Data obtained by Greenpeace indicates that there is an almost entirely anonymous funding source funneling far more money than Exxon or the Koch Foundations into the climate denial machine. Also covered in Media Matters and Mother Jones.
Category: linkstream
A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.
A Moral Atmosphere
Bill McKibben rants eloquently about the need for more than individual actions to combat climate change — it’s a systemic problem, the solutions to which can only come with changes to the systems we are all embedded in. Changing your light bulbs and riding a bike are the easy parts. Organizing a devastating political campaign against the fossil fuel interests is much more challenging, and utterly necessary.
Share Everything
Share Everything: Why the Way We Consume Has Changed Forever. Sharing material goods makes it cheaper to use high quality, durable, well designed things, and the higher utilization factor means that many fewer things need to exist to satisfy everyone’s needs. It works especially well in urban areas where the geographic transactional overhead is small. This is a big piece of the dematerialization of our economy, and one of the most underappreciated reasons cities are a core climate solution.
Alex Steffen and Angie Coiro discussing the future of cities
A good hour-long podcast discussion between Alex Steffen and Angie Coiro about the future of cities. Skip the first 8 minutes or so to get to the meat of it.
E.ON lobbied for stiff sentences against Kingsnorth activists
German energy giant E.ON apparently lobbied cabinet ministers for stiff sentences against Kingsnorth activists, according to papers released under a FOIA style request made by Greenpeace. The company suggested that without “dissuasive” sentences, they might be less willing to invest in generation facilities in the UK in the future. Light sentences for non-violent direct action, and no more coal investment? Sounds like a win-win to me.
Cars and Robust Cities Are Fundamentally Incompatible
A writeup by The Atlantic Cities of a paper in the Transportation Research Board journal of the National Academies looking at the effects of parking on the vitality of urban centers. It’s found that the detrimental effects of dedicating urban real-estate outweigh the potential benefits of making it easier for drivers to access your central business district. Those cities that stopped adding parking to their urban cores after 1980 were found to have more jobs and higher incomes on average than those that continued adding parking.
Shifting Suburbs
The Urban Land Institute (ULI) has put together a study of suburban densification strategies called Shifting Suburbs: Reinventing Infrastructure for Compact Development. I haven’t read it yet, but based on my experience of Belmar in Lakewood (which is one of their case studies) I’m not particularly optimistic. Maybe Belmar is better now than it was a few years ago — further built out, etc… but back then it seemed like a weird Disneylandish island lost in a sea of cars. Like a mall on steroids, ringed with parking structures. Dunno. Should be interesting reading.
UK Passivhaus Primer
A good short English primer on Passivhaus design elements, and the standard itself. If only there were more English documentation.
A Technical Teardown of the Philips L-Prize LED bulb
Philips won the 60W A19 L-Prize, with a 9.7W bulb that puts out 940 lumens. They’re available commercially now, and someone’s posted a great technical teardown of it, including its emissions spectra.
Has Rosling on Data Journalism and Visualization
A long format talk by Hans Rosling at the Open Knowledge Festival, on the importance of not just liberating public data, but also using it to weave engaging stories for the public about the facts of the world as we know it exists today. It does no good to allow students to debate why women in the Muslim world have more children than elsewhere, because it isn’t true. Sweden still sends foreign aid to China, even though China just bought Volvo. People think that 30% of our power comes from wind and solar, because wind and solar grew 30% last year. Why don’t more activists demand good data? Why don’t they use it to build fact-based cases for their causes, instead of seeking out only the data that confirms their pre-existing ideologies?
Note: Rosling’s talk begins at 35 minutes into the archived video stream.