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Chinese Eco-Cities
opencity writes "The Guardian is reporting on a deal by Arups, a British consulting firm, to build four eco-cities in China. The cities are to be self-sufficient in energy, water and most food products, with the aim of zero emissions of greenhouse gases in transport systems. The press release hints at some of the technology."
Not without a spindizzy
Seriously though, what's wrong with designing a generation ship by first designing a self-sufficient arcology?
as soon as you have a more or less closed system (bio-sphere anyone?) that only requires a little energy from external sources.. you can send generation ships..
say.. they find a planet with no ability to support any but cellular life, and leave a few microbes.. wait milennia, and kerzham!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Launch Arcologies. You need a city population of 120,000 and a game year of (I think) 2100 for them to become available under the "Rewards" submenu, the one with the Mayor's house and City Hall.
"Arcologies" - and I think they had a capacity of 500,000 sims. Simcity isn't the originator of this idea. They were conceived by Paolo Soleri in the 60's as the epitome of conservatism.
Is china actually that bad of a polluter? Let's talk per capita. Because that's really what matters. China has 1.2 billion people, of course it produces a lot of pollution. The question is, does it produce more or less pollution per capita than other nations? A lot of people in china live in rural areas, and many people live simple lives, without cars, or electricity, or other amenities that generally cause pollution. Whereas, in more developed countries, everyone has cars, and electricity, and uses ungodly amounts of water. Are there any studies that have been done that show that China is actually polluting more than it should be for it's population?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"but only when a country is rich and the people have decent quality of life will it have the means to stop polluting."
Do you know any countries like this? Me neither. Great theory.
Looking at this in a slightly cynical light, Chinese factories may see this as a means to up their bargaining power in deals with environmental authorities. Something along the lines of "...why should we [ stop dirty smelting practises / pay increased pollution taxes / etc ] when our employees are living in an urban green zone?".
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Do I smell another failed biodome-like experiment comming on, or what?
:-P
This sig rocks the casbah.
Unfortunately, China is going to have to drastically limit the personal freedoms of its occupants to achieve these goals.
China is trying to industrialize and modernize without the same harships and human suffering.
Yeah, China is a real beacon of freedom and fairness. Oh, no, wait - China actually has a long, brutal history of tyranny and oppression, with a history of more "slaves" than the West ever had in its worst moments. Moralizing about that is, quite simply, remarkable.
China's current economic wealth is of course slingshotting on the backs of the West - it hardly occurring in a vacuum.
India is much worse, and per capita Canada is one of the worst with America coming in second.
Canada 1/40th the number of people over more land than China - saying we're "worse" is lame given that the "per capita" consumption is largely the creation of resource wealth for the world.
Of course China is cleaning up, as all economies do when they become more wealthy - suddenly living in a shithole doesn't seem as appealing, and you start to want to have clean air and clean cities. Just look at the industrialization of London, England as a great example of this.
I mean seriously, It really would be. I say this in a good way.
Unfortunately planned cities tend to go terribly wrong. Brasilia is a good example of a planned city, and while it eventually became a credible city, it is in spite of the original planning, not because of it.
I'm saying that if you have 1 country with 300 million people, who all drive SUVs, Turn their heat up to 25 degrees in the winter, and their airconditions down to 15 degrees in the summer, as well as leaving all their incandescent light bulbs on 24 hours a day, then they are going to produce much more pollution than a country of 1.2 billion who mostly don't own cars, don't have air conditioners or heaters, and don't have all that many lights to turn on. I'm pretty sure the earth could support 30 billion people if we didn't generate the amount of pollution we currently do. We have created some good things like treating sewage, but most of the inventions of the last 100 years have reeked havoc on the environment.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Rad idea! Every new city from now on should be built super dense too so getting around is faster and easier, and built around pedestrian traffic, bikes, walking... not cars. If people get from place to place via their own power the world would be a lot less fat.
Whilst the parent may have been written a little tongue in cheek, it isn't exactly a humourous notion to have Chinese-free government in Tibet. No number of green cities can replace a culture that is being destroyed - or for that matter, China's treatment of its own people.
It's like Naxi Germany building the autobahn and ensuring that there was more employment - let's not forget the other side of Communist China, just in the same way that we don't forget about the other side to Nazi Germany.
