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Can Cities Solve Climate Change?
Warming is global, but efforts at the local level make the most difference
By David Biello
NEW YORK CITY—When Superstorm Sandy roared ashore with a surge of seawater in 2012, Sergej Mahnovski had been on the job directing the New York Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability for one week. He had a steep learning curve. In the wake of the storm surge 43 people were dead, Lower Manhattan lacked light at night and seven hospitals had to be evacuated. Post-Sandy, the long-term plan could quickly be reduced to two words: “never again.” It consisted of a range of major initiatives, from strengthening coastal defenses, whether seawalls or swamps, to ensuring food supplies in hospitals. “It’s not just other storms but heat waves, heavy winds,” Mahnovski told the audience at CityLab, a conference on urban solutions to global challenges sponsored by The Aspen Institute, Bloomberg Philanthropies and The Atlantic.
Cities are at the forefront of dealing with the impacts of global warming, so CityLab posed the question: Are they also the best places to begin combating the pollution that causes climate change? As sociologist Daniel Bell once wrote, “The nation-state is becoming too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life.” So, in the same spirit, perhaps city governments offer solutions to the problems caused by the 90 million metric tons of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere daily.
The world’s cities add 65 million people per year, or the equivalent of more than 20 Chicagos or six New Yorks. India alone will add nearly 300 million urbanites by 2030, or a population roughly the size of the entire U.S. today. “We will spend more and build more in the next century than we have in all of human history before this,” Richard Florida, an urban theorist at the University of Toronto, told the CityLab crowd on October 7. “Our cities have to be more environmentally sustainable.”
That’s because more than half the world’s population of seven billion now live in cities and cities are responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Roughly 75 percent of that pollution is under the direct control of city governments, whether municipal power plants or the like.
To begin to mitigate the pollution causing climate change, cities around the world need to be made more efficient, adopting measures ranging from reducing the energy costs of sanitation to constructing buildings that waste less energy. Former Vice Pres. Al Gore offered a list of recommendations at the conference, including the use of solar panels where feasible, trees and green roofs to combat the urban heat island, cisterns to deal with more intense but less frequent rainfall, and that metros “go whole-hog on electrification [of transportation].” Most importantly, Gore added, buildings must be made more efficient at heating, cooling and the like, a process that can be helped along by the revolution in information technologies, such as smart thermostats. “I see cities cutting greenhouse gas emissions and saving money in the process, but much more needs to be done,” Gore said.
As Superstorm Sandy demonstrated by inflicting $19 billion in damages, cities will also have to adapt to a changed world. That may mean making politically unpalatable choices like retreat from current ocean shorelines, an effort actually under way in New York via buyouts of some coastal residents. “We haven’t convinced voters that mitigation is important and we’re going to spend billions on adaptation?” noted a skeptical Manny Diaz, former mayor of Miami, a coastal city even more at risk from the stronger hurricanes and sea level rise as a result of climate change.
Then there’s the issue of growing metropolises and their impacts on climate. Suburban sprawl has helped U.S. emissions balloon in the last few decades. “Urban expansion on the scale the world is going to experience is going to require more land,” argued economist Paul Romer of New York University’s Stern School of Business. “Any strategy based on containment is just doomed to failure.”
But providing incentives for people to remain close to the metropolitan core, such as better public transportation, can help minimize the impact of city size on surrounding rural land. China is currently building 40 different metro lines in 40 different cities, each one covering roughly 1,000 kilometers, said Jonathan Woetzel, a director at consultancy McKinsey & Company’s Cities Special Initiative. “One single act of infrastructure creates opportunities for new lives, new choices for 50 [million] to 100 million people” as well as cutting down on the demand for cars, roadways and their attendant pollution in the world’s most populous country.
The challenge, as always, is how to pay—whether for metros, bus rapid transit or any other solution. “Cities are worth more than they cost to build so we should be able to get more of them at a profit,” Romer noted, because the gain in the value of city property should be more than enough to compensate a government for building and running a city. After all, the roughly 1,200 square kilometers of land on which New York sits is now valued at around $600 billion, much more than the total cost of building the Big Apple. Or take London: “We’re 23 percent of the country’s [gross domestic product],” said Sir Edward Lister, that city’s deputy mayor for policy and planning. Yet London does not garner 23 percent of the national government’s investments.
One idea for getting around that comes from Hong Kong: the city government buys the land around any new transit line, and the sale of that now more valuable real estate funds the construction of the new line. “Their metro system is fundamentally a property company,” Lister noted, adding that similar schemes financed the expansion of railroads in Europe and North America in the 19th century. “We have to return to that, that’s what we lost. It’s the same argument for electricity and gas where we’ve got the same problem.”
