"Cities Can Save the Earth"

A bicyclist friend of mine appeared the other day in a T-shirt reading, "Ask me how I lost 3,600 pounds in a day." By getting rid of his car, obviously! Cars are big and the infrastructure that provides for them is even much bigger yet. The mass/energy/spatial requirements of cars, as compared to human beings, is on the order of hundreds to one.

If one designs an infrastructure - buildings, streets and open spaces and systems for supply, recycling and disposal – to go along with one set of things that are 30 time bigger and heavier than the other, car bodies versus human bodies, very different results are likely, right?

Late though the hour may be for dealing with the triple crisis of climate, extinctions and energy, the flood of money and resources and potential it represents is colossally enormous. It's like a giant fire hose aimed in the wrong direction, accomplishing in many cases exactly the opposite of what it should do. Imagine shifting that intense stream gradually in the right direction. Little by little, then ever more quickly we'd have the transition to a kind of city that can bring CO2 in the atmosphere down to below what it was at the beginning of the industrial area. Maybe it really can.

(2006-09-14 13:10:53 SGT) [Env] Permalink

Starving the people to feed the cars

washingtonpost.com, business-times.asia1.com.sg :

Plans for new ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries are announced almost daily, setting the stage for an epic competition. In a narrow sense, it is one between the world's supermarkets and its service stations. More broadly, it is a battle between the world's 800 million car owners, who want to maintain their mobility, and the world's two billion poorest people, who simply want to survive. Whenever the food value of a crop drops below its fuel value, the market will convert it into fuel. Ultimately, this dynamic risks driving up world food prices, destabilising governments in low-income nations and disrupting global economic growth.

Ours is not the first society to face a predicament of this kind. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond assesses our current civilisation against the backdrop of earlier ones, some of which recognised only too late how their future depended on safeguarding their basic resources. What salt levels, deforestation and soil erosion foretold for past societies, high oil prices could reveal about our own. Among the many environmental threats to our future - increasing CO2 levels, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, falling water tables and shrinking forests - the depletion of oil reserves may be the most immediate for our oil-based global civilisation.

Like earlier civilisations, we face a choice. When the Sumerians got into trouble on the food front, they substituted barley for wheat, which delayed but did not prevent their ultimate decline. We are similarly substituting ethanol for oil, treating the symptoms rather than the cause. The question is whether we will move quickly enough to reduce our dependence on oil, or whether we will continue with business as usual.

Lester Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of 'Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble' (Earth Policy Institute).

- Discussion of the food-vs-fuel debate and even some thoughts on societal collapse being published on Washington Post and re-printed on Business Times, Singapore? That's something.

Global financial markets face risk of major correction: IMF

channelnewsasia.com :

The global economy is at risk of a major setback because investors seem to ignore evidence that it has reached a turning point, the International Monetary Fund warned. The risks include a US economic slowdown and falling house prices, any further surge of oil prices, and interest rate rises to contain inflationary pressures.

Underscoring the warning, IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato, speaking in Vienna, called attention to the potential for a sharp slowdown in the US housing market that could hamper momentum in the world's biggest economy, with damaging effects elsewhere.

(2006-09-14 12:41:02 SGT) [Biz] Permalink

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