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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 ....
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?