Chinese Eco-Cities 447
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."
The best part (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The best part (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, what's wrong with designing a generation ship by first designing a self-sufficient arcology?
as soon as you have a more or less closed system (bio-sphere anyone?) that only requires a little energy from external sources.. you can send generation ships..
say.. they find a planet with no ability to support any but cellular life, and leave a few microbes.. wait milennia, and kerzham!
Try getting out of orbit first (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:The best part (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The best part (Score:2, Insightful)
Potemkin villages (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Potemkin villages (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Potemkin villages (Score:2)
We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:2)
My guess is that China is fully aware of reality and if the Brit consultant throws them a curve ball (so to speak) they'll go ahead and do it anyway, fuck the consultant.
Never, ever underestimate the Chinese. They have the manpower to brute force projects.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:2)
The Chinese have a few thousand years of history behind them. Stalin was a cult phenomenon- there's a difference, maybe you missed it.
Oh wait, I get it. Plan for/create the next boogyman.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:3, Funny)
Zhou Enlai replied, "we think it is too soon to tell."
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:2, Interesting)
You're saying that if everyone in Luxembourg burned a pile of tires they'd be worse polluters than China?
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:5, Insightful)
But there's another measure: Dollars of worth / amount of pollution. In other words, if one country is producing $1000 of services and goods for every ton of CO2 released, they probably have modern industry and don't "waste" as much as another country that produces only $300 of value for every ton of CO2 released.
Measured on such a scale, the USA is actually better than China.
But I don't think Americans should be satisfied that they're better than china, instead they should try comparing themselves to say an average state in the EU, or if they want to aim even higher at say Iceland or Switzerland.
I don't see any obvious reason why an average American needs to pollute around twice as much as the average Norwegian. You *don't* have a higher standard of living, and there's also no reason you need to be less technically advanced. Nor is the reason climate.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:3, Insightful)
In 1981, President Reagan's first secretary of the interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. "God gave us these thi
or per ex capita (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:or per ex capita (Score:3, Insightful)
It means that two countries can look worse on your statistic simply by entering a union and otherwise change nothing. They'll still pollute the same, but the amount of "other people" will decrease for both of them.
Americans love to play games like these, for the simple reason that measured pro capita, the USA is among the most polluting countries in the world, worse even than countries that have a *higher* standard of living and a colder climate like Canada, Norway or Iceland.
If ev
oh? (Score:2)
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:5, Informative)
Or why not per dollar of GDP? Measuring pollution by GDP actually represents an interesting metric of production efficiency, and on that scale [wikipedia.org] China is very poor indeed, although the US and Canada are at best middling (on par with nations like Brazil, Sri Lanks and Mexico. It's Japan and various European countries that fare best.
Jedidiah.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, steelmaking and plastics are very polluting and energy intensive industries. Banking and insurance is not very polluting per unit of GDP. The US exports banking and insurance while importing steel and plastics (both in raw form and as manufactured goods). US retail, as hard as it tries to be wasteful, is inherently fairly efficient because it sells a disproportionate amount of luxury goods, which don't take much space or shipping, while Chinese stores sell a disproportionate amount of low-value goods like food, which are transport and space intensive.
Once all of this is accounted for, the US is genuinely probably about 50% more efficient than China per unit GDP. This comes from things such as more efficient power generation (~40% for our coal plants vs. ~30% for their coal plants) and far more efficient buildings (our 4,000 square foot McMansions are more efficient per $ of value and per square foot, at a given temperature setting, than their 400 square foot coal-heated houses).
The reason why the US is reviled (and quite justifiably so in my own view) is that its citizens consume far more than is needed for a good lifestyle. Consumption is probably so high that it actually reduces our happiness. The US might only be 3rd in per-capita emissions, but the two above it have major (and highly polluting) oil extraction and exporting industries, while the US imports most of its oil (and therefore transfers some of the pollution that its consumption causes). The US is also the main force pushing other countries to consume more. The rest of the world might not complain so loudly if we didn't butt into their afairs via the WTO, World Bank, trade agreements, corporations, etc.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:3, Funny)
Can I donate to your campaign?
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at this in a slightly cynical light, Chinese factories may see this as a means to up their bargaining power in deals with environmental authorities. Something along the lines of "...why should we [ stop dirty smelting practises / pay increased pollution taxes / etc ] when our employees are living in an urban green zone?".
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, China is a real beacon of freedom and fairness. Oh, no, wait - China actually has a long, brutal history of tyranny and oppression, with a history of more "slaves" than the West ever had in its worst moments. Moralizing about that is, quite simply, remarkable.
China's current economic wealth is of course slingshotting on the backs of the West - it hardly occurring in a vacuum.
