A good short profile of the city of Freiburg, Germany, and their many sustainability initiatives. Freiburg is a little more than double Boulder’s size — both in population and area, so it has a similar average population density. It’s also a university town with a strong tech sector locally. The whole city was re-built post WWII, but they chose to build it along the same lines as the old city, with a dense core, and well defined boundaries. Today about half of daily trips are done by foot or on bike, with another 20% on public transit. They have a local energy efficiency finance program, on top of the national one administered by KfW, and higher building efficiency standards than Germany as a whole. Half their electricity comes from combined heat and power facilities that also provide district heating and hot water. It seems like they’d be a good model city to compare Boulder to, and learn from.
Communicating sustainability: lessons from public health
Some lessons from public health for sustainability and climate campaigners. Our choices are largely not our own — context and norms are far more powerful forces for behavioral change than abstract attitudes. Most people just stick with the default settings. We need to change the default settings.
Every drone strike in Pakistan visualised
A simple but effective visualization of all the drone strikes in Pakistan, from 2004 to the present. 3100+ people dead, 1.5% of them “high value” targets. More than 75% alleged combatants (males of plausibly military age… 14+ years old) or “other”. 5% children. 17% “civilians”.
The Water Footprint of Crops
A fairly exhaustive accounting of the water embodied in various crop products in a 2011 paper by Mekonnen and Hoekstra. For each kg of rice, 14,000 liters of water. For each kg of beans, 5000 liters of water. Wow.
The NYT on Green Muni Utility Efforts
A piece largely referencing Boulder, talking about cities trying to wrest control of their electricity systems from major utilities. At this point I think I’ll probably find any media coverage of this process hopelessly one dimensional, but still, it’s nice to know they care.
Someone Else’s Blank Slate
The Long Now has a good post on their blog summarizing the fate of Paul Romer’s Charter City initiative in Honduras. In short, it’s gone down in flames. Especially with the ideas and capital coming from N. America, this really shouldn’t surprise anyone. There’s a good core idea in Romer’s Charter City pitch, but it has to be more like an organic autonomous region and less like a maquiladora or a colonial outpost.
An ultra-low energy neighborhood in Germany
The German university town of Heidelberg is developing a near zero energy neighborhood, housing 5000 people and providing jobs for 7000. All the buildings will meet the ultra strict Passivhaus energy efficiency standard. It’s in the center of town, and will be extremely well served by transit, with easy bike and pedestrian access to the rest of the city. This would be a great thing to see in, say… the Diagonal Plaza. More info on the development here. 93% of the unites are already sold…
Depaving Rural America
Rural counties across middle America are turning paved roads back into gravel. The WSJ article is from 2010, and I wonder to what extent this trend has continued. I can’t say that it seems like much of a loss. I suspect that much of the rural pavement was laid down without a good understanding of how much O&M it was committing the local governments to paying for. As state and federal budgets shrink, and counties are left to pay for their own infrastructure, they realize that maybe cheaper gravel and lower speeds are actually a better value proposition.
Steamships, Landlines, and the Decline of the Private Car
A fun little musing from the Atlantic Cities on the difficulty of envisioning a very different world, even when we all know that big changes do take place over time. Old technologies slowly decay, and fade into the background, as a new normalcy takes over. We will see Jane Jacobs’ attrition of cars by cities eventually.
Dark Money for to Change the Climate
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.