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."

Comments

Good Luck...

[iamwhoiamtoday]

I hope that this pans out, but the manufacturing of said Renewable energy will probably offset the whole "Green" side of things... Well, hopefully it will all work out for the best. The question is, apart from Government financing, is it possible for Normal People to buy a Green Home / Car / Life?

Re:Good Luck...

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

The question is, apart from Government financing, is it possible for Normal People to buy a Green Home / Car / Life?

Move close to your work (or get a job you can telecommute to), use a bike / walk / public transport wherever possible. Insulate. Put in a water tank.

There - not that hard & no need to go whining to the government for a hand out.

Re:Good Luck...

[dAzED1]

you left out:

become vegan, or at least vegetarian (the cattle industry is extraordinarily destructive to the planet

fix things, instead of replacing them

wear studier clothes, longer

Re:Good Luck...

[Kell Bengal]

The GP said "Normal People" - vegetarianism and veganism are, for most of the world, unusual. I'm not going to enter into the debate as to whether they are desirable modes of living or not.

I think the real question we should be asking wrt to diet is 'How can we make farming and agriculture a green process?'

Re:Good Luck...

[mrroot]

Excuses take the responsibility off your shoulders so you can feel good about doing nothing.

Bite the bullet and make changes. Over two years ago, I cut my commute in half by moving closer to the city (no its not an urban blight neighborhood, nor is it a million dollar condo). While everyone else is complaining about gas prices, I don't give it a second thought. That is nice, but the reason I moved wasn't for gas prices or for the environment, it was to conserve the most precious resource I have... time.

If you commute 45 minutes each way to work, and let's say you work 5 days a week for 48 weeks out of the year (taking out 4 weeks for vacation and holidays). That means you spend 360 hours per year in your car driving to and from work. How many hours of vacation-time does your employer give you? 80? 120? If you cut your commute in half, you get an extra 180 hours per year!

By the way, a really good book I read a while back is called "Take Back Your Time", and there is also a Take back your time website.

Re:Good Luck...

[p0tat03]

Move close to your work (or get a job you can telecommute to), use a bike / walk / public transport wherever possible. Insulate. Put in a water tank.

And have the right attitude.

Let me explain. Most people can't afford to live close to work, considering how expensive housing is in heavily developed office areas. Here in Seattle it can be up to *millions* to live within walking distance of work. Most people can't afford that.

So, the next best thing is to live somewhere with good public transportation coverage. This effectively cuts out *all* suburbs, since bus service is invariably trash due to the lack of ridership and the vast areas to cover with way too few vehicles. Your only real choice left are condo complexes built around transit hubs. Most American cities don't even *have* a hub-based public transit system (local traffic around a hub, with high speed links between hubs). So, if you live in the wrong city, you're ALREADY SOL.

And most transit authorities have no means to fix this problem. This is where attitude comes in. America has been car-obsessed for so long that riding the bus has become taboo - something the neighbours whisper about. "Oh, that poor Bob! They must be in dire straits, he can't even drive a car to work!"

And indeed it's cyclical. Transit is looked upon as the poor person's choice, and the affluent commuters shun it. This results in less revenue for the bus service, which eventually deteriorates. To maintain some semblance of service, cutbacks have to be made, and obviously the first routes to go are the ones to the rich suburbs - after all, nobody's riding THEM anyways right? That's why in every city I've been to public transit has always been disproportionately well-developed in poorer neighbourhoods. After all, the bus company has to go after its main audience - poor commuters. And on and on this cycle goes, with crappy buses, dirty stations, etc etc.

Few cities have been spared this cruel fate. Toronto, Canada is one of those few cities where commuting via mass transit is even a viable option for your average working-class guy, or even upper-middle class workers. Seattle is not too bad either - but its success is driven more by a yuppie desire to be green than anything else.

It's all in the attitude. As soon as we start accepting public transit as an everyday fact of life, whether rich, poor, or somewhere in between, we can start building cities with mass transit in mind.

Re:Good Luck...

[amRadioHed]

The practices may be uncommon at this time, but I assure you that all of the vegetarians I know are completely normal humans. Anyone can do it.

And for those who don't have the willpower to completely cut out meat from their diets (such as myself) eating less meat is always an option. It is really unnatural the amount of meat the average American eats anyway.

Re:Good Luck...