India is much worse, and per capita Canada is one of the worst with America coming in second.
Canada 1/40th the number of people over more land than China - saying we're "worse" is lame given that the "per capita" consumption is largely the creation of resource wealth for the world.
Of course China is cleaning up, as all economies do when they become more wealthy - suddenly living in a shithole doesn't seem as appealing, and you start to want to have clean air and clean cities. Just look at the industrialization of London, England as a great example of this.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:2)
Also, China's wealth is not simple "slingshotting." That's pretty insulting. They have made HUGE strides on EVERY level since the collapse of the last (puppet for the west) empire fell. Literacy rate has gone from the teens to the 85% in that time period. Women have gained TREMENDOUS amounts of rights/freedoms. Is China perfect? No. But China has succeeded where many countries with seemingly disasterous problems (neglig
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:2)
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=39475 [worldnetdaily.com]
Wanna know what the murder of girl babies in China has resulted in?
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/omicinski/069
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20040308-0926 32-4101r.htm [washingtontimes.com]
Free trade
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:3, Insightful)
Also great job in muddying up the discussion. Does the one child politcy cause suffering? Sure it does. But what is the alternative? China's population grew from around 300 million to above a billion in just a few decades, in a country that already had problem feeding it's population in the first place. Tens of millions died of starvation in the process.
As it is, China is still regularly close to disaste
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:2)
Please elaborate on these slaves. I know of no huge slave populations in China's history.
Maybe he meant the peasants that contribute to the GDP but are forbidden from living on the coast, or perhaps he meant the workers that built the great wall. China has a long history of scant concern for their peasant class.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:2)
The US's current economic wealth is of course slingshotting on the backs of the East - it hardly occurring in a vacuum.
China 8x the number of people over more land than the US - saying we're "worse" is lame given that the "per capita" consum
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:2, Interesting)
Are the poor peasants in China really that much better off?
No. And for the record, they have less per capita pollution because most of them still use horses for transportation and live in villages without electricity or even running water!
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier (Score:3, Informative)
Unless you count factory workers as slaves, which they weren't even if one takes everything The Jungle teaches us.
per capita... (Score:2)
They're enslaving their own people.
I agree it's tough to industrialize. And you're gonna pollute doing it. But to exclude large portions of the population from the spoils of it is a shame.
Re:Sure bash on... (Score:4, Insightful)
Dream... (Score:3, Funny)
I mean seriously, It really would be. I say this in a good way.
Re:Dream... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately planned cities tend to go terribly wrong. Brasilia [wikipedia.org] is a good example of a planned city, and while it eventually became a credible city, it is in spite of the original planning, not because of it.
Re:Dream... (Score:2)
Re:Dream... (Score:2)
Re:Dream... (Score:2)
This is a common conceit.
It didn't work because they were stupid. Surely it'll work this time -- we're not stupid, are we? No. Therefore it will work. And once someone doesn't do what we planned for them to do, well, they'll have to be stopped and forced to do it The Right Way(tm). So it works. Because we're
Re:Dream... (Score:3, Interesting)
It didn't work because they were stupid. Surely it'll work this time -- we're not stupid, are we?
Have you never seen the films of early attempts at heavier-than-air flight? There are lots of ways to construct a plausible looking aircraft, but the few that are actually flightworthy are in fact the result of less-stupid designs.
Re:Dream... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dream... (Score:3, Funny)
"We had to flood some cities, but we need the Three Gorges Dam to power our grow lamps."
The press release is dated 24/8/2005 ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The press release is dated 24/8/2005 ... (Score:2)
with cool chase scenes too? (Score:2, Funny)
Also Known As Arcologies... (Score:5, Informative)
Self-sufficient cities (Score:5, Funny)
Why is this moderated as funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Benefit of Planned Economics (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine the US if the govt didn't give businesses money for jobs and everything else?
Made in China? (Score:3, Funny)
great achievement (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Biodome (Score:3, Insightful)
:-P
Re:Biodome (Score:2, Informative)
Thank God for Dr. Mills (Score:3, Interesting)
How timely!
The down side (Score:2, Insightful)
The Exodus has begun. (Score:2, Funny)
- We need more Firemen.
When did we let Chinese government officials play SimCity 2000? I'm sure they cheated to get money
Dense Living (Score:4, Insightful)
Stubborn People (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
China's Foward Think (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
What will they eat there? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Energy crisis (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know any countries like this? Me neither. Great theory.
Yes I do (Score:2)
You are much more likely to get clean water in a rich country than a poor one. The USA doesn't deplete its forests like Brazil or Liberia. Nor does the USA pollute her water sources as much as India, Mexico, or China. Fact is, when people are rich they are more capable of enforcing "Not In My Backyard". Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Japan etc. do not pollute as much as China or India.