Ultimately, strong local government would be required for any of these solutions. “A pervasive problem around the world is that city governments are not strong enough,” Romer said, citing the example of New York City seizing land from private property owners in 1811 to construct the present street grid. “Very few city governments in the world can do what New York City did in 1811, and that’s what is holding us back.”
And global warming remains a global problem for which the nation-state remains indispensable even if city governments can act faster. “We have to put a price on carbon in the marketplace and we have to put a price on denial in the political system,” Gore argued.
Nevertheless, the megalopolis—or even gigalopolis—is likely to be the place where efforts to combat climate change, and adapt to it, actually happen. As sociologist Fran Tonkiss of the London School of Economics and Political Science put it: “Cities are just about the right size for dealing with some of the most serious problems we’re facing.”
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A list of some of the replies and comments:
1. puppies and rainbows
11:12 PM 10/9/13
Cities cant even fix potholes in a timely manner, and they can fix Climate Change…………LOL
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2. Mark Goldes
02:48 AM 10/10/13
Cities, suburbs and rural areas can all introduce radically new technology that can supersede fossil fuels with cheap green energy.
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT CAN has been invented.
It substitutes atmospheric heat, a form of solar energy, for fuel.
See NO FUEL ENGINE on the AESOP Institute website.
These engines remain cool. Once an inexpensive prototype is validated by an independent lab, small plastic desktop piston generators will power a tablet and recharge cell phones etc.
Metal versions will provide electricity to homes and apartments 24/7. They will replace all sizes of diesel gen-sets.
They can also provide emergency generators and an on-board recharge for some electric cars.
Later replacing wind turbines.
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT CAN will demonstrate, rather than argue, that neglected new science can open a practical path to rapid reduction in the need for fossil and radioactive fuels.
Thus, providing hope that humanity can achieve the necessary changes that increase the odds of a livable planet.
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3. KeytoClearskies
09:00 AM 10/10/13
Aesop Institute is a wonderfully elaborate fraud, operated by Mark Goldes.
Mark Goldes, starting in the mid-seventies, engaged for several years in the pretense that his company SunWind Ltd was developing a nearly production-ready, road-worthy, wind-powered “windmobile,” based on the windmobile invented by James Amick; and that therefore SunWind would be a wonderful investment opportunity.
After SunWind “dried up” in 1983, Goldes embarked on the long-running pretense that his company Room Temperature Superconductors Inc was developing room-temperature superconductors; and that therefore Room Temperature Superconductors Inc would be a wonderful investment opportunity. He continues the pretense that the company developed something useful, even to this day.
And then Goldes embarked on the pretense that his company Magnetic Power Inc was developing “NO FUEL ENGINES” based on “Virtual Photon Flux;” and then, on the pretense that MPI was developing horn-powered “NO FUEL ENGINES” based on the resonance of magnetized tuning-rods; and then, on the pretense that his company Chava Energy was developing water-fueled engines based on “collapsing hydrogen orbitals” (which are ruled out by quantum physics); and then, on the pretense that he was developing ambient-heat-powered “NO FUEL ENGINES” (which are ruled out by the Second Law of Thermodynamics).
Goldes’ forty-year career of “revolutionary invention” pretense has nothing to do with science, but only with pseudoscience and pseudophysics – his lifelong stock-in-trade.
Goldes’ current favorite scam is an engine that would run on ambient heat – which is clearly ruled out by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But of course, the laws of physics always make an exception for the scams of Mark Goldes.
Mark Goldes is a textbook-ready example of a highly talented con artist who clearly takes pleasure in fooling people with his ludicrous claims, artfully peppered with pseudoscientific rubbish.
http://greatnonprofits.org/reviews/aesop-institute/166232/
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4. KeytoClearskies
09:03 AM 10/10/13
Mark Goldes’ claims regarding his make-believe ambient-heat-powered generator do not represent any new technology, or even a new pretense – they merely represent a rather old pretense.
“Before the establishment of the Second Law, many people who were interested in inventing a perpetual motion machine had tried to circumvent the restrictions of First Law of Thermodynamics by extracting the massive internal energy of the environment as the power of the machine. Such a machine is called a “perpetual motion machine of the second kind”. The second law declared the impossibility of such machines.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#Perpetual_motion_of_the_second_kind
“A perpetual motion machine of the second kind is a machine which spontaneously converts thermal energy into mechanical work. When the thermal energy is equivalent to the work done, this does not violate the law of conservation of energy. However it does violate the more subtle second law of thermodynamics (see also entropy). The signature of a perpetual motion machine of the second kind is that there is only one heat reservoir involved… This conversion of heat into useful work, without any side effect, is impossible, according to the second law of thermodynamics.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Classification
Goldes’ make-believe ambient-heat-powered engine would be a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, as defined above. Goldes is not developing any such engine; he is merely developing a pretense – as usual.
