Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to The Guardian, packing people into cities like sardines will help save the world from climate change. But even progressives are hesitating to support this latest climate initiative.
Denser cities could be a climate boon – but nimbyism stands in the way
Drawing people into cities could cut emissions and combat housing crises. But even progressives are hard to convince
In San Francisco’s Sunset District, rows and rows of pastel-colored, two-storey homes flow from the edge of Golden Gate park into the sand dunes of Ocean Beach. Many houses here have solar panels on their roofs and compost bins at their driveways, flanked by hybrid and electric cars.
Yet here – and all over this city – one major solution to both the housing crisis and the climate crisis has been met with fierce resistance: building more.
Climate scientists and urban planners increasingly suggest that one of the most impactful ways to slash greenhouse gas emissions is to make cities denser. This change, scientists have calculated, is even more impactful than installing solar panels on all new constructions or retrofitting old buildings with energy-saving technologies. Residents of cities like San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis already have much lower carbon footprints than in the surrounding suburban sprawl. City dwellers tend to have smaller apartments that require less energy to heat and cool.
But it also means a certain American way of life may have to end.
…
At a national level, Joe Biden has called for a “historic investment” in affordable housing, with his administration urging cities to change zoning laws to boost density and limit single-family housing developments, as well as rip up highways that have cleaved apart communities, typically communities of color, and added to air pollution.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/22/cities-climate-change-dense-sprawl-yimby-nimby
Is it just me, or does anyone else think some climate activists act like they hate the idea of any personal contact with nature? At least with suburbs, houses with backyards, there is room for kids to play on grass lawns, maybe plant a few fruit trees between the houses, to share the space with the local wildlife. High density housing not so much.
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If you do heat analysis, one thing pops out of heat transfer equations. The larger a structure, the less heat loss per unit volume. Which is why the Earth still has a molten core.
If you really want to reduce heating costs, start with high rise flats but end up by enclosing a whole city in a geodesic triple glazed dome. Photochromic glass is recommended to reduce summer ‘greenhouse effects’ .
Less Antwerp than Antheap…
Taller buildings dont require more energy
The apartments dont lose energy through floors or ceilings, only through walls, and then only if they are outsie walls. An apartment that occupies say one quarter of the floor has a heat loss through two walls only instead of six in a single storey detached house
It didn’t ‘demand’ it, did it?
It is logic if humanity continues to increase its number then either cities become more densly populated or we spread into the countryside and bring added pressure on all types of life reducing biodiversity of the planet with predictable consequences – you choose. Nothing to do with climate of course
Readers of and writers for The Guardian are the sorts of people that want everyone else to live in crammed cities, not them. With a SARS virus, living in cramped conditions leads to rising infection rates.
That is right. Then Covid, but the nasty variant.
the green agenda 21 housing plans and land use i read some time back…wanted dense urban corridors on public tranport corridors to be around 6 stories high jam packed
why
so they could move people(like china did great jump backwards) to relocate TO suburbia and get all farm and other land under govvy wildlife corridors parks etc
there were maps showing how theyd remove people and create huge “wilderness areas”
as stupid as it gets I thought then
post covid its a total fustercluck idea when hi density means easy disease spread.
Happening right now in Australia. Look at any urban development near or along a transport corridor, lines and lines of unit blocks. Funnily enough, in China, if you are lucky enough to buy an apartment, it’s value decreases with improvements. So most remain unaltered and empty.
The best & brightest FAIL to learn from experience;-( In the 1950s, 60s & 70s, they moved people from cities to suburbs and rural areas. Cities were then said to be bad for civilized society. The adverse results include Detroit, Baltimore and suburbs blanketing former farm land.
Scotty, beam the best & brightest out of here. There is no sign of wisdom or humility amongst them.
Interesting that the old ecomodernist plan of increasing urbanisation is now suddenly embraced by the Guardian.
Next: nuclear power and intensive crop cultivation.
Save the world, incarcerate the GREEN FOOLS.
This is actually quite to be welcomed.
The only way to get to the desired local reductions in CO2 emissions is a radical change of lifestyle. This has always been obvious, but its always been the one thing that the green movement refused to talk about.
As a result we have had for many years now the pretence that all you have to do is change the technology. Like, keep on with cars, suburbs and malls, but just change the cars to electric. Keep on with the housing we presently have, just change the way we heat them to heat pumps, or hydrogen. Keep on shopping just like we do now, but eat less meat.
Finally we are seeing the Guardian admit what it will actually take. Addressing housing is an important step.
It will take, in no particular order:
— abolition of the car industry – under one million total on the roads in the UK, compared to over 40 million today
— closing of roads to cars and covert to use for bikes and walking
— wholesale population move into dense insulated housing
— closure of shopping centers – you will shop within walking distance
— move of business into cities, you will walk or bike to work Or take public transport to the few heavy industry sites left
— huge expansion of rail and public transport services
— an end to chemical agriculture, back to hand labour in fields
You have to imagine the UK as it was just before the introduction of the car, around 1900. This is the only way to get where the Guardian claims to want to go.
