked off the floor and the crowd was completely sold on those dirty British Scoundrels.

Download this live track for free here:

• Buy Sexy Weekend EP on iTunes.
• Join Scoundrels on Facebook and Twitter.

Free and legal downloads for you this week:

Alabama Shakes – 4 Track HearYa Session (I dig this band big time, DEFINTELY download this)

Best Coast – The Only Place

The War On Drugs – Your Love Is Calling My Name

Justin Townes Earle – Rogers Park

Joanna Newsom – Instrumental 1999

Benjamin Francis Leftwich – Ticket To Ride (Beatles cover)

Don’t Mess With Texas – 23 Track Amazon sampler from SXSW 2012

Press info from The Musebox:

Brooklyn darlings LETTERIST have just premiered their debut video for “100mph”.

The band who has started generating attention lately, are taking it to the next level with a gorgeous new video that features singer Pamela Bell being chased by bandmates Rammy Yogendra and Alex McCown. Shot in Brooklyn, NY, the members of LETTERIST came up with a Spy vs. Spy concept for the video upon a brainstorm from Rammy.

LETTERIST is the perfect blend of electro-synthpop and dance rock. Influenced by classic artists such as Royksopp, Daft Punk, New Order, Fleetwood Mac, and Kylie Minogue, while evoking the sounds of modern luminaries like Metric and Lykke Li, the group will make you un-expect the expected. This spring sees the release of LETTERIST’s sophomore album, Solace and Gold, which was recorded with Tim Monkiewicz (Golden Pony), mixed by Abe Seiferth (DFA Records) and mastered by Jamal Ruhe at West West Side Music. Each piece takes you on a musical journey: art and history, ex-boyfriends, mental Polaroids of real life situations.

Regions of Earth where water is frozen for at least a month each year are shrinking as a result of global warming. Some of the effects on ecosystems are now being revealed through research conducted at affected sites over decades. They include dislocations of the relationships between predators and their prey, as well as changes in the movement through ecosystems of carbon and nutrients. The changes interact in complex ways that are not currently well understood, but effects on human populations are becoming apparent.

Ecosystems are changing worldwide as a result of shrinking sea ice, snow, and glaciers, especially in high-latitude regions where water is frozen for at least a month each year — the cryosphere. Scientists have already recorded how some larger animals, such as penguins and polar bears, are responding to loss of their habitat, but research is only now starting to uncover less-obvious effects of the shrinking cryosphere on organisms.

An article in the April issue of BioScience describes some impacts that are being identified through studies that track the ecology of affected sites over decades.

The article, by Andrew G. Fountain of Portland State University and five coauthors, is one of six in a special section in the issue on the Long Term Ecological Research Network. The article describes how decreasing snowfall in many areas threatens burrowing animals and makes plant roots more susceptible to injury, because snow acts as an insulator. And because microbes such as diatoms that live under sea ice are a principal source of food for krill, disappearing sea ice has led to declines in their abundance — resulting in impacts on seabirds and mammals that feed on krill. Disappearing sea ice also seems, unexpectedly, to be decreasing the sea’s uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

On land, snowpack changes can alter an area’s suitability for particular plant species, and melting permafrost affects the amount of carbon dioxide that plants and microbes take out of the atmosphere — though in ways that change over time. Shrinking glaciers add pollutants and increased quantities of nutrients to freshwater bodies, and melting river ice pushes more detritus downstream. Disappearing ice on land and the resulting sea-level rise will have far-reaching social, economic, and geopolitical impacts, Fountain and his coauthors note. Many of these changes are now becoming evident in the ski industry, in infrastructure and coastal planning, and in tourism. Significant effects on water supplies, and consequently on agriculture, can be predicted.