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5. KeytoClearskies
09:06 AM 10/10/13
Let’s look at another example of Mark Goldes’ wonderful offerings in “revolutionary new technology:”
Mark Goldes’ “POWERGENIE”
One of the most laughable of Mark Goldes’ many “inventions” is his “POWERGENIE” horn-powered generator. The brilliant idea of this revolutionary breakthrough is to blow a horn at a magnetized tuning rod, designed to resonate at the frequency of the horn, and then collect the electromotive energy produced by the vibrations of the rod.
I’m not making this up.
POWERGENIE tuning rod engine explained – from the patent:
[The device incorporates] “an energy transfer and multiplier element being constructed of a ferromagnetic substance… having a natural resonance, due to a physical structure whose dimensions are directly proportional to the wavelength of the resonance frequency…”
“In this resonant condition, the rod material functions as a tuned waveguide, or longitudinal resonator, for acoustic energy.”
- But the patent doesn’t tell us who is going to volunteer to blow the horn at the rod all day. Perhaps it will come with an elephant.
Goldes claimed in 2008 that this wonderful triumph of human genius would bring his company, Magnetic Power Inc, one billion dollars in annual revenue by 2012. Magnetic Power Inc is now defunct, having never produced any “Magnetic Power Modules” – just as his company called “Room Temperature Superconductors Inc” is also now defunct, having never produced any “room temperature superconductors.”
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6. Sisko
09:30 AM 10/10/13
What cities can do is to properly maintain their infrastructure to minimize any damage from any severe weather that does occur.The failure to do so is one of the largest causes of loss of life and property damage.
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7. sault
in reply to KeytoClearskies
11:43 AM 10/10/13
Awesome takedown of Goldes’ illogical nonsense. Do you think comment #2 was from that actual Mark Goldes? Does he randomly spread this nonsense wherever he can on the Internet?
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8. Mark Goldes
01:12 PM 10/10/13
The wind-electric hybrid vehicle was the cover story for Popular Science in November of 1976. SunWind developed the electric propulsion system for what was previously a brilliant racing land yacht totally dependent upon the wind.
Room Temperature Superconductors Inc. completed four Small Business Innovation Research contracts on our Ultraconductors – including a Phase II with the USAF after the Air Force did its own tests of the materials during Phase I. Fractal Systems independently reproduced almost 1,000 samples of these materials on a separate USAF contract. These polymer equivalents of an ambient temperature superconductor will be commercialized by CHAVA Energy. See Ultraconductors at www.chavaenergy.com
What was once called POWERGENIE is a magnetic generator. The inventor has an issued Patent and now has a second patent pending. Magnetic generators are likely to prove important as we supersede fossil fuels, however they are dismissed by most scientists and the great majority of those prototyped have proven to be inventor’s delusion. Some have been scams.
However see The Coler Papers on the CHAVA Science website for a magnetic generator that was demonstrated in Germany in 1937 producing 6,000 watts. It became a Top Secret project for Hitler’s navy in an attempt to recharge submarine batteries without the need for a sub to surface. The lab was bombed by the Allies. Hans Coler later reproduced some of his work in England and British Intelligence published a Report in 1946 readily available on the web. Chava Energy is exploring several MagGen designs including the one first referred to above.
The science behind fractional Hydrogen, which I call ECHO, Energy from Collapsing Hydrogen Orbits, is detailed on the CHAVA Energy website.
The NO FUEL ENGINE on the AESOP Institute website opens revolutionary new science. See CIRCUMVENTING SECOND LAW on the same website.
The energy market is measured in the Trillions of dollars. Any revolutionary energy technology that is widely adopted will have a market in the Billions of dollars. Due to the difficulty of raising capital for unconventional technologies, progress is much slower than anticipated. However, the work continues. A visiting financial consultant stated last year that: “Chava will be bigger than Apple”. I hope he proves to be correct.
This new technology provides hope for humanity.
To quote Bill Nye “The Science Guy”: “The planet will always be here. But will we?”
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9. sault
in reply to Mark Goldes
01:52 PM 10/10/13
What Laws of Thermodynamics do you not understand?
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10. Mark Goldes
in reply to sault
02:45 PM 10/10/13
CIRCUMVENTING SECOND LAW on the AESOP Institute website may surprise many scientists.
Dogma has no place in science. Experiment rules!
When this new technology has been tested and validated by independent labs there will be a great rush to the other side of the opinion boat. A great “hurrah” as fossil fuel is replaced in hundreds of applications.
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