If you believe that poor co
Re:Energy crisis (Score:2)
If we were all wondering if we'd be able to feed ourselves through the winter, no one would give a damn if the river water started on fire. A silent spring is the same as any other spring when you haven't eaten in 2 days.
Think about it for a minute and tell me you'd really care if an energy source polluted or not if it was the only thing you could afford to keep your family from freezing some cold Janu
Re:Energy crisis (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Energy crisis (Score:2)
Re:Energy crisis (Score:2)
There's got to be a better way
==
Yes there is, but it's a bitter pill to swallow: reduce energy demand via reducing global population radically. We are a species that has completely overpopulated the planet and we fail to recognize this. Because we have the crutch of technology to support us, we think the laws of nature don't apply to us anymore. They do. Once our energy supply runs out or fouls the planet enough, we'll be out of luck just as much as any animal has been out of luck when it becomes a vi
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Fact is, to the best of my knowledge in urban planning and design, libertarian "paradises" (like Houston in the field of real estate development) usually turn out to be anything but. Most people would rather live and work in a built environment with effective government--which isn't necessarily the same, mind you, as limited government.
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
I don't know much about NYC (or Houston), but I don't think either of them could properly be called a paradise.
I do know that choosing for yourself is better than having someone choose for you though. And that's what my posts in this topic are about.
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
I have a somewhat limited knowledge of NYC. But it's known as a liberal place. It was more liberal when Dinkins was mayor. Is it worse now that's it's a little less liberal, or is it better?
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
I keep mentioning Houston because it's probably the best example of the horrors of the libertarian approach to zoning
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
What is a leftist? (Score:2, Flamebait)
The inhabitants of this marvelous new city will sure be happy to be relieved of the burden of making their own choices, not to mention the constant disappointment of finding out they made the "unenlightened" choice again.
So we have this right wing utopia where the government lies to us to scare people into going along with whatever retarded scheme they've come up with this week. That keep photographers away from milita
Re:What is a leftist? (Score:2)
At least they're doing something.
Are you for anything? Or are you just against the things your friends all agree you should be against? And "doing something" doesn't cut it -- come up with something specific that has a history of working in the real world and doesn't rely on fantasy and utopian thinking to achieve a goal.
BTW: The war talk is juvenile, completely off-topic
Re:What is a leftist? (Score:2)
Are you for anything? Or are you just against the things your friends all agree you should be against?
Speaking for me, I'm for accountable government that doesn't get off on starting wars to distract from problems at home. I'm also for a viable economy that isn't draining all the decent jobs to the third world so that C-level execs can line their pockets.
Let's see - social liberal, financial conservative, and in favor of better oversight of corporate land.
Re:What is a leftist? (Score:2)
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Um, then why do you keep trying to tell people they can't
- drive the car,
- eat the food,
- smoke the cigarettes,
- buy the healthcare,
- hire the people,
- work for the wage,
- open the store,
- live with the neighbors,
- run the campaign ads,
- build the factory,
- go to the schools,
- support the charities,
- raise their children the way or
- spend their paychecks the way
they want?
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
Re:It's a leftist's dream come true (Score:2)
First, they should realize that that IS what they're doing.
Then they should realize that making people's choices for them is wrong.
Then they should stop.
Re:The hypocrisy of "sustainable" (Score:2, Insightful)
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 investmen
Re:The hypocrisy of "sustainable" (Score:3, Insightful)
Anything "sustainable" (or "organic") is guaranteed to be expensive.
And that is usually
Re:The hypocrisy of "sustainable" (Score:2)
1. People pay for it due to pretention and irrational fear.
2. Pesticides, inorganic fertilizers, herbicides, hormone injections, genetic modification, and all the other non-organic techniques work. (So you create more food with the same amount of input. Costs are lower, prices can be lower, and food can be a lot more plentiful.)
Re:The hypocrisy of "sustainable" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The hypocrisy of "sustainable" (Score:2)
Re:The hypocrisy of "sustainable" (Score:2)
Wow, that kind of ignorance is pretty amazing. Better go check out the Radical Faeries, who have self-sustaining communities all around the world, from here in the mountains of Tennessee to Australia, that requires practically no money, and just a little knowledge. Many of them have no electricity, almost all do some farming, many ARE hippies, but they're quite educated, intelligent, and definitely very outgoing and happy pe
then there's reality (Score:2, Insightful)
The hypocrisy of "the parent post" (Score:3, Insightful)
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 abundanc
Re:The hypocrisy of "sustainable" (Score:3, Interesting)
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 id
Re:Nothing amazing sounding here (Score:2)
We don't only do Rolls Royce projects, but they're the projects t
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)