Lord Monckton is busy embarrassing himself again. Not only is he the world’s pre-eminent global warming debunker (even though he doesn’t have a science degree, let alone a degree in climatology) he’s now an expert on everything about Obama. Specifically, his birth. Apparently Obama faked his US birth certificate. See world? See CIA and FBI? Monckton knows best!
If it looks like a duck and waddles like a duck…. Quack Quack! Or is that “Crack Crack!”
If I took a swab of the inside of your nose and analysed the DNA, there would be some DNA we would recognise from you, some from bacteria, and some from virus. That would be it, right? There wouldn’t be anything else in your nose? We would be able to classify 100% of the DNA in your nose, wouldn’t we? Wrong! About 20% of the DNA inside your nose is “Biological Dark Matter”. We know how to swab it and test it, but the Gattaca just doesn’t fit anything we know.
WHAT IS IT?
The Harvard Business review states:
To put it simply, the suburbs have lost their sheen: Both young workers and retiring Boomers are actively seeking to live in densely packed, mixed-use communities that don’t require cars—that is, cities or revitalized outskirts in which residences, shops, schools, parks, and other amenities exist close together. “In the 1950s, suburbs were the future,” says University of Michigan architecture and urban-planning professor Robert Fishman, commenting on the striking cultural shift. “The city was then seen as a dingy environment. But today it’s these urban neighborhoods that are exciting and diverse and exploding with growth.”
Why Such a Major Shift?
The change is about more than evolving tastes; it’s at least partly a reaction to real problems created by suburbs. Their damage to quality of life is well chronicled. For instance, studies in 2003 by the American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Health Promotion linked sprawl to rising obesity rates. (By contrast, new research in Preventive Medicine http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.phpdemonstrates, people living in more urban communities reap health benefits because they tend to walk more.) Car culture hurts mental health as well. Research by behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman and his team shows that out of a number of daily activities, commuting has the most negative effect on people’s moods. And economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer have found that commuters who live an hour away from work would need to earn 40% more money than they currently do to be as satisfied with their lives as noncommuters.
A recent report sponsored by Bank of America, the Greenbelt Alliance, and the Low Income Housing Fund examines the inefficiencies of the current “geographical mismatch between workers and jobs.” Focusing on California, it says that sprawl “reduc[es] the quality of life,” “increase[s] the attractiveness of neighboring states,” and yields “higher direct business costs and taxes to offset the side-effects of sprawl”—which include transportation, health care, and environmental costs.
Or, as one New Urbanist developer says:
Walkable communities like Monarch at Ridge Hill are rapidly gaining in popularity, and with good reason. There are clear financial, environmental, social, and emotional health benefits of pedestrian friendly design. Here are ten of them:
Well, it depends on the seafood. Every trophic level upwards means a 90% loss of the previous foodweb.
Don’t understand? Let The Conversation explain.
A comparison between the way we exploit marine and terrestrial food webs can illustrate the problem. The efficiency in the transference of organic matter up the food webs is typically below 10% (i.e. an organism grows in weight by less than 100 g for each kg of food ingested) (note 1). This means that production is dissipated as it moves up in the food web, so for every ton of plant production introduced in the food web, we can harvest up to 100 Kg of herbivores, 10 Kg of carnivores feeding on herbivores, and so on. On land, we eat largely plants and herbivores, with a few omnivores and very few carnivores (e.g. dogs in some Asian countries). Accordingly, the mean food production on land has a mean weighted trophic level of 1.008, where 1 is a plant, 2 is a herbivore, etc.
In contrast, we eat many large predatory fish, such as tuna or sharks, that sit high up in the marine food web, which has many more steps than the terrestrial food web does. For instance, tuna has a trophic level of about 5 (i.e. four other steps in between plankton production and tuna), which is unparalleled in terrestrial food webs, equivalent to imaginary monsters eating wolf-eaters (Duarte et al. 2009).
This means that the production of 1 Kg of tuna (trophic level 5) requires about 100,000 tons of plankton production, which is equivalent to the annual primary production of 5 hectares of ocean surface. If we, however, consume 1 kg of small pelagic fish, such as anchovies (trophic level 3), we are effectively harvesting the annual production of an ocean surface 100 fold smaller.
Amory Lovins presents “Reinventing Fire”, his new TED talk which shows how to make our transport and homes and industries so efficient America could move to renewables and grow their economy and switch off the coal.
While I remain aghast at his over simplistic dismissal of nuclear power and his lack of concern for reliable baseload electricity, the other stuff is pretty good. I especially liked the diagram illustrating how cars become lighter they become far more energy efficient. I was impressed with the strength of the carbon-fibre dome he presented to the audience. I’m just sad that he was so glib as he dismissed nuclear power as ‘dangerous’ and didn’t really explore how safe, clean, abundant, and reliable it is.
He was also a little too glib about the marketplace solving all of these issues for us. He even seems to like trucks and cars. I guess living in the USA he has to! But in less individualistic societies like Australia and Europe we can have other public conversations about fast-rail and trolley buses and, over time, increasing trendy New Urbanism.
All the usual facts on Better Place but with a few cool visual aids to get the picture.
Back in 2004 when I first discovered peak oil one late night after a very bad few weeks in hospital with my sick son, I basically freaked out. At the time, nothing appeared to be able to scale up and replace oil. It was just too much liquid fuel to replace too fast. At the time peak oil looked more alarming than global warming. I had images of us hitting a Greater Depression by now, or worse. But now, I’m not so sure peak oil will be that catastrophic. It’ll probably result in quite a bit of economic disruption in the first world, but maybe not the social disruption and collapse I visualised.
This change in position comes from considering the new developments in Fracking. Sadly, it seems we can now economically recover far more gas than I previously thought. Cars can be rejigged to burn gas instead of oil. This is good news for alleviating peak oil, but very bad news from a climate point of view. I’d rather us consider how to rezone our cities into more European styled New Urbanism with trolley buses and trains than save the car; especially if saving the car means wrecking our fragile climate.
However, it’s not all bad news. I believe in a ‘car disciplined’ society where most of us can get by most of the time without a car. Car clubs and subscriptions and sharing schemes would replace owning a car or van unless your business really, really needed it.
And when you absolutely have to have a car, it’s nice to read that Electric Cars are gradually improving in cost. They’re still far, far too expensive. Take a small new car of about $15 000 and double that price if it’s electric. But here is the trend. Green Car Reports says:
Reuters reports that the average price of an electric vehicle-grade battery fell 14 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2012.
The Bloomberg New Energy Finance Report reveals that every kilowatt-hour of a battery pack now costs $689, down from around $800/kWh this time last year. In 2009, it cost over $1,000/kWh.
For a pure battery electric car, the cost of the battery typically makes up 25 percent of the cost of the vehicle.
If the trend continues, analysts predict that by 2030, batteries could cost as little as $150/kWh, in 2012 dollars. That would bring down the cost of a Nissan Leaf‘s 24 kWh battery pack from approximately $16,500 at today’s prices, to as little as $3,600 (pre-inflation).
