The cost of moving a shipping container between most any two points on Earth is about $5000, and only part of that cost is fuel. So if your container of goods is worth much more than that, then their price and the viability of your business is not going to be particularly sensitive to the cost of liquid fuels. You can pack half a million dollars worth of manufactured goods into one of these boxes. Increase the price of oil by a factor of ten and the cost of those goods goes up by 10%. Annoying? Sure. World changing? Hardly.
Category: linkstream
A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.
Green Manhattan
A good piece from The New Yorker on what makes dense urban areas intrinsically better for the environment than suburbia or back-to-the-land fantasies. More people closer together need less transportation to go about their daily lives. High density buildings need less energy to stay comfortable inside because they have less surface area for the enclosed useful space. More resources can be effectively shared when lots of people are close together. The author, David Owen, has a whole book on the topic, entitled Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability. Cities have their problems, but often they aren’t the result of density directly. Poor air quality in cities, for instance, is almost entirely the fault of motor vehicles.
Goss-Grove neighborhood to be re-zoned for lower density
The Goss-Grove Neighborhood is slated to be re-zoned for lower density (PDF) as part of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan update. Goss-Grove is right in the very core of Boulder, next to downtown and CU, intrinsically walkable and bikeable. It should be dense! Residents are unhappy with the low-quality student slumlord apartments. Small, affordable, high quality condos that blend in with 100 year old homes could increase density, without destroying the neighborhood’s feel. Vancouver, BC has done this well.
Project Thirty Days mostly Car-Free
Someone from Bike Radar decided to give up their car for a month, right here in Boulder and midwinter no less. They’ve got a sweet longtail from Trek that looks like it’s served them well. Even with temperatures plunging below -20°C, it ended up being easier than he thought, and easier with time. Boulder’s infrastructure made it pleasant, not just doable. Here’s hoping more people will give it a try!
Cities and Revolution
Another thing that cities do is make revolution possible. Which is interesting to think about, given that more than half the humans now live in cities, many of them in relatively poor, relatively un-free conditions.
Construction of a Canadian PassivHaus
A great slideshow with captions showing the construction of a PassivHaus in Ottawa. Relatively high density, and relatively high end. I’d love to build something along these lines… and live in it.
Understanding the Republican Party’s Reluctance to Invest in Transit Infrastructure
A great look at the geography behind the Republican demonization of mass transit. To a large degree in the US cities are democratic and the exurbs and hinterlands are republican. Since so much of our transportation funding gets funneled through the federal government, this means cites spend a lot of time getting screwed. Policy decentralization would help a lot.
Do Roads Pay for Themselves?
A study from the US Public Research Interest Group (PDF) on transportation funding the US. The short answer is that only about half of highway funds come from “user fees” like the gas tax and vehicle registration fees. The rest is payed out of bonds, property taxes and other government revenues.
Womb for Rent
Surrogate pregnancies are becoming common in India. For roughly the cost of having your own baby in the US healthcare system, you can outsource the task of giving birth to a Gujarati woman. It sounds like there’s a wide range of conditions, some less ethical than others. Is it okay to pay someone the equivalent of 10 years worth of wages to bear your child, so that they can give their daughters good dowries? The mind boggles. How long until you just upload the two genomes you’d like intertwined, and pick up the baby at the airport 9 months later? Or even better, maybe someone could take care of them in a well organized creche until about age 5, when they’re all potty trained and interactive. Choose from our vast selection of native languages and cultural indoctrination schemes! All the benefits of having kids when you’re 25, without the negative career impacts. Operators are standing by.
Markets and Morals
A good talk from Chautauqua on the interaction between markets and morals. Some interesting examples of morally ambiguous markets: countries paying one another to take on refugee acceptance obligations and the outsourcing pregnancy to impoverished surrogate mothers in Gujarat, India. Sandel argues that in the last few decades we have gone from having a market economy to being a market society. Markets are now a large portion of our governance, and it’s unclear whether this is really a good thing.