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."

Comments

We can all breathe a bit easier

[ReformedExCon]

As China is one of the biggest polluters and is not bound by the Kyoto environmental treaty, having them take this step on their own initiative to create cleaner cities is certainly a welcome sight.

The cities are being developed by a British group, and I'm not sure how well that bodes for the final designs. Britain has some of the most "natural urban growth" cities in the Western world. It will be interesting to see how well they will be able to come up with something that is both ecologically friendly and unique and attractive.

Re:We can all breathe a bit easier

[Yartrebo]

Per-GDP is a pretty lousy measure of polluters so long as there is world trade. Some sectors are inherently polluting or much harder to clean up, and some are inherently quite clean. It also ignores trade surpluses and deficits.

For example, steelmaking and plastics are very polluting and energy intensive industries. Banking and insurance is not very polluting per unit of GDP. The US exports banking and insurance while importing steel and plastics (both in raw form and as manufactured goods). US retail, as hard as it tries to be wasteful, is inherently fairly efficient because it sells a disproportionate amount of luxury goods, which don't take much space or shipping, while Chinese stores sell a disproportionate amount of low-value goods like food, which are transport and space intensive.

Once all of this is accounted for, the US is genuinely probably about 50% more efficient than China per unit GDP. This comes from things such as more efficient power generation (~40% for our coal plants vs. ~30% for their coal plants) and far more efficient buildings (our 4,000 square foot McMansions are more efficient per $ of value and per square foot, at a given temperature setting, than their 400 square foot coal-heated houses).

The reason why the US is reviled (and quite justifiably so in my own view) is that its citizens consume far more than is needed for a good lifestyle. Consumption is probably so high that it actually reduces our happiness. The US might only be 3rd in per-capita emissions, but the two above it have major (and highly polluting) oil extraction and exporting industries, while the US imports most of its oil (and therefore transfers some of the pollution that its consumption causes). The US is also the main force pushing other countries to consume more. The rest of the world might not complain so loudly if we didn't butt into their afairs via the WTO, World Bank, trade agreements, corporations, etc.

Benefit of Planned Economics

[Anonymous Coward]

A situation such as this is virtually impossible to achieve in a free market situation. Hence this is showing the benefits of a planned economy. 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.

Imagine the US if the govt didn't give businesses money for jobs and everything else?

great achievement

[a302b]

The ability to do these things is probably the strength of China. Because the economy is run by the government, it has the ability to pursue these large-scale and exciting projects such as sending a man to the moon or creating ecological cities.

Every country has its strengths and weaknesses. I actually think these "ecological cities" are a fantastic idea, and I am very happy that someone is modelling them for future modification/reference. On the other hand, China has its own weaknesses (poverty of so many & massive industrial pollution to name two big ones), but I don't think these weaknesses should detract from what is fundamentally a great potential achievement.

Re:Energy crisis

[Coryoth]

Rather than trying to save energy, we should find ways to produce more energy cheaply without causing pollution. Expensive energy is the root cause of global poverty and reduced quality of life. Cover the deserts with solar panels.. make energy dirt cheap.

This is about both saving energy (by making more efficient use of it) and producing more energy (new energy generation for the city to make it self sufficient). Put most succinctly it is about sustainability. Efforts to "save" energy are not about stopping doing things, but about doing possibly even more than we do now, just doing it all more efficiently so that it doesn't use more energy.

To put it in terms of a rough economic analogy, it's like figuring out how to spend your money more wisely so you can get more out of it. Sure you could simply keep spending flagrantly with ever increasing expenses and just take out larger and larger loans, but eventually you have to sit down and work out what your current income level really is, and then see how you can spend that most efficiently. That doesn't mean you stop trying to get a raise, it just means you try and get "living within your means" as a basepoint.

Sustainability and efficiency do make sense, no matter what your standpoint. I think you're simply constructing a straw man with claims that "The supposed environmentalist "final solution" is to eliminate people" and generally implying that energy self sufficiency is about giving things up, rather than what it is really about: doing even more with what we already have.

Jedidiah.

Re:It's a leftist's dream come true

[pomo monster]

You mean like most of the world's great cities? Here in NYC, for example, our government "plans in advance" where you can live and work (zoning laws), what we can do there (labor law and industry incentives), how we get to work (automobile restrictions and public transit), what products we can buy (consumer safety), where to buy them (business regulation), and where to dispose of the wrappers (litter law, trash pickup, mandatory recycling).

Of course, if you prefer to live in a libertarian shithole like Houston, Texas (no zoning laws, few social services, motor vehicle free-for-all, etc.), that's entirely up to you--and so much the better for the rest of us in livable environments, as we won't have to waste time talking down all the suckers at the teats of Ayn Rand.

Re:It's a leftist's dream come true

[benjamindees]

Most of the planning in NYC has been done after the fact. For most of its history, it was a "libertarian shithole" much like Houston is now. In fact, that probably had a lot to do with its phenomenal growth.

Most planned cities, Brasilia, Washington DC, end up being little more than monuments to their creators. Anyone who has anything to do with these cities and has any sense lives in suburbs.

Successful cities create themselves. People move to be closer to some resource, such as a trade route or mine or otherwise strategic location. If there's time for some authority to do any planning at all, there's not really any strategic resource nearby. Most attempts to create successful, self-sustaining cities have been failures.

Look at the location planned here, for instance, "farmland", the absolute worst place to put a city unless you're a government looking to herd citizens into factory jobs.

or per ex capita

[Quadraginta]

Hey, shouldn't people be allowed to produce pollution they breathe themselves? Do you care if I smoke and ruin my own lungs, so long as you don't have to breathe it? That is, doesn't the offense of pollution, if offense there be, come from producing pollution that other people have to breathe?

In which case, the way to measure the obnoxiousness of pollution by country X is just to divide the pollution by the population of the rest of the world, everybody except those who live in X.

By this standard, the Chinese may not do so well, because the non-Chinese population of the world (everybody but the Chinese) is much smaller than the non-US (everybody but the Americans), non-Canadian, non-Australian, et cetera. 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. Oh well.