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
Wow confusing issues of human rights and autonomy with economics! You sir are a genius.
Let's talk per capita. Because that's really what matters
Why?
Perhaps the Americans should have babies like there is no tomorrow so that they can "legally" pollute more, have higher levels of poverty and then complain that the rest of the world won't support them.
Umm... Global and interdependent economy is a recent invention in human history. Humans have lived most of their lives living off of the land and their labor. You may have heard of a little thing called farming.
I know this goes against your globalist/economic paradise line of thinking (gee, how dare these radical commie scum try to thwart economic interdependence!), but this has nothing to do with politics. You are the one who is injecting politics in here. The Chinese are simply trying to make an investment in something that will hopefully reap a gain in effecincy by promoting self-sufficency of these people.
The only class warfare rhetoric, ironically, is yours.
Sure there's a lot of pretentious people who talk about environmental issues or sustainability to be trendy and don't know what they're talking about. Pick any subject and you can find such people. Sustainability does make a certain amount of sense, and just because there are some people who promote a rather hollow shell version of the concept doesn't mean there isn't a real concept with ood sense and reasoning behind it.
Anything "sustainable" (or "organic") is guaranteed to be expensive.
And that is usually the case for one of two reasons:
(1) To get a better profit margin selling mostly the same stuff to pretentious gits, or
(2) Because what had previously been pushed into negative externalities has been introduced into the transaction proper and has increased the cost by better accounting for the true cost of the item.
The first one is about labels and not about sustainability at all, the second is more what sustainability is all about: trying to allow the market to better account for the true costs of producing (and disposing) of things, rather than having the market ignore "hidden" costs that are increasingly coming back to bite us later.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
When you see "sustainable", you can think of this tagline: "Sustainable. By rich liberals, for rich liberals."
Clearly some new definition of "insightful" is being applied here... perhaps one where it means the same thing as "wrong" or "ill-reasoned" or "prone to political name-calling to discourage critical thought".
Sustainability, or something close to it, has been the norm for most of human existence. It's also easy to achieve today, and the simplest way is to just consume a whole lot less. I don't believe that using fewer consumer goods and less energy requires one to be rich. It would appear to be an option available to most people.
I would also like to point out that the survivalist movement is very big on sustainability - though perhaps not for for ecological reasons - and I doubt that anyone will be calling them "liberals" any time soon.
You propose implementing nationally technologies claimed to be sustainable prior to testing the truth of those claims with four pilot cities. How reckless!
That is, the amount of US pollution the average non-US citizen must breathe might be less than the amount of Chinese pollution the average non-Chinese citizen must breathe.
US/Canada and western europe combined have 15% of the world's people and produce 40% of the world's greenhouse and other polluting gases. Not to mention how US corporations/goverments pollute third world countries (Vietnam, Bhopal and so on) thru war and other lovely means. Of course then its easy to put the blame on those poor bastards who can't clean up the resultant environmental mess. There is a lot of pollution in the 3rd world and quite a bit of that is the direct result of US/european corporations violating norms that they won't dare to violate in their own countries. Keeping one's own house clean by dumping garbage on your neighbor's yard was never a good practice. Some day this will back fire.
Perhaps Chinese officials are thinking ahead. Earth's population is wasting valuable resouces, warming up it's atmosphere, and gradually destroying it's ozone layer.
China is now attempting to build self-sustaining cities that are able to survive even when Earth dies and it will die if we continue to destroy it.
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Poorer nations are installing solar PV and wind powered generators or "sustainable" energy devices, because most of the traditional exisiting "traditional" centralized grid tech is just WAY too expensive, plus getting access to and paying for fuel. It's *cheaper* for them to have a lot more de centralized points of production using alternative electrical generating technology than a few huge powerplants and then run powerlines everywhere. In India, they have the largest installed base of methane digesters to provide useful quantities of burnable gas, because it's cheaper over all to do it that way. There's only a few hundred in the US, but tens of thousands or more in India. that's just an example, there are numerous others. Wireless tech is being adopted faster in the poorer nations because it's cheaper/faster to deploy than hard wired now. Poorer nations lead the world in adoption of very high mileage per gallon vehicles, and pure electric, because it's just cheaper to buy them and use them. Poorer nations are adopting advanced agronomy tech that doesn't require as much heavy equipment and chemicals as western agricultural techniques because it's cheaper to do so.