[j. andrew rogers]

become vegan, or at least vegetarian (the cattle industry is extraordinarily destructive to the planet

The "cattle industry" is essential to the ecology of places like the American West, where they replaced the critical role of vast herds of wild bison. A major percentage of the American cattle herd is raised on the range, marginally arable land, where bison used to roam. If you remove the cattle, you either have to replace them with bison (in which case there is approximately zero net benefit) or you can collapse the ecosystem -- your choice. In either case, you are neither adding to the amount of plants that can be reasonably grown nor mitigating damage to the environment.

The idea that all cattle farming is necessarily destructive to the environment is ignorant nonsense. Sure, some of it is, but there is a large percentage that is not only non-destructive but actually allows us to produce food on land that would not otherwise be productive. Cattle were not genetically engineered from whole cloth in a lab by evil scientists somewhere in an effort to destroy the planet, they were a part of many ecosystems in temperate climates. We would not need to cut beef consumption nearly as much as some fringe vegans claim in order for it to be a net *benefit* to both the environment and food production.

It does not do the credibility of the environmentalist movement any good when they assert the necessity of making dire choices for ideological reasons with no basis in fact. Yes, meat production could stand to be decreased and/or optimized. Completely eliminating beef from the human diet not only serves no practical purpose, it would actually be counterproductive to the stated goals in many cases.

Re:Good Luck...

[umbra_dweller]

Veganism and vegetarianism are certainly unusual for most people, but one can still try to "eat green" if they really want to by just eating less meat. These days I am experimenting with buying half as much meat as usual, but buying better quality cuts/dishes when I do eat it.

I just watched a presentation from TED where New York Times food journalist Mark Bittman said that the average American eats 1/2 pound of meat per day (3.5 pounds/week), which is twice the amount recommended by the USDA. He suggests Americans could try eating 1/2 - 1.5 pounds per week instead - which could mean eating smaller amounts of meat with each meal, or eating the same amount of meat on fewer occasions.

I experienced this when I lived in Asia for a year. Most of the meals I ate used vegetables, rice and eggs - big pieces of meat like burgers, BBQ and steaks were only eaten occasionally. But on the flip side, most of the vegetable and rice dishes were flavored with meat and fish broth or sauce, which gave meat flavor to each meal without actually including much meat.

Re:Good Luck...

[edisrafeht]

Organic does not have to be a luxury. It is more expensive at the moment simply because of supply and demand. We can convert more farms to increase supply, but most growers feel that non-organic and the status quo is still the safe way to do business.

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. So I would argue that the massive variety available in the mainstream supermarket is the luxury you have become accustomed to.

Mainstream agriculture uses environmentally-unfriendly chemicals and methods. This maximizes crop in the short term but harms the environment in the long term. Mainstream food distribution sends produce thousands of miles to consumers. This entails shipping pollution. Long-distance food are also picked too early and have sub-optimal taste compared to local organic produce (ripe, natural, and in season..., of course it tates good). It really seems like a waste to ship bad food around like that, so I would also argue that the non-organic way is the immoral one, not organic.

Lastly, the obvious... of course it's immoral for non-organic growers to use brain-damaging, cancer-causing pesticides regardless of environmental impact. So, at least eat organic for your health, if not for the environment.

You mentioned that it is unfeasible on a global scale... what did you think people were growing before we had artificial fertilizers and pesticides?

Re:Good Luck...

[kklein]

Thank you thank you thank you.

I grew up in rural Colorado, and every time I'm back there and I look at the nigh-endless pastureland, I think, "what the hell else do you use this land for???"

Before the Europeans came, much of the American West was empty grassland grazed by unbelievably large herds of buffalo and a few scattered tribes of Native Americans who scratched out a living from following them. With the Europeans came irrigation and we were able to support larger populations on the land and use it to grow things like corn and wheat, but if you want to talk about environmental destruction, it's that corn and wheat that has "damaged" the land. That land, left to its own devices would have always supported huge numbers of grazing animals. Now it supports lush crops as well.

Good beef is grass-fed, and that is still a large percentage of it. Unless they want to start eating buffalo grass, vegetarians aren't missing out on any potential meals.

The vast majority of this hippie nature bullshit comes from city kids who were shocked when someone at school told them that meat wasn't just some stuff you bought at the store, and that it used to have big brown eyes. People with little experience out of the city, telling rural people how to live their lives.

