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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."
After a few decades of careful and steady growth, they launch into outer space.
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.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I mean seriously, It really would be. I say this in a good way.
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
Recycled news is green too, I suppose ....
"Cats like plain crisps"
Every inhabitant will be given a number + letter designation such as THX 1138. George Lucas to sue in 3....2...
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
For more information check this link as a starting place.
libertarianswag.com
How about self-sufficient governments in these cities? Tibet would be an ideal test site.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
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?
"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.
Will all the parts be made in China?
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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.
Unity in Diversity
Do I smell another failed biodome-like experiment comming on, or what?
:-P
This sig rocks the casbah.
Well, this would turn out to be another Biodome if not for Dr. Mills patented cure-all energy tonic.
How timely!
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Unfortunately, China is going to have to drastically limit the personal freedoms of its occupants to achieve these goals.
- You have too many roads! Get rid of some to save money.
:P
- We need more Firemen.
When did we let Chinese government officials play SimCity 2000? I'm sure they cheated to get money
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.
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.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
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.
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!
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
SOYLENT GREEN?
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.
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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...
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!
Well you can laugh because I know something about sustainability and I am not left wing. I can grow TONNES of organic delicious gormet food and it normally sells wholesale for over $12 bux per kilo. So - maybe I'll just get rich eh?
To a large degree it is all about knowledge and engineering.
BTW - I could NEVER sell any of this stuff in China for a price like that because they've known these technologies for over 1000 years.
Often people pay dearly for food because they are either lazy or simply have no idea of the real costs of production. A sack of dried beans for instance costs less than 20 cents per pound. Dried peas are even cheaper. So for about $10 bux I can pretty much fill a 45 gallon drum with beans with pork. If you buy this at the supermarket I suspect $10 bux might get you a case.
Of course beans with pork are not gormet. However if you live in a poor 3rd world country then maybe beans with pork will have you dancing in the streets being it is the musical food.
I think there is a lot we in the western world can learn. We have been very wasteful of our natural resources. I suspect this will hit you right between the eyes this winter and the next when you look at your gas heating bills and wonder why the people who built your house designed it to exclude all free energy and instead replaced it with inefficent non-renewable sources (such as your furnace) where you have to buy the fuel month after month after month.
Check out the Solar Decathalon. The work presented there is very exciting.
Then look around you and try to figure out if there is anything in your house that doesn't have to be torn apart to be rebuilt.
In this city if I go to the new construction areas I see the contractors have not learned much in the last 50 years. They still think houses need furnaces for instance. I know for a fact they do not.
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
No, you can worry about self-contained bio-spheres AFTER getting the ships out of the planet's atmosphere. The problem of getting cargo into outer space is the number one issue at this point in time. A bio-sphere isn't too hard to designed and built by college students. (Hydroponic farms anyone? Water for the plants and astronauts, plants will grow all necessary food, carbon dioxide is recycled through the plants and back into oxygen. Solar power for electronic devices. You'd have to be a vegetarian but thats a small price to pay to be a space pioneer.)
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.
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?