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China Planning For Sustainable Cities
TapeCutter writes "In a BBC article William McDonough says, 'The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.' The Chineese appear to agree with him and have commissioned McDonough's company to create an environmentally sustainable village as a pilot project for the more ambitious idea of sustainable cities. McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart have also written a book on the subject, Cradle to Cradle, previously reviewed here on Slashdot."
The book was really dry, but very informative, and from an engineering standpoint fascinating. I recommend it.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I recently came back from China on a business trip... I stayed in a expensive hotel... and they warned me at the front desk that I should use bottled water for everything. Not just drinking, but brushing my teeth, washing my face etc..
If I needed more water for such activities all I had to do was call the front desk and they provide it free of charge.
The problem I had with that particular episode of Bullshit! was that they seemed to miss the point that some recycling has to be done since the materials we use are non-renewable, such as plastic. I don't claim to be an expert, but plastic is a by-product of oil. When the oil runs out, no more plastic.
Sure, it's cheaper to throw it away _now_, but it will be more expensive to dig up old plastic later on than to recycle what we have now.
If you get this, we're 10 of a kind.
Not to mention China is in the middle of a industrail revelution and is 'factory of the world' and has over 1 billion people in it.
America is so much worse than China it hurts
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
You cannot patent ideas.
You can only receive a patent on an invention that:
1. is described in enough detail in the patent application so that others can build it without undue experimentation
2. does not have prior art
3. is not obvious or anticipated by prior art
4. and more...
Read the FAQ at www.uspto.gov to see why it is not possible to get a patent on an idea.
The entire premise of the patent system is that the FIRST inventor receive sufficient incentives to FULLY disclose ALL the details so that the general public can have access to the solution.
The incentive is the temporary monopoly that expires around 15 years after the patent is granted.
This means fewer trade secrets and reduced need to reverse engineer (because the 'recipe' must be fully disclosed).
China, peaceful? Perhaps you've never heard of the Chinese EMPIRE. They've had several of them. China was a brutal conqueror long before Japan took their own shot in WW2. What always shocks me about the mindset of people coming out of China is that they don't seem to care about truth, or human rights, or even justice really, they have been so brainwashed by their government. Mostly, they're just afraid to stick their necks out, while their leaders bluster on threatening people right and left while they work on assimilating or exterminating ethnic minorities in order to make room for more Chinese people. (For example, look at what happened to Manchuria, as well as China's policies in Tibet.) Lucky for the Vietnamese, they drove out the Chinese while they had the chance. (Vietnam was actually a quasi-province of China for a long period of its history, in fact.)
For all the criticism of Americans, it is the Chinese who really take the cake for cultural insensitivity, imperialism (in the old-fashioned sense, not neo-colonialism because they're not rich enough for that yet), and disregard for the rights of all people, both within and outside their country. Oh yeah, they're also way more racist than we are, too.
If China is peaceful now, it's because they know that they will lose if it comes down to a confrontation with the USA. They don't actually have the capability to nuke the USA (they still lack the long-range missiles), they could hit Taiwan but that would be self-defeating; meanwhile they would risk having everything that they've built up in the past 100 years completely destroyed.
No doubt their space program largely aims at developing ICBM technology, so perhaps a greater threat is on the horizon. One might think that the value of trade would restrain China, but that didn't rein in Germany or Japan, and the Chinese seem quite capable of the kinds of abuses perpetrated by those powers back in the 1940's.
This is the first time I've seen anyone really discussing this. I'm glad to see it. This is going to be an extrememly important issue in our lifetimes.
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Good reading: http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Writings/The_New
And some great books: http://www.newtribalventures.com/ntv/market/categ
Plastic can be made from lots of different oils, not just petroleum. George Washington Carver managed to convert peanut oil to plastic.
There's a radio interview with McDonough here: http://www.aarp.org/fun/radio/pt_radio/sustainable _architecture.html
You may want to listen to it before you go off the deep end. The guy's pretty rational and amazingly farsighted.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.
Nothing turns me off faster from reading an article than idiotic profoundness.
The Stone Age gradually faded away as more humans discovered/invented better tools that increased their chances of survival. No caveman sat around thinking much about it, it was a slow natural process.
The solution is to come up with something that does for goats what myxomatosis did for rabbits.
The solution is to come up for somthing that does to people what Calicivirus did for rabbits. I think the Australians are working on it.
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
In Australia, I think it currently works out at $3.30 a gallon. More expensive than the US, but far cheaper than Europe. (The difference is basically taxes. Fuel taxes in Europe are horrifying.)
The Saudi's had a conservative estimate of $700 billion invested worldwide in 2003 with about 60% in the U.S. and 30% in Europe. Wouldn't be suprised if the U.S. investment has gone down since the dollar has been a bad investment until recently.