Cities are unsustainable. Not farms. (Full disclosure: I'm typing this from my apartment in Tokyo, one of the biggest and most unsustainable cities in the world! --And a nice place to live.)

Re:Good Luck...

[zsau]

The more people buy up housing that's not close to the city the more expensive trips into to work get. It takes me about an hour and a half to get to the city from home in the morning. I don't work in the city so it's not the biggest issue for me, but that's where all the decent jobs are in this town (I'm moving overseas soon) and dad does — and yeah, that's another thing, it also makes housing so expensive that people working full-time in their mid-twenties don't bother moving out because there's nowhere better to go. So just building bigger and bigger cities without building higher cities is not going to work.

One of many things that Europe's got right. I was — no, I am — amazed that it takes less time to go from Glasgow to Edinburgh than it does to go from one part of Melbourne to another.

Re:Good Luck...

[Kjella]

Organic does not have to be a luxury. It is more expensive at the moment simply because of supply and demand. We can convert more farms to increase supply (...) You mentioned that it is unfeasible on a global scale... what did you think people were growing before we had artificial fertilizers and pesticides?

How many people were there to feed before we had artificial fertilizers and pesticides, and how many are there now? I think you will find there's a few billion more to be fed, from 1900 to 2000 world population increased from 1.65 billion to 6 billion. Organic crops doesn't produce nearly as much crops so the end result is that the rest of the land must be driven even harder to pick up the slack. "We should all eat organic" is unfeasible in the same way as "We should all eat steak", because if we tried the world would starve.

I've heard that even the best organic crops only deliver half of what regular crops do, so if we can produce food for 8 billion today (there's enough but not in the right places) then say we could grow organic food for 4 billion. That'd be enough for the world ca. 1975, but not nearly enough today. Do you understand what would happen with supply and demand if supply was short? Forget economics, you're talking hunger. Famine. Crime and anarchy as hungry people fight to survive. Mass starvation.

What we eat is a luxury, to eat is most definately not a luxury. I'm sure there's much better food to be had both for us and the environment than big industrialized farms. We can pay for quality for our own health and the warm and fuzzy feeling that our food is sustainable to the environment. But if you're talking about changing the world, you also have to consider efficiency and whether it's sustainable to the human race. We can not live without an efficient food production to feed the world. Literally.

Re:Obvious

[icebike]

And looking at the skyline in the TV coverage of the Olympics that is a real possibility. In spite of the cleanup the skys are STILL really thick over there, in spite of their massive efforts to clean them for the events.

Exporting the pollution

[EmbeddedJanitor]

So they'll just export the pollution to a different city which will manufacture goods for them. The roads will still be made of concrete (made with huge energy inputs) and they'll still use diesel earthmoving machines to build the place.

The people will still eat meat (probably only second to transport as a way people generate carbon footprint).

Basically its just a greenwashing exercise.

Re:Exporting the pollution

[Nefarious Wheel]

No good deed goes unpunished, I see. Now if you were considered a "thought leader" (whether you wanted the appelation or not) of a country of several billion people, and you saw you were increasingly becoming the lead polluter in the world, how would you go about fixing it? Spend trillions of tax dollars directly lining contractors pockets, brutally supress the use of non-green energy, or perhaps -- just perhaps -- try to educate your populace into doing it themselves?

It's easy to slag these efforts, yes they're flawed, but dammit **something** has to be done. Get out of the road if you can't lend a hand.

Oh my, where is the spirit of building things?

[2Bits]

Oh my oh my, where is the spirit of exploration, taking risk, experimenting, building things in this community? I often come here for insight discussion and interesting debate on things that matter, but instead, we got a flame fest.

So, for this forum, anything done in China must be bad, negative, and nothing good could come out of it.

Everyone is ohing and ahing when we talk about Mars terraforming. When China is experimenting a new project, everyone must slam about its politics, and there's nothing worth reading and discussing here.

Tell you what, I'm living in Shanghai, I hate as much as the next guy the corruption, the pollution, the control on free speech, the human rights, ... all the negative things here.

But for fuck sake, this is a project where the Chinese government is investing in, taking risk, experimenting, building things, ... this is a big project to experiment an alternative way of building human cities, to change the way we work, live, entertain, deal with nature, etc. Where else do you get to experiment at this scale, and with the financial backup like that? Ok, this may be a political show, but I don't see other governments dare to experiment and make a show like that.

