Posted on 06/15/2008 7:30:42 AM PDT by Bean Counter
This is how it will be. Across the fair face of Albion, to the ringing of bells and the soft murmur of doves, appears a leafy flush of eco-towns. They are sun-dappled utopias, urban dreamworlds in which no human need is unfulfilled. Wildlife romps through bird-loud glades. People work at home or in business parks to which they can stroll or cycle. Public transport is swift, efficient and free, so cars are not needed. Community sports hubs, leisure and cultural facilities are so abundant that nobody wants to leave the town anyway. Children walk safely to schools in which the most popular subject is environmentalism. There are superstores for convenience, and farmers’ markets for friends of the planet. Allotments, too, for those who want to grow their own. Energy is renewable, insulation total and the carbon footprint zero.
Nothing is wasted. Grey water goes onto the gardens. Rainwater is dispersed via permeable pavements, swales and ponds into wetland habitats, which channel it safely back into the aquifers and rivers where it belongs. The town never floods. There are no dustcarts. Residents put their rubbish into cylinders that discharge straight into underground vacuum tubes, which whisk it to the local recycling centre, where at least 50% of it finds new economic use. The rest of it is converted into heat or energy. Ill health and unfitness are rare aberrations. “Eco-towns,” says the Department for Communities and
Local Government (CLG), “should be designed as healthy and sustainable environments, encouraging healthy living for all through ‘Active Design’ principles, community involvement and encouraging healthy behaviours.”
*SNIP*
Out in the shires, hype was mating with wishful thinking and breeding chimeras. Zero-carbon house-building is about as likely as the odourless fart, and concrete is the baked beans of global warming. Cement kilns contribute at least 5% of the global output of carbon dioxide, and some calculations put it at double that. Every brick laid is a blow to the climate. Of course, this doesn’t mean there should be no new house-building; and it certainly doesn’t mean that houses should be any less carbon-efficient than technology can make them. There is no quarrel with the government’s decree that all new homes should be “zero carbon” by 2016. But note that word “all”. If the targets for eco-towns are the same as they are for everywhere else, then what gives them their special status? Why is the government so determined to drive them through? And if it is so hooked on sustainable housing, why is it pouring so much of its energy into new-build? The vast majority of people live, and will go on living, in homes built during the 19th and 20th centuries. Retro-fitting these to improve their carbon efficiency would yield exponentially higher benefit than a few flagship housing estates.
**SCHNIPP**
Of course there is no mention of what all of this will cost, or where all of the money will come from...
Some pipe dream, no??
Very descriptive writing!
Zero-carbon house-building is about as likely as the odourless fart, and concrete is the baked beans of global warming.
I am a bricklayer by trade so I am also a carbon stacker!
I guess we will have to build straw huts because nothing else will be suitable for the carbon collectors.
I guess I will have to convert to stacking twinkies. Carbon will put me out of work with the mentality of the Church of Green. hail Ye reverunt Algore!
Environmentalists are fascists. It’s all mapped out here -
Insanity on the Spree: New Exhibit Explores Hitlere’s “Germania”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,540558,00.html
And for those who don’t like new “Germania,” there’s always Himmler’s solution to the Eastern Territories. See here -
http://www.historynet.com/heinrich-himmler-the-nazi-leaders-master-plan.htm/6
“A “manor house” occupied by an SS or Nazi party leader would dominate each village. In addition, each settlement would feature a Thingplatz and a local party headquarters that Himmler envisioned as a “center for general intellectual training and instruction.” Himmler also planned to transform parts of the Russian steppes, with their sweeping grasslands, into his vision of a proper Teutonic homeland. “Germanic man,” he explained to Kersten, “can only live in a climate suited to his needs and in a country adapted to his character, where he will feel at home and not be tormented by homesickness.” So Himmler decided to plant thick groves of oak and beech trees to reproduce the ancient forests of northern Germany. “We’ll create a countryside something like that of Schleswig-Holstein,” he boasted.
“How will they pull this off with Sharia law in force?”
The practioners of islam will be exempted, and have their own eco-village, with two wheeled carts made with the rear axles from scrapped polluting automobiles pulled by jackasses... the manure will go into the centrally located “People’s Compost”.
A Brit with the turn of the phrase! Such a rare commodity these days...
Certainly well worth a careful read and to think about the mind set of those who continually try to engineer the lives of people. It is important to step back and use that delightful saying, "cannot see the woods for the trees".
George Orwell wrote his delightful escapist novel, "Coming Up For Air" in 1938. Mr Bowling, sneaks away to his native town, not seen for nearly forty years. Unhygenic and topsy turvy with little shops and pubs etc. Bowling gets an unpleasant shock. Urban renewal and the very fish pond filled with tin cans. Imitation "Tudor" semi- detached villas. It is pretty near all gone. A darn sight cleaner though.
Pardon my digression. The bottom line is the bureaucrat cannot damn well leave people alone. He or she longs to gaze on their creation as people gaze on poor animals in a zoo. Oh yes, well fed. Well housed.
As with many things, there are wise and foolish ways of going about it. The two directions are doing with less, and using technologies to have more.
Most eco-types are firm believers in the “do with less” idea, but they are invariably upstaged by technologies that provide more, to more people. Technology can also be strongly enhanced with common sense use.
For example, trees provide us with many products. Some of these, like lumber, are very valuable. Others, like pulp for paper, are not, even though paper is an enormous industry.
If instead of using trees for pulp, we used hemp instead, not only would we get higher quality, longer lasting paper, but vast amounts of wood would be freed up for lumber. In turn, this would lower house building expenses and lower the prices of homes, so more people could afford them.
This is environmentally a very good idea, and we don’t have to do with less, we all have much more, and better.
Ideas like this one are all over the place, that at the same time allow us to save a lot of money, and a lot of energy, and to lower the price of other things as well.
So don’t buy into the notion that we will have to do with less in the future. Because they have a habit of being wrong.
Doesn’t work in a global economy. Our California and Northwest mills are hanging on by a thread. Several continue to close each year. Can’t get dependable stream of wood at times; can’t compete with Canadian wood at times; or new housing market is down. Or the reasonable cost of shipping by rail is thwarted by line closures.
Once a mill is gone, it is never coming back. We are rapidly losing our wood products infrastructure. That will limit our flexibility in the future to deal with the growing biomass crisis in our forests.
Much of the problem lies in conceiving the lumber industry as something other than agribusiness. In truth, the industry is caught in many of the paradoxes as other kinds of farming, but just doesn’t realize it. And farming can be hellacious if you don’t understand these paradoxes.
Had the lumber industry changed its practices when the rest of agribusiness did, by now it would have been a very different business indeed.
To start with, compare pine to wheat. It will always be by far the most popular product. But that does not mean that it will be the most profitable product. And not diversifying its product almost guarantees that the lumber industry is going to be financially nuked at intervals.
But the industry is so focused on pine, that it just grinds up other trees that could produce valuable fine lumber, for chip and pulp, as it is doing in the deep South. That is a lot worse than turning food crops into ethanol.
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