Carbon Copy

gobsmacked

If we ever manage to reduce reliance on private cars to any appreciable degree, the benefit will extend beyond reduced emissions from driving and from making the car in the first place. There will also be less space dedicated to cars - on the roads, in parking lots and household driveways - and more for green lungs, play areas, community gardens or whatever tickles our fancy. Using that logic, conventional wisdom among progressive planners is that if we actually reduce the number of parking bays provided at offices, shopping malls and so on, we can encourage a reduction in driving.

But wait! North York, part of the City of Toronto, thinks paved driveways are a good thing. So good, in fact, that people have been stopped from ripping up driveways that they want to replace with greener alternatives. On their own private properties! Is this just plain dumb, or what?

Dabbawallas of Mumbai

Seth Godin wrote about the Dabbawalla phenomenon in Mumbai back in April 2007. This is a low-tech organisation that delivers food to hundreds of thousands of customers a day. The magic of this operation, and the reason that big western organisations are queuing up to hear about it, is that the employees deliver the right goods to the right destination with an error rate that is the envy of just about any other delivery organisation you can name: less than one error in 6 million transactions.

The 5,000 employees in the flat organisation build customer relationships, and also use a simple colour-coding system to maximize efficiency and minimize errors; but what really appeals to me is that they use a level of technology that suits who the employees are (largely illiterate) and where they work. There's more about it on the Dabbawalla website.

screw the spotted owl

Amateurs are more sincere than professionals. Rehad Desai, co-director of the film You Chuse: the future is free, reminded viewers at this month's Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, that a sex worker might deliver a technically good performance, but she will probably leave you less than satisfied. Why? Insincerity. Amateur sex - the kind that happens in the bedrooms of committed couples - might be less slick, but is likely to be more satisfying because of a greater emotional investment.

What has sex to do with the Spotted Owl? I'm coming to that, in a roundabout way.

You Chuse, which presents the case for the open source movement and restoration of the creative commons, makes the intriguing point that as intellectual property dominates more and more of modern life as a financially tradable commodity, there is less space for things to develop for reasons other than financial reward. The film suggests that science and most human endeavours advance by building on what went before. If "what went before" is copyrighted and unavailable for others to use, then advancement only takes place in the R&D departments of corporations, and is driven by financial returns alone. Individuals with little or no capital have no opportunity to contribute.

will real communities emerge from the new breed of ecocity?

Another sustainable city being planned from scratch is Ecobay on the Paljassaare Peninsula in Estonia, overlooking the Baltic Sea. Inhabitat raises an interesting point regarding these built-from-scratch communities:

While they certainly present an organized and efficient vision of modernity, some staunch critics (most notably Jane Jacobs) have raised concerns that they may limit the organic self-organizing capacity of a city left to grow of its own accord. Since these super-funded cities are currently in the process of creation, it has yet to be seen how their communities will grow and develop.

dancing against climate change

Just too late for my visit to London last month, a night club called Surya (Sanskrit for Sun God) opened recently at King's Cross. I am not one to regularly frequent clubs, but this one would have been interesting for its claim to be an ecological club, with an electricity-generating dance floor that developer Andrew Charalambous claims could supply about 60% of the club's electricity needs.

Even better news is that Charalambous plans to open Surya2 right here in Cape Town incorporating piezoelectric dance floor, wind turbines, rainwater harvesting and waterless urinals. [via Weekend Argus, 19 July 2008]

A similar club is to open in Rotterdam in September - Watt, by the Sustainable Dance Club.

growth of a monster

For many environmentalists, Walmart is the epitome of how a retailer can take low-density sprawl, accelerate it, and cause havoc by magnifying the trend towards increasingly car-dependent cities. Just for fun, here's a visual representation of how Walmart took over America between 1961 and 2007.

if you want to get somewhere - slowly

I'm not sure how this would work, but here's a post claiming that you can sail across the ocean on a wave powered boat: not wind power, wave power.

Hey, I'm back :-) no thanks to Telkom, the "dis"utility I have now ditched for leaving me without Internet access for a month :-( and blaming everyone but themselves ("Have you checked that the cable is plugged in?").

hydrogen economy is more hype than substance

I have said before that hydrogen's usefulness is more as a storage medium than as a source of energy in its own right. But here's a well-referenced assessment of the science by Alice Friedemann, suggesting it isn't of any value even for storage:

The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy will always be an energy sink. Hydrogen’s properties require you to spend more energy than you can earn, because in order to do so you must overcome waters’ hydrogen-oxygen bond, move heavy cars, prevent leaks and brittle metals, and transport hydrogen to the destination. It doesn’t matter if all of these problems are solved, or how much money is spent. You will use more energy to create, store, and transport hydrogen than you will ever get out of it.

And the conclusion? The energy and environmental challenges facing the world are far too serious to spend effort on dead-end technologies. Policy needs to guide investment based on a firm grasp of both science and geopolitical realities. The risk is that lobby groups will sway government to create misguided incentives, such as the US corn subsidies aimed at ethanol production.

speed wobble

Apologies for the lack of activity on Carbon Copy, but I am busy using up my carbon allowance on a one-week study tour of a few cities in the UK and Europe. I should be refreshed on my return, but I'm not sure I will be able to keep up the frenetic pace of posting that I maintained over the past year. I will do my best, though.

I am writing now from Amsterdam, city of bicycles. I knew there were a lot of bikes here, but this is phenomenal. The older areas are teeming with young and old cyclists, and I am having to be alert to avoid getting hit by cellphone-wielding riders. You may have seen pictures of row upon row of bikes at railway stations, but what really amazes me is a massive parking garage built under a new square, just for bicycles. People cycle there from home, and either walk or catch a train to work, giving new meaning to the term 'park and ride'. I have never seen so many variations on bicycle style, from three-wheeled taxis to two-wheeled versions customised to carry cyclist, two children, and packages on the front and behind the driver. People are walking and cycling everywhere at all hours of the day and night, and the only hint of crime is on signs at railway stations, warning of pickpockets. Apparently most theiving is on public transport, not on the streets. Groups and individuals seem happy to use dimly lit, quiet alleys. It makes me feel like getting out and walking all night, just because I can.

algal biofuels: the next wave

Using a third-generation biofuels technique to create ethanol from algae in seawater, one company claims it "will be the largest consumer of CO2 on the planet". Algenol Biofuels says it will be able to create 100 million gallons of ethanol from 1.5 million tons of CO2 at a facility in Mexico, with a yield of 6,000 gallons per acre per year. In comparison, corn yields only 360 gallons per acre per year, and sugarcane 890 gallons. Expecting to be producing at scale by the end of next year, the company hopes to produce "the cheapest fuel on the planet".