It might be a big flop, and it might be a huge success. The lessons learned might be useful for other regions on this planet, and even might be useful when we need to build outer space colony.

And guess what, westerners (the Brits, Americans, French, Italians...) have taken a huge part in designing it too. This is not a one country thing.

For those who only have negative things to say, let's get out of the parent's basement and go out more. Visit other countries, not all is well and perfect, but I'm sure you will learn a lot more too.

You want to make China a better place? Don't whine in the basement, that won't change anything. Come here, bring your grand vision, your next big thing.

Re:Obvious

[jandersen]

My God, This Is So Insightful Of You!!!!

Because, of course the bloody commies are never going to do something good just because it is a good thing - they hate everything that is good. And of course they came up with this idea, the whole plan, the detailed architecture, the city planning, just like that in the about 5 days since the Olympics started.

Come to think of it - I don't know which is most impressive: Starting a massive, green initiative like that and showing us all the way to the future, or coming up with it in no time at all, when it would have taken everybody else years to work out the plans.

Back to reality, though: The Chinese have seen reality in the eye, just like we have - they know that this kind of things are necessary if we are to avoid choking in our own filth, and they know it has to happen on an absolutely epic scale. The difference is that they are taking action instead of waffling over who should pay and which foot to stand on.

Being honest

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Sure, this is a great step forward in thinking. However they should call it a "Reduced Carbon Green City" or something similar, not "Zero".

They also need to be fully transparent about the whole process. Just hiding pollution by exporting it does not make it go away.

Re:Obvious

[jandersen]

the rushed nature of things like the even/odd car ban and the planting of millions of plants and trees in the months leading up to the Olympics seems entirely too coincidental.

Rushed? You don't think there is a need to get a bloody move on already? We have wasted the last 8 years of Bush admin on trying to avoid facing up to the enormous task ahead of us, and I won't be surprised at all if the next ten administrations are going to do the same. It is urgent that we do something - we still have time to think (quickly) before we act, but act we must.

The planting of trees may have picked un in recent months, but it has been going on for a long time in NW China in an effort to stop or at least slow down the desertification, that send such huge clouds of dust in over Beijing, among other things. The smog can be quite bad, but what really is bad is the dust, at least that is what I found when I lived there.

As for your cheap dig at the Dam - what, in your opinion would have been best, or at least the lesser of evils: building X new coal-fired powerstations or the Three Gorges Dam? I suspect the environmental impact of the dam is likely to be less in the long run. But of course, no matter what China does, it is always wrong. If they build green and introduce legislation to limit pollution, it is "oppression of the free market", if they don't, it shows how callous and uncaring they are about the plight of the common people. If they fight terrorism in Xinjiang it is "oppression of minorities" and if they don't it is because they are incompetent and don't care about the security of their people. Is it any wonder they simply choose to close their ears to whatever criticism comes from the West? How about we once in a while greeted them with some encouragement?

They are going to build a green, carbon-neutral city? I think that is absolutely fabulous, and I hope they have every success. They open up to Western media, even if it is just a bit? I think it is good - and brave, considering that we can find nothing positive to say about what they do.

Re:OMFG FASHION MELTDOWN

[jsiren]

If the internet has taught us anything it's that the Infinite Monkeys Corollary is more important than the Infinite Monkeys Theorem. The corollary reminds us that it doesn't matter whether the monkeys turn out Hamlet, because you'll need to read through an infinity of worthless crap before you find it.

Which leads to the conclusion that you get the damn thing sooner by writing it yourself than by sorting out an infinity of worthless crap.

Re:zero carbon?

[jimdread]

CO2 from humans (or animals, plants, decomposition or any natural phenomenon) is not pollution, since it comes from carbon we took in with our food. Therefore, it is in equilibrium with the carbon cycle. The polluting part of CO2 is the one coming from fossil fuels, that is from outside the ecosystem, that gets dumped into it because it's easier than to put it back where you took the carbon.

Right, now think carefully. Where did the fossil fuels come from? Did fossil fuels come from animals, plants, decomposition, or any natural phenomenon? If fossil fuels are natural, does that make them "not pollution" by your first definition? So why do you call fossil fuels "pollution" in your second definition?