And etc.
This process is obviously ongoing and not near finished, not even close, but the trends are very easy to see and research. They are trying to skip a generation of "almost works cheaply but fails it" western tech, they are at least smart enough to see what works and what doesn't, to be able to learn from others successes and failures, given they have very little cash to work with.
I think you are at least a decade or more behind the times in your energy news reading. There's only a couple of western nations that are pushing the alternatives as strong as the second and third world poorer nations are,(Germany is an example there, somewhat) and the US is down the list, not near the top, not yet anyway. It could be but it would take a few more major energy hits to push it over the top. Now if your rant is meant only for people inside the US, yes, I would agree. Talk is cheap. Although,in my personal circle of friends,use of solar, at least in a useable backup size is pretty common,but as the population goes, no it is not. We think ya'all who haven't got any are sorta sdilly, but oh well. a lot of people were early adopters of PCs, too, they got the benefits, late adopters suffered in ignornace and had no access. To each their own.
This is changing though now that solar tech in particular is good for two decades or more of decent production,is very well built, choices are there, and is increasingly being installed and included in the normal 20 year home note. In fact, the current market is saturated with orders and there's a big demand for panels. The newer polymer tech coming out will drastcially reduce prices,so I expect within five years or so you'll start to see it in every subdivision. Remember when satellite TV first started, or cable television? It took one install in a neighborhood, then within a year or so most all folks had it who were going to get it, it was that quickly adopted, from zero to a real decent market. things can change fast. remember the OPEC embargo and what happened with the japanese car market in the US? FAST is the keyword here. That's what this sort of tech requires, jim bob talking to bubba about his new toy that fixes a major problem. Hmm, very similar to home computers. Very very slow to start out, then wham, mid 90s it took off, now they are almost throw away disposable tech. Most households and almost all business have them now. One decade to go from expensive and medium rare to more common than not.
"Sustainable" tech will get there, and it won't be just the brie and champers crowd using it, because in the long run it's just cheaper and better for most useages. Stufff that uses less power but is better to use will become common, along with personal energy production. It just *will*, there's no ifs about it, inevitable now. Our society was only able to develop that "luxury
China has a middle class of 300 million people. This middle class wants to buy things, like cars. They also still burn mostly dirty coal for their power. When Chinese pollution is detectable on the West Coast of Canada and the US, arguing over per capita levels is pretty irrelevant.
You, not he, is confused, sir.
Y'see, everything is economics. An empty stomach trumps any ideology. Namely, if you have a subsistence economy so poor that it can barely feed itself, there will be very little "human rights." People will be concerned about feeding themselves first and foremost, not about protecting their unalienable rights.
So, human rights stems directly from economics.
Autonomy is also a matter of ecoonomics. How is one to be a sovereign nation if you exist only because of foreign financial backing? What if some nation planted a flag in your back yard? Without an economy, how would you resist? With what army? For what reason?
Economics always comes first. Worrying about rights is a luxury affordable only by countries who can feed and protect their citizens. Until then, you have no autonomy or human rights.
DATABASE WOW WOW
The reason it's appealing is it hasn't failed yet. I recall throughout the entire life of the USSR had all sorts of ambitious 5-year plans. They were never able to execute successfully. Economies are simply too complex to be planned - you need the feedback loop free markets provide. The best you can do in the way of planning is subsidize behaviors you like and tax behaviors you don't, within limits.
China (economically) has come a long way in the past 50 years and will probably go much further as they gain more influence over their super power buddy the US.
Actually, in the '60s they were going backwards, as Mao's cultural revolution and "great leap forward" caused mass starvation. They really didn't start to get on their collective feet until the '70s when Deng Xiaoping realized China would always be backward and poor unless it adopted a market economy.
Imagine the US if the govt didn't give businesses money for jobs and everything else?
This is silly. You have a misconception of which way the money goes, for the most part. Only government contractors are "given" money - the wealth the government spends is generated by corporations and comes to the government through various tax schemes (some corporate, but mostly income tax on employees). Having worked with the civil service, I can tell you the current situation is orders of magnitude better than the one we would be in if the government ran everything.