Of course, it only works as if China does the same. imagine China in about 1965. That is where China will have to go back also, to really make a dent in the global emission figures. India too.
So its good the Guardian is finally waking up to this. Now if we could only explain it to the BBC, and get them off their insane narrative about every little thing we do personally is going to have huge effects on saving the planet….
Give it time. The Guardian has even started to notice that China is emitting quite a lot and is not stopping, in fact its increasing. Men go mad in a herd, but they come to their senses slowly, one by one, a bit at a time. Its starting.
We have already seen massive centralization of America’s work force since 1960. In 1950, 25% of American’s either lived on farms and/or owned small business. My father grew up in Iowa plowing fields with horses at age 12, in 1930’s…producing what would now be 5-6 ,million dollars of beef, eggs, milk, livestock, grain, apples, tomatoes, potatoes, cabbage, hogs, chicken, veal etc, with only coal to heat the house and no electricity, (think if he had a truly viable off grid cheap electricity high tech solution…. he might of had enough money to buy shoes instead of wrapping his feet in rags. Now only 1.3% Americans live on farms or own businesses and this number is still falling. The rise of corporate globalistic leveraging has forced a very large migration of Americans off the farm lands and into cities and coastal megalopolises. America is nothing like what it was 50 years ago. We’re at a point in history that if the tide does not turn in America, Americans will be squeezed into tighter and tighter holes psychologically, geographically and politically, (or disenfranchised totally). There will be plenty of special stuff to consume but less and less liberty and opportunity. Since 1970, there has been little tech advancement that truly empowers families on small farms and businesses in local communities, ( I mean small… not multi-million dollar operations). And not franchises selling Crapola made in china. I mean small family businesses that hire a few local people. Currently, there is the alt economy in the hinterlands…(why buy new crap on Amazon when you can buy 20x cheaper used). Much of it is marketing of used items, and home made food, and small craft/manufacturing operations. These local economies would flourish with tech solutions that would provide off grid solutions for cheap electricity…. of the kind promised in the early 70’s that never happened. Instead, we got smartphone serfdom and with it, a rapidly shrinking imagination and massive intellectual decadence. There was a time when America’s strength was the small town. The radical fringe do not want to see that economic strength rise and flourish again in small town America unless it serves the current trajectory of Corporatism’s centralized, modularized, predictable and decadent tech make work solutions. They don’t want to see intellectual growth and expansive imagination, ( I do not mean grandiose imagination for grand high towers. I mean imagination for land, relationships, partnerships, in making and growing things and doing good work day to day in the local community. There was a time where I live in PA, when every one worked the fields and apple orchards, the craft manufacturing sheds. I mean every one. The old, the disabled and the barely able. There were no nursing homes. There were no predictable corporate program for life worked out by the insurance companies, hoards of lawyers, politicians. Yet structure in society is good… it protects and provides but now we’re into radical fringe social restructuring to the max led by the politically ambitious and intellectually decadent.
Hitler had the same idea of people happily living in close quarters where they can be easily watched. Maxine Waters said the people have to be controlled. In fact it is the representation that must be controlled with only honest votes counted.
They want to do away with cages and stock yards for live stock grown for food but are ok with stacking people into cages called apartments. In other words eliminate private ownership of everything. And for what, their idea of what is good.
Someone would move into the rural areas with trees, grass and fresh air. Who would that be the elites of course.
“Is it just me, or does anyone else think some climate activists act like they hate the idea of any personal contact with nature?” – Eric W.
Nope, nope, nope, Eric. It is NOT just you. There is something about climate activists that indicates a separation from reality in everything they say and do. They want what they want and who cares what it costs, as long as they get their way, like spoiled noisy brat that they are. And they always want it done to someone else, not to them. I don’t believe they can be trusted, period.
They want to turn the cities into huge PRISONS>
Well, they don’t seem to know much about the natural world (first-hand), so why not try to keep other people away from it too?
40 year old dystopian novels…and it’s exactly what leftists want.
These people are demented.
Agenda 21! Man is evil, man must be separated from ‘nature’. Of course urban fox populations are 5 times the density of rural ones. The same with pigeons, and there would be no where near the bat population without houses.
The Guardian are just ignorant.
I think our experience with COVID-19 shows the advantage of living in densely populated urban areas. They seemed to have the lowest death rates, didn’t they? (/sarc)
F. word morons, I’ll invite all of them in former East Europe where the packed ten stores buildings are the norm. Let’s all of them came here and find solutions!
When dense cities were bombed during WW2 the firestorms ensued. That is because of low distance between buildings the fire from the burning buildings were setting the neighbour buildings on fire. And thus all the city burned. If they kept large distances between the buildings (lower density) this wouldn’t happen.
This also may be one of the reason than in the Eastern Block during communism architects kept large distances between buildings. These were tall buildings, but not a dense architecture.