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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."
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. Energy assists in industrial manufacture of goods. A drop in energy prices has massive payoffs for global quality of life.
.. they want to tell other humans how many kids to have, and force them to remain in poverty. They like poverty because they fear damaging the environment. They also fear some sort of massive human population explosion when there is no evidence to support population expansion in rich countries/people except via immigration. And that's assuming that population expansion is a bad thing.
... but only when a country is rich and the people have decent quality of life will it have the means to stop polluting. Otherwise we will be in a permanent state of "resource depletion" and global poverty. Poor countries today have no choice but to practice innefficient farming techniques and even worse they contribute massively to deforestation because of the lack of sustainable agriculture techniques.
The supposed environmentalist "final solution" is to eliminate people
The environmentalists will jump on me for saying that we should produce more energy
This is great news. Clearly, if China is actually designing eco friendly, self sufficient cities, then they have finished fixing all the other ones! No more poor, no more hunger! We can move on to worrying about the plants, cuz the people are taken care of!
China's last experiment with self-sufficiency was by all accounts a complete disaster, with upwards of 35 million dead. I wouldn't be surprised if this attempt results in another spectacular failure.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
The compulsory wikipedia article __________....
Oh noes! What compulsory wikipedia articles? Now I will never know! I'm doomed to lag behind my hip and stylishly retro peers once again!
Things that are "sustainable" (and "organic" in the foodie subculture) are often championed by people who claim to know better than everyone else. They spout off like enlightened, forward-thinking people upon whom the rest of the common rabble relies for knowledge and sophistication.
In other words, they're leftists. But we're all used to leftist sanctimony, right? Here's the part that really gets under my skin.
Anything "sustainable" (or "organic") is guaranteed to be expensive. In other words, poor people can't afford it. While rich, sophisticated leftists wallow in their organic fucking arugula, the poor rabble that they claim to "care about" will still be eating fast food and frozen pizzas. (Or millet, seeing as these people will be living in China.) "Sustainable" won't help those people one iota because they can't afford to pay for it. The rest of the subhumans will still be ignorantly destroying the Earth as before. When you see "sustainable", you can think of this tagline: "Sustainable. By rich liberals, for rich liberals."
Even reading the article makes it seem like these "sustainable" cities are going to be nothing more than posh playgrounds for the cosmopolitan readers of "The Nation". When the denizens of these not-quite-quaint climate-controlled and shielded-from-the-shit bio-domes are toasting each other with glasses of "certified 100% organic" chardonnay, will they also be asking themselves, "I wonder what the poor are doing?" Despite their tired class-warfare rhetoric, I would have to say, "hell, no."
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Kill everyone outside of US/Canada and western europe (throw Australia and NZ in there too..I like them) so we can have 100% of the world's population and 100% of the polution.
or, we could eradicate china...
it WOULD be a good idea.
What a great social experiment! Put all your troublesome individuals and families in one "city" and if something starts getting out of hand you can threaten to close off the city unless the rest of the populace keeps everyone else in line.
Hmmmm. In Japanese feudal society, the Daimiyo's serfs were clustered in families of five. If a member of one family offended the Daimiyo, all five families were executed, so each family member watched everyone else very carefully. The Japanese still have a culture of popular co-operation and responsibility to the population, and this is thought to be one of the originating cultural artifacts.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"