Don't they teach this stuff in the schools anymore?
Wow. So many people are bashing China in this thread. And they make broad generalizations about their government and history while detracting from the seriousness of their own countries problems. How about anytime someone bash China, also tell us how long you've lived in China, studied China, and talked with Chinese citizens? Maybe that should be a requirement when talking about any subject, so we will know exactly when someone is talking out of their ass, as if it weren't apparent already...
Things that are "interesting," (and "provocative," in the political troll subculture), are often championed by trolls who claim to know more than everyone else. They spout off like enlightened, forward-thinking people upon whom the rest of the common slashbots relies for knowledge and sophistication.
In other words, they're trolls. But we're all used to troll sanctimony, right? Here's the part that really gets under my skin.
Any "hyperlinks" (or "links") are guaranteed to be links to goatse. In other words, poor slashbots simply can't afford to click on them. While rich, sophisticated trolls wallow in their somethingawful.com, the poor rabble that they claim to "care about" will still be clicking on lemonparty.com and hick.org. (Or tubgirl.com, seeing as these people will be living in China.) "Humor" won't help those poor people one iota because their eyeballs will be fried by it. The rest of the subhumans will still be ignorantly destroying the slashdot as before. When you see "trolls," you can think of this tagline: "Trolling. By creepy losers, for creepy losers."
Even reading the post makes it seem like these "paragraphs" are going to be nothing more than deviant giggles for jaded readers of "adequacy.org". When the denizens of these not-quite-quaint sad, pathetic subcultures are toasting each other with glasses of "certified 100% organic" urine, will they also be asking themselves, "I wonder what the poor slobs who replied to our troll posts are doing?" Despite their tired rhetoric, I would have to say, "hell, no."
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
I guess the heavily industrialised ways in which we're doing things now are guaranteed not to be expensive, right? Is that what you're implying?
Everything we do today is about growth, by which we measure economic strength against all better judgement. In modern times, growth is based on the abundance of cheap energy and cheap materials, all of which will run out because we can't have sustainable growth (and, because of peaks in the production of oil and natural gas, we'll feel this sooner rather than later). The ballooning costs that come with resource depletion and scarcity are going to wipe out any disadvantage you would care to spout about sustainability.
If you want to talk about "hypocrisy", try reading that sentence in your post about "class-warfare rhetoric". In a way, you're a "rich liberal" as well, by the very premise that you're here. The difference is that some of us really are wondering about the poor people, instead of about the rich.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
But have you ever considered how HARD it is to maintain civil order in a country with 1.4 billion people?
It's easy. All that the Chinese government has to do is stop telling people what to do. People don't need a nanny to tell them what to do. The government should stop stealing the people's money, and the government should disappear into the abyss from which it came. Common law, infrastructure, fire departments, police departments, etc. existed long before government, and they will continue in its absence (and operate in a more efficient manner, of course).
The Civil War started with FAR fewer dichotomous opinions.
The civil war would not have happened if it were not for government, because the north would not be imposing taxes on the south. Slavery would still need to be abolished, but that did happen almost everywhere, and usually without a war. The civil war is a good example of why we shouldn't have government.
Try getting 700 million people getting angry at at another 700 million. It's simply not a pretty sight =p
In a stateless world, 700 million people would never get angry at another 700 million. Such large-scale conflict requires the existence of states.
As much as I dislike the fact that China does violate civil liberties, it's a necessary evil required to keep it from dividing itself into 16 different countries like many times throughout its history.
The problem is not China dividing into 16 different countries...the problem is that they do not divide further! Let smaller countries succeed from nations, and let those countries divide further still, until the countries are so small that they disintegrate into groups of individuals.
Eventually, all you will have left is a bunch of individuals, held together merely by voluntary associations and contracts. The free individuals would still, of course, be able to defend themselves, as America defended herself from Britain during the revolution. But all the government corruption, inefficiency, and horror would be gone. It would be as close to utopia as you can get, in short. Even if a State formed again, at least the Chinese would have a supremely pleasant holiday.