Probably correct that it wouldn't create a calamity if Saudi money pulled out overnight though the stock market would take a serious beating. I think they are investing their oil wealth in a diversified way so they have something to fall back on when the oil runs out which it inevitably will so if their oil runs out they wont "collapse".
It is interesting to contemplate what would happen if the House of Saud and the Emir of Kuwait were toppled by Islamic fundementalists which is a much more realistic scenario. That would seriously roil oil and financial markets. Fact is they are both very corrupt family owned dictatorships, not well like by their subjects, and the lion's share of the oil wealth of their countries is going in to the pockets of family members not the population as a whole(though people are more affluent than most countries).
Always been an odd double standard for the Bush administration to preach "Freedom and Democracy" while they are close family friends with these two regimes who are the antithesis of "Free and Democractic", of course the fact they are rich and have lots of oil tends to color how the Bush family looks at things.
@de_machina
In 1981 the cost of a gallon of gas was $3 in 2005 dollars. See "The Oil Uproar that Isn't."
So we pretty much know that the threshold for economic shit hitting the fan is between $2 and $3 per gallon in 2005 dollars, eh?
Ethanol is a fool's fuel. It takes nearly a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of ethanol. How exactly does that help anyone, other than farmers in the Midwest who're take government subsidies to produce the appropriate crops?
Ethanol has been a sham from the get-go.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I don't see the point of your argument. It takes more money, more time, more energy, and more effort to recycle anything other than aluminum cans - and there is no shortage of aluminum on this planet. So what precisely is the point of recycling? Or recycling *now*?
If resources become too scarce then recycling will become a viable economic alternative - even a ten-year-old can see that. But until that point is reached recycling is nothing more than a boondoggle to make people feel like they're doing something about the environment.
That was the point of Penn and Teller's show, and it's straight from Econ 101.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I disagree with your statements, entirely
.Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment," writes Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. "They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base."
Disagree all you like, but it is indeed historical fact that the Fertile Crescent was covered in huge temperate forests, and that deforestation caused by humans dramatically reduced the rainfall the region received. Here are a few excerpts on the topic for ya:
"Along with its other distinctive qualities, the Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest recorded story of desertification caused by the extensive destruction of forestlands. Lebanon went from more than 90 percent forest (the famous Cedars of Lebanon) to less than 7 percent over a 1,500-year period. Trees and their roots are an important part of the water cycle, so rainfall downwind of deforested areas decreased by 80 percent. Over time, millions of acres of land in the Fertile Crescent area turned to desert or scrubland, and remain relatively barren to this day...
"The result of this local climatic change more than 5000 years ago was widespread famine. The collapse of the last Mesopotamian empire happened around 4,000 years ago, and the records they left behind show that only at the very end of their empire did they realize how they had destroyed their precious source of food and fuel by razing their forests and despoiling the rest of their environment." This is actually just a summary of what you can find in any ecological textbook for undergrads, but is reprinted in "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" by Thom Hartmann, copyright (c) 1998, 1999, 2004 by Mythical Research, Inc. Used by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Another:
". .
Jared is referring to the fact that the societies in the Fertile Crescent cut down their forests for agricultural use and wood burning, which ultimately altered the climate and destroyed the land they were cultivating.
Another:
"A cautionary tale comes from the arc of land through parts of Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran -- the cradle of civilization known as the Fertile Crescent. In ancient times much of this land was forest. The area became a leader in food production as trees were cleared for agriculture, and cut for timber, firewood, and manufacturing plaster. Now the expression "Fertile Crescent" is absurd, because the land is largely desert, semi-desert, steppe-eroded and salinized terrain, unsuitable for agriculture." A summarization of another textbook article by Ann Hancock, who simplified it for a magazine article.
I can go on here. Any undergrad in ecological science will be able to confirm what I've said. It isn't an area of dispute where scientists are concerned.
I can't argue you this point, because it's simply not correct.
You can't argue with it because you've apparently never bothered to do a whit of research on the topic. But I suppose you're more learned than Jared Diamond, or just about any other ecological scientist on the planet?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Yes, the cities are dirty, but no more so than European cities of 100 years ago. If they need to be cleaned up they can be. It just requires money and/or willpower, neither of which China has in abundance.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
In the small town where I grew up, yes, the recyling program cost more money than it brought in. But it also saved money compared to dumping the garbage, and this is in a town where we had to pay for every bag of garbage that we wanted brought to the landfill.
There are many reasons that recyling makes sense. When calculating its cost, you can't just ignore the fact that there is a cost associated with dumping as well. At least with recycling, you recover part of the cost.
Ceci n'est pas un post