Fountain and his colleagues argue that place-based, long-term, interdisciplinary research efforts such as those supported by the Long Term Ecological Research Network will be essential if researchers are to gain an adequate understanding of the complex, cascading ecosystem responses to the changing cryosphere. Other articles in the special section on the Long Term Ecological Research Network detail further notable scientific and societal contributions of this network, which had its origins in 1980 and now includes 26 sites. The achievements include contributions to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, to ecological manipulation experiments, to bringing decisionmakers and researchers together, and to mechanistic understanding of long-term ecological changes.

by Bill McKibben, via TomDispatch

Along with “fivedollaragallongas,” the energy watchword for the next few months is: “subsidies.” Last week, for instance, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez proposed ending some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry with a “Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act.”  It was, in truth, nothing to write home about — a curiously skimpy bill that only targeted oil companies, and just the five richest of them at that. Left out were coal and natural gas, and you won’t be surprised to learn that even then it didn’t pass.

Still, President Obama is now calling for an end to oil subsidies at every stop on his early presidential-campaign-plus-fundraising blitz — even at those stops where he’s also promising to “drill everywhere.” And later this month Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a much more comprehensive bill that tackles all fossil fuels and their purveyors (and has no chance whatsoever of passing this Congress).

Whether or not the bill passes, those subsidies are worth focusing on.  After all, we’re talking at least $10 billion in freebies and, depending on what you count, possibly as much as $40 billion annually in freebie cash for an energy industry already making historic profits.  If attacking them is a convenient way for the White House to deflect public anger over rising gas prices, it is also a perfect fit for the new worldview the Occupy movement has been teaching Americans. (Not to mention, if you think about it, the Tea Party focus on deficits.) So count on one thing: we’ll be hearing a lot more about them this year.

But there’s a problem: the very word “subsidies” makes American eyes glaze over. It sounds so boring, like something that has everything to do with finance and taxes and accounting, and nothing to do with you. Which is just the reaction that the energy giants are relying on: that it’s a subject profitable enough for them and dull enough for us that no one will really bother to challenge their perks, many of which date back decades.

By some estimates, getting rid of all the planet’s fossil-fuel subsidies could get us halfway to ending the threat of climate change. Many of those subsidies, however, take the form of cheap, subsidized gas in petro-states, often with impoverished populations — as in Nigeria, where popular protests forced the government to back down on a decision to cut such subsidies earlier this year. In the U.S., though, they’re simply straightforward presents to rich companies, gifts from the 99% to the 1%.

If due attention is to be paid, we have to figure out a language in which to talk about them that will make it clear just how loony our policy is.

Start this way: you subsidize something you want to encourage, something that might not happen if you didn’t support it financially. Think of something we heavily subsidize — education. We build schools, and give government loans and grants to college kids; for those of us who are parents, tuition will often be the last big subsidy we give the children we’ve raised. The theory is: young people don’t know enough yet. We need to give them a hand when it comes to further learning, so they’ll be a help to society in the future. From that analogy, here are five rules of the road that should be applied to the fossil-fuel industry.

1. Don’t subsidize those who already have plenty of cash on hand. No one would propose a government program of low-interest loans to send the richest kids in the country to college. (It’s true that schools may let them in more easily on the theory that their dads will build gymnasiums, but that’s a different story.) We assume that the wealthy will pay full freight.  Similarly, we should assume that the fossil-fuel business, the most profitable industry on Earth, should pay its way, too. What possible reason is there for giving Exxon the odd billion in extra breaks? Year after year the company sets record for money-making — last year it managed to rake in a mere $41 billion in profit, just failing to break its own 2008 all-time mark of $45 billion.

2. Don’t subsidize people forever. If students need government loans to help them get bachelor’s degrees, that’s sound policy. But if they want loans to get their 11th BA, they should pay themselves. We learned how to burn coal 300 years ago.  A subsidized fossil-fuel industry is the equivalent of a 19-year-old repeating third grade yet again.

3. Sometimes you’ll subsidize something for a sensible reason and it won’t work out. The government gave some of our money to a solar power company called Solyndra.  Though it was small potatoes compared to what we hand over to the fossil-fuel industry, it still stung when they lost it. But since we’re in the process of figuring out how to perfect solar power and drive down its cost, it makes sense to subsidize it.  Think of it as the equivalent of giving a high-school senior a scholarship to go to college. Most of the time that works out. But since I live in a college town, I can tell you that 20% of kids spend four years drinking: they’re human Solyndras. It’s not exactly a satisfying thing to see happen, but we don’t shut down the college as a result.

