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.
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.
Reckless Driving in the Netherlands
In the US we wouldn’t think twice about a young testosterone laden driver endangering the lives of four cyclists with his “monster truck”. If anything, we’d probably blame the cyclists — especially if they weren’t wearing helmets. But how is it different from someone carelessly brandishing a gun in your face? That’s how seriously they seem to take it in the Netherlands:
From David Hembrow via Streetfilms.
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!
Into Eternity by Michael Madsen
I am now in this place where you should never come. We call it Onkalo. Onkalo means hiding place. In my time it is still unfinished, though work began in the 20th century when I was just a child. Work will be completed in the 22nd century, long after my death. Onkalo must last 100,000 years. Nothing built by man has lasted even a tenth of that time span. But we consider ourselves a very potent civilization.
If we succeed, Onkalo will most likely be the longest lasting remains of our civilization. If you, some time far into the future find this, what will it tell you about us?
It isn’t often that you find people seriously thinking about deep time in a concrete way. Usually it’s abstract, just a thought experiment, not an engineering problem or a gut wrenching moral quandry. But this is apparently not the case for the Scandinavians who have taken on the task of storing their spent nuclear fuel. Finland has decided to go forward with permanent storage, in a typically responsible, deliberate, earnest Nordic way.
We aren’t so tough
We’ve had some honest-to-god winter weather in Boulder this past week, with overnight temperatures as low as -25°C (-13°F), and light snowfall on and off for several days. Here, if you keep riding your bike around town when the weather is like this, people think you’re tough, hard core, committed… or crazy:
@BoulderParking: Boulder bikers are tough & committed. Despite the sub zero temps this week… bike commuters were out every day!
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.