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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?