4. Don’t subsidize something you want less of. At this point, the greatest human challenge is to get off of fossil fuels. If we don’t do it soon, the climatologists tell us, our prospects as a civilization are grim indeed.  So lending a significant helping hand to companies intent on driving us towards disaster is perverse. It’s like giving a fellowship to a graduate student who wants to pursue a thesis on “Strategies for Stimulating Donut Consumption Among Diabetics.”

5. Don’t give subsidies to people who have given you cash. Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies. In essence, they’ve been given small gifts by outfits to whom they then return large presents, using our money, not theirs. It’s a good strategy, if you’re an energy company — or maybe even a congressional representative eager to fund a reelection campaign.  Oil Change International estimates that fossil-fuel companies get $59 back for every dollar they spend on donations and lobbying, a return on investment that makes Bernie Madoff look shabby. It’s no different from sending a college financial aid officer a hundred-dollar bill in the expectation that he’ll give your daughter a scholarship worth tens of thousands of dollars. Bribery is what it is.  And there’s no chance it will yield the best energy policy or the best student body.

These five rules seem simple and straightforward to me, even if they don’t get at the biggest subsidy we give the fossil-fuel business: the right — alone among industries — to pour their waste into the atmosphere for free. And then there’s the small matter of the money we sink into the military might we must employ to guard the various places they suck oil from.

Simply getting rid of these direct payoffs would, however, be a start, a blow struck for, if nothing else, the idea that we’re not just being played for suckers and saps. This is the richest industry on Earth, a planet they’re helping wreck, and we’re paying them a bonus to do it.

In most schools outside of K Street, that’s an answer that would get a failing grade and we’d start calling subsidies by another name. Handouts, maybe. Freebies. Baksheesh. Payola. Or to use the president’s formulation, “all of the above.”

– Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

In fashion, London, New York and Paris are generally considered the leaders that everyone else follows. Two researchers, Conrad Lee and Pádraig Cunningham at the Clique Research Cluster in Ireland, set out to show that data can show which cities play a similar role for music.

Last.fm publishes lists of plays by location, so this pair studied Last.fm data for 200 cities globally fromas far back as 2003 – 60 billion pieces of data.

To crunch the data, they used a “recently developed statistical techniques to decide which cities lead others.” explains MIT’s Teclnology Review. “They then construct  a network in which a link pointing from one city to another indicates that one follows the other.”

The study shows that some cities appear ake a leadership position for certain genres of music. Montreal leads North America in indie music listening habits and Atlanta drives Hip Hop. In Europe, Paris leads for indie music, but Oslo leads for music overall.

Another intersting finding is that the data seems to support that the size of the city does not matter as much as we might think when it comes to being the place where new music is discovered.  So you’ll find Richmond, VA and Columbus, OH realtively more influential for new music than New York.

Download the full study from Cornell University here.

Yes, they all have the same surname. No, it’s not coincidental. The story as I once heard it, and I have no idea if it’s true or not (but what else are blogs for if not gossip-mongering), is that Gareth and Paul are brothers, and Tammy and Gareth were once married. But they’re not anymore. But they’re still in a band together. Now that’s badass!

Hailing from the Eastern Cape, the three members were born and raised in the tiny town of Molteno. Although they’re based in Johannesburg, Southern Gypsey Queen tour throughout the year within South Africa and to neighbouring countries.

The local rock stalwarts released their latest album, Delusions Of Grandeur in March last year, and I thought I’d take a mini detour off new releases and stream some solid SA rock for you. Listen up –

(For some sweet-ass nostalgia, South Africa-style, scroll down to after the stream to watch SGQ’s video for their take on “99 Red Balloons”.)

South Gypsey Queen – 99 Red Balloons:

Join Southern Gypsey Queen on Facebook, and catch the endlessly touring band at a rowdy bar near you soon!