China to Build a Zero-Carbon Green City 620
gormanw writes "Just outside Shanghai, there is an island about the size of Manhattan. China is going to build its first-ever 'green city', complete with no gasoline/diesel powered vehicles, 100% renewable energy, green roofs, and recycling everything. The city is called Dongtan and it should house about 5,000 people by the end of 2010, with estimates of 500,000 by 2050. The goal is to build a livable city that is energy efficient, non-polluting, and protects the wildlife in the area."
Better article from CNN (Score:4, Informative)
This CNN article (from last year) has much more information:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/08/14/dongtan.ecocity/ [cnn.com]
Wikipedia's article mentions several problems and delays that I hadn't seen in any other stories (some of which lack citations).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongtan [wikipedia.org]
Re:That would be interesting (Score:3, Informative)
I can't think of any country that would benefit more by this sort of thing.
I can. Maybe the US since they do have the highest total annual CO2 emissions and the highest CO2 emissions per capita
Wrong on both counts. China passed the US on CO2 emissions. The US is 10th on a per capita basis. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jun/19/china.usnews [guardian.co.uk] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita [wikipedia.org]
Re:Good Luck... (Score:5, Informative)
Veganism in China and India (two of the worlds most populous countries) may in fact be a majority [wikipedia.org].
Re:Good Luck... (Score:5, Informative)
vegetarianism and veganism are, for most of the world, unusual.
Hmmmn - I believe you meant 'USA' instead of 'World'.
It's hard to get good figures, but I'd say 1/2 a billion Indians are vegeterian (but eat eggs, dairy)
Billions more eat very little meat. A diet low in meat is normal for most of the world & something easy you can do if you want to be green.
Re:Good Luck... (Score:2, Informative)
The cattle that live around here eat plants that you can't feed to people. Like grass, for example. People can't live on grass, because they can't digest it. There are cattle living on huge stations where the ground is unsuitable for crops, but can support cattle roaming around eating what grass is available. So you see, not all beef is bad. Beef that eat grass are eating food that humans can't eat, and converting it into food that humans can eat. If some vegetarians suddenly develop some extra stomachs, maybe they can start eating grass.
Re:Good Luck... (Score:3, Informative)
I'll start eating grass as soon as I've installed my four stomachs. You've got a point if animals are fed foodstuffs that can also be fed to humans, but that is not at all universally the case.
Here in South Africa a lot of our meat is produced in the Karoo [wikipedia.org]. Sheep feed on the natural vegetation and as long as you guard against overgrazing it is 100% sustainable and has very little impact on the environment.
Compare that with trying to grow crops there and the erosion, habitat destruction etc. that goes with that.
One last point: Yes the energy in the methane farts are lost forever, but that is just a fraction of the waste produced by cattle. Most of it takes the form of manure which (surprise, surprise) gets used to fertilize the crops that then again get fed to animals and people.
Re:Good Luck... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not hard to achieve and most ways are known, but don't fit with the industrialization of agriculture:
- rotate the grown cultures every few years to keep the land from loosing nutrients for the crops
- do not use chemically-produced fertilizers
- do not use genetically engineered crops (there may be exceptions to this)
- recycle everything you can: bio-gas, animal waste (for fertilizers)
There are others, that don't come to mind right now. Ask any farmer in eastern Europe and they'll tell you more than enough.
There still are villages in that region that do this (unfortunately they are on the way out as they can't compete with industrialized agriculture and GM crops).
Re:Good Luck... (Score:5, Informative)
Organic means natural, sustainable methods and growing and harvesting crops in the right seasons. In fact, it is not a luxury when it comes to convenience. Organic produce means you can only have right crop in the right months.
Having both grown up farming both organically and non-organically, as well as currently working in the seeds industry, I can say from both first-hand experience and industry research that that couldn't be more wrong. There are two points in particular that are mistaken.
The first is that the conflation of geographic location with organic production. Most farmers' local markets include a significant (usually majority in my experience) non-organically grown produce. Buying local vs. freighted foods is entirely unconnected to organic/non-organic production.
In many cases locally-grown produce has a higher total energy cost of production than foreign-grown produce. The archetypal example of this is tomatoes grown in the UK vs those shipped from Spain [ecocentra.org].
In addition to non-optimal local growing conditions requiring more energy, smaller, local food producers almost always burn more energy per unit of produce than larger operations even in the same geographic region because large producers lower the marginal energy cost of production with economies of scale. Japan is an excellent case study of exactly this effect, as its market regulations strongly bias the market to smaller less efficient regional producers, causing the price of food to be significantly higher than it otherwise would be due to higher production costs.
Geographic proximity is absolutely not a reliable indicator of relative energy consumption
As for organic farming being 'sustainable', all it is is substituting human labor, land (production densities must be much lower to avoid pest population buildup), and excess energy (e.g., using a propane torch to kill weeds by application of heat, or more tillage passes to mechanically weed fields) for chemical and fertilizer use. Human labor is anything but cheap energy-wise, unless you're talking about basically slaves who were raised from childhood on an extremely low energy budget, and who are not afforded any of the luxuries of the society for whom they are producing the food.
You mentioned that it is unfeasible on a global scale... what did you think people were growing before we had artificial fertilizers and pesticides?
Before we had those things, population centers around the world (e.g., Mexico, India, China, Pakistan, etc.) were on the verge of an epic famine and the most extensive die-off of humanity this side of WWIII. A larger portion of agricultural lands were then also comprised of regularly cleared slash-n-burn fields fertilized by the ashes of the forest for a few years before the soil was depleted and more land needed to be cleared.
The only argument that can have merit is the health issue, but that varies significantly by specific grower practice. Proper use of pesticides as per the label is proven to be safe, but it's unfortunately not unheard of for growers to misuse them, both knowingly and unknowingly. Likewise, many organic farmers improperly compost their organic fertilizers and put consumers at higher risk of bacterial contamination. In both cases we have government regulatory agencies watching for infractions, and they generally do a good job of keeping us remarkably safe compared to pre-green revolution days.
Re:And what'll be a few dozen miles away? (Score:1, Informative)
Also, what about Dongtan Airport?
If both the city and air traffic grow as predicted, that's gonna be inevitable. Clean, CO2 neutral airplanes, huh? Bird sanctuary, huh?
What about 500,000 people living there, are they just going to work and sleep there, or is this gonna be a relatively rich city anyways and will there be a lot of motor boats and what not...
The wikipedia article says, "Houses are now selling here to Shanghai middle classes for use when spending weekends away from the city."
If this is true the bird sanctuary is pretty much fucked i guess.
Re:Good Luck... (Score:5, Informative)
humans (sans perhaps Eskimos and such) also weren't meant to eat the amount of low-quality meat that the average American eats these days, either. There is a middle ground.
Completely agreed, but that doesn't change my point one iota.
That being said, eating meat isn't necessary anymore;
Nope, it's not. With the advent of vitamin supplements, it's possible to eat a balanced vegetarian/vegan diet and still consume the necessary vitamins and minerals. But, once again, that doesn't change my point. You shouldn't just flip a switch and start eating vegan. It's something you should carefully think about and research before making the switch, because it's *not* a trivial change and you *do* need to work hard to ensure you're getting a balanced diet, because humans are simply not designed to survive on a pure-vegetable diet.