How much horror and destruction has the world known because countries have tried to stop their subjects from succeeding? If your fellow man is not infringing on anyone else's rights, leave him the hell alone! Alas, if only everyone thought this way...
Parent requires that you take a big-picture view of recent chinese activities, especially the political implications: new space race. man on the moon a year before the US returns, an industrial and economic agenda rivaling the equivalent american -- of course theyre trying to impress. potemkin villages in old world russia served the same purpose - convincing europe through a facade that it was full of happy people and progress. the chinese villages are a PILOT, an experiment, of course; however, they're ultimately more of a political statement than a scientific/ecological one. parent was pointing out (very subtly and obviously missed by other repliers) that china is likely trying to garner postive PR
Also great job in muddying up the discussion. Does the one child politcy cause suffering? Sure it does. But what is the alternative? China's population grew from around 300 million to above a billion in just a few decades, in a country that already had problem feeding it's population in the first place. Tens of millions died of starvation in the process.
As it is, China is still regularly close to disaster, and for all the problems of the one child policy, China is doing more or less the only thing it can to prevent it's population from growing out of control.
If anything, they should be applauded for being the only country willing to take action to halt population growth.
Your whining about abortions in the face of China's history of regular mass deaths due to famine is just plain disgusting.
The problem is that it's incredibly hard to get people to give up on cars. In the Netherlands, fuel costs something like $6/gallon, making alternatives way cheaper, and traffic jams can easily turn a 20 minute drive into an exercise that lasts over an hour. On top of that, driving is probably one of the least safe ways of transportation.
Public transport can get you to many places quickly and easily. There are bike roads virtually everywhere, making cycling efficient and safe.
Well, guess what? People still drive to work by car, all the while complaining that driving is so expensive and that the government should do something about traffic jams.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It means that two countries can look worse on your statistic simply by entering a union and otherwise change nothing. They'll still pollute the same, but the amount of "other people" will decrease for both of them.
Americans love to play games like these, for the simple reason that measured pro capita, the USA is among the most polluting countries in the world, worse even than countries that have a *higher* standard of living and a colder climate like Canada, Norway or Iceland.
If every chinese started behaving like the average American already do behave, that would lead to a huge increase in pollution.
But there's another measure: Dollars of worth / amount of pollution. In other words, if one country is producing $1000 of services and goods for every ton of CO2 released, they probably have modern industry and don't "waste" as much as another country that produces only $300 of value for every ton of CO2 released.
Measured on such a scale, the USA is actually better than China.
But I don't think Americans should be satisfied that they're better than china, instead they should try comparing themselves to say an average state in the EU, or if they want to aim even higher at say Iceland or Switzerland.
I don't see any obvious reason why an average American needs to pollute around twice as much as the average Norwegian. You *don't* have a higher standard of living, and there's also no reason you need to be less technically advanced. Nor is the reason climate.
In 1981, President Reagan's first secretary of the interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. "God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back," Watt said in public testimony that helped get him fired.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Spoken like a true American.
Do you even realize how silly (and stereotypically American) this sounds? As if the greatest human freedom is the freedom to choose to drive a big, ugly, polluting monstrosity?
You forgot to throw in "Are they free to choose to eat a Super-Sized McFatty Deluxe meal from McDonald's?"
Cars are stupid anyways. They should not be allowed, except for where they are actually necessary: In remote areas. People should live in dense cities; they're more efficient and, most importantly of all, LESS POLLUTING.
We only have one atmosphere. Once we mess it up, it's all over. You libertarian types with your "FREEDOM TO POLLUTE!!1111" rubbish are going to be the death of the human species.
Just as people shouldn't have the "freedom" to shoot each other over petty squabbles, people also shouldn't have the "right" to pollute the atmosphere. You want to talk about "the tragedy of the commons"? By allowing anyone to spew pollutants willy-nilly into the atmosphere with privately-owned cars, ironically, we've created a "tragedy of the commons"-like situation... WITH OUR AIR..
We may be okay for a century or two, or three, or maybe even more. But we can't keep it up forever. Either the air will become unbreathable, the oceans will end up flooding out coastal cities (read: Manhattan, San Francisco, etc. etc. etc...) or both.
And if it happens, you can thank Americans like yourself who think owning a car is their God-given right.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?