Not a lot of posts coming this week. I’ll be in Pittsburgh for the “Remaking Cities Conference” as a ‘thought leader speaker’ – which means I have ten minutes in one of the workshops to be provocative.
So here’s what I’ll say, condensed into four hundred words and posted in the “Pre-Read Material” along with the other thought leaders here:
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Is it too late?
Carbon in the atmosphere is already over 400 ppm; there will minimally be an
increase in temperature of 2 degrees (C), our leaders are in denial or paralyzed
by the prospect of taking any action that would make a difference. Climate
change is too slow, too global, too difficult for the current generation. We prefer
not to ponder an apocalyptic future, especially if we’ll be cashing out before the
horsemen show up.
If it is too late, what is the point of urban design that only cosmetically deals with
the city as it is, not the city that will be pummeled by the forces we are unleashing?
New York before Sandy. Calgary, Boulder and Alcapulco before their billion-dollar
floods. My city, Vancouver, before sea-level rise.
Yet a Monty Pthyonesque future—with continual news of fresh catastrophe – may
be the opportunity that a generation of planners and urban designers need to
advance an aspirational agenda that ‘sustainability’ cannot capture. (Too medicinal,
that word: “Here, have a dose of sustainability; it’s good for what ails you.”
And it’s already been co-opted by those who have who have refined greenwash-
ing to an art form.)
The future will instead be about ‘defensive infrastructure’—the public works needed
to protect our existing assets and as much of our way of life that we can afford.
Massive resources will be diverted to those who promise they can protect us.
Traditionally, that has been the military, hand in hand with engineers capable of
building and managing large, single-purpose projects. In peacetime, those skills
are directed to the construction of public works that can transform continents:
freeways, water projects, power grids.
Can those resources be used to not just respond to the impacts of climate
change but to design, build and transform urban environments that are more
resilient, more equitable, more beautiful?
Well, sure. There are already examples. But what we need now is recognition by
those with the power and resources that it is possible to build both the dike and
the greenway, to integrate landscape urbanism with strategic retreat, to create
a more beautiful and humane urban environment that responds to both the
vagaries of nature and diverts us from doing more of what created the problem in
the first place. That strategy must be conceived and promoted now.
It’s not too late for that.
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See you next Monday.
Gord – challenging big picture thoughts indeed.
I’m most interested in the City of Pittsburgh itself (not the Metro), as it continues to shrink in population since the 1970’s. Exurbanization not unlike Detroit but not as drastic continues to be a fact in many once-vibrant and populous Rust Belt cities. A quick Google scan seems to suggest heavy investment in cultural and entertainment attractions (where does the $$ come from?), tearing up riverfront viaducts and seniors housing, probably in so-called “life style” developments. OTOH, I’d imagine closing schools, single-occupancy residential neighbourhoods and the like.
Gordon
We have already been co-opted! I have coined a phrase for this condition; I call it “The Cyborg Syndrome”. It is intentionally a term that the spin doctors can not co-opt. It is a term that reflects the reality of modern global civilization, it means in a nut shell that we cannot live, literally cannot live without the help of machines, yet those very machines are destroying the biosphere in the process of supporting us humans. We are seriously entangled economically, socially, culturally, politically and in every other way with our machines. There is no opting out for anyone on this planet. The only choice is to build better machines.
I am an urban designer so of course having framed and named the problem I then want to fix things. There are many actions that can be taken locally. But actions also need to be taken at a higher organizational level. Global Industrial Revolutions have to take place that reduce environmental impacts to zero. These projects have to take place primarily in the energy supply sector to begin with. This is where our creative energy needs to be focused.
For example, I have proposed a novel solar cell design based on the idea that you can build a PV cell along an endless thread, and then weave it to make a fabric, to then both build a home and power that home where ever the sun shines. For me it is the story of the Golden Thread, for others it is the Solar Blanket. In order to develop an idea like this a Manhattan style project has to be organized. Solar Thread can be utilized in yet another machine which I call a “Photon Engine”, but more about that some other time. My point is that we have to think about things if we are going to change the future.
In order to make ideas happen quickly they also need to be freely published without conditions. I call this activity “Stealth Design” and we need to do a lot more of it in order to make rapid development progress.
The idea of weaving a PV “panel” is interesting. I’d be keen to see this design.
However, I feel compelled to comment that the problem we face now with implementing renewable energy is not technological but human. The barriers are not due to the lack of efficient or effective technologies; the barriers are due to slow implementation caused by a host of factors ranging from opposed vested interests to regulatory inertia to good-old-fashioned fear of change.
As an example, one of the biggest obstacles today to installing renewable energy plants is the lack of transmission lines, for which the technology has been around for about a century. (I work in renewable energy and have seen this problem reported in Europe, Canada, USA, Latin America, etc.)
The problem with renewable energy is technological because humans are unwilling to widely adopt this technology in its current form. Humans have found many reasons not to do this. Solutions have to be compelling at fundamental levels before they can supplant existing conditions. That is why I am for pure inventions that overcome all objections at once.
As an example, Bill Gates changed the state of human knowledge in the world with a very simple idea, a novel use of the on-off switch.
OK…
I look forward to reading more about your threaded PV technology. I hope it is able to overcome all objections at once.
Reblogged this on The North Van Urban Forum and commented:
Is it too late?
Check your facts – been no global warming for 15 years, carbon proven to have no effect on climate and latest IPCC report just says “might” have have climate change in 50 years.
Haha! That’s a good one! (Although not really that original…)
OK, I have another one:
Climate change is a hoax perpetrated on the world’s gullible people by a consortium of “scientists”, who are really at the mercy of the elite from the Swiss chapter of the Illuminati. Many people think that they are carrying out this hoax in order to funnel money to Greenpeace and other similar sister organizations because they are friendly with the Illuminati (one of Greenpeace’s founders was actually the second cousin of one of the Swiss Illuminati), but the truth is that Greenpeace is a shell company set up in the late 1960s with the goal of financing covert operations such as:
(a) covering up the presence of aliens in Area 51;
(b) staging the moon landing and many of the subsequent space missions (it’s not a coincidence that both Greenpeace and the Canadarm have Canadian roots); and, somewhat esoterically,
(c) eradicating the penny from several of the world’s currencies (a member of the Illuminati was killed in 1938 by a penny that was dropped from the top of the Empire State Building while he was visiting New York on vacation).
The Swiss Illuminati came very close to achieving huge political power through Al Gore, but were ultimately thwarted. As everyone knows, the world wide web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, with a lot of help and support from Gore, at the CERN facility in Switzerland. At the time, Berners-Lee had been dating the younger sister of one of the Illuminati elite and had been accepted into the family. They saw great potential in Gore and started grooming him for another run at the White House (after he lost in 1988 in the Democratic primaries). Ultimately, the plan was foiled by a rogue ex-Illuminati member who was able to win the contract for voting machines in Florida for the 2000 US presidential election.
Today, the battle rages on, but more and more people are starting to see the truth about this great hoax. For instance, the Tea Party movement (which is largely funded by the Koch brothers — no relation to Ed Koch, who endorsed Al Gore during the 1988 primaries and who was a bystander at the aforementioned penny incident in 1938), is making great headway in disabusing much of the US population of the notion that climate change has any basis in science — or rather, more accurately, the notion that there is any value whatsoever to science.
Keep fighting the good fight, brother.
Remember to visit this while in Pittsburg:
http://www.fallingwater.org/