Slashdot Mirror
China to Build a Zero-Carbon Green City
gormanw writes "Just outside Shanghai, there is an island about the size of Manhattan. China is going to build its first-ever 'green city', complete with no gasoline/diesel powered vehicles, 100% renewable energy, green roofs, and recycling everything. The city is called Dongtan and it should house about 5,000 people by the end of 2010, with estimates of 500,000 by 2050. The goal is to build a livable city that is energy efficient, non-polluting, and protects the wildlife in the area."
So most of the world now means the United States?
Veganism in China and India (two of the worlds most populous countries) may in fact be a majority.
Organic means natural, sustainable methods and growing and harvesting crops in the right seasons. In fact, it is not a luxury when it comes to convenience. Organic produce means you can only have right crop in the right months.
Having both grown up farming both organically and non-organically, as well as currently working in the seeds industry, I can say from both first-hand experience and industry research that that couldn't be more wrong. There are two points in particular that are mistaken.
The first is that the conflation of geographic location with organic production. Most farmers' local markets include a significant (usually majority in my experience) non-organically grown produce. Buying local vs. freighted foods is entirely unconnected to organic/non-organic production.
In many cases locally-grown produce has a higher total energy cost of production than foreign-grown produce. The archetypal example of this is tomatoes grown in the UK vs those shipped from Spain.
In addition to non-optimal local growing conditions requiring more energy, smaller, local food producers almost always burn more energy per unit of produce than larger operations even in the same geographic region because large producers lower the marginal energy cost of production with economies of scale. Japan is an excellent case study of exactly this effect, as its market regulations strongly bias the market to smaller less efficient regional producers, causing the price of food to be significantly higher than it otherwise would be due to higher production costs.
Geographic proximity is absolutely not a reliable indicator of relative energy consumption
As for organic farming being 'sustainable', all it is is substituting human labor, land (production densities must be much lower to avoid pest population buildup), and excess energy (e.g., using a propane torch to kill weeds by application of heat, or more tillage passes to mechanically weed fields) for chemical and fertilizer use. Human labor is anything but cheap energy-wise, unless you're talking about basically slaves who were raised from childhood on an extremely low energy budget, and who are not afforded any of the luxuries of the society for whom they are producing the food.
You mentioned that it is unfeasible on a global scale... what did you think people were growing before we had artificial fertilizers and pesticides?
Before we had those things, population centers around the world (e.g., Mexico, India, China, Pakistan, etc.) were on the verge of an epic famine and the most extensive die-off of humanity this side of WWIII. A larger portion of agricultural lands were then also comprised of regularly cleared slash-n-burn fields fertilized by the ashes of the forest for a few years before the soil was depleted and more land needed to be cleared.
The only argument that can have merit is the health issue, but that varies significantly by specific grower practice. Proper use of pesticides as per the label is proven to be safe, but it's unfortunately not unheard of for growers to misuse them, both knowingly and unknowingly. Likewise, many organic farmers improperly compost their organic fertilizers and put consumers at higher risk of bacterial contamination. In both cases we have government regulatory agencies watching for infractions, and they generally do a good job of keeping us remarkably safe compared to pre-green revolution days.