Notes from Howard's Sabbatical from Working. The name comes from a 1998 lunch conversation. Someone asked if everything man knew was on the web. I answered "no" and off the top of my head said "Fidel Castro's favorite color". About every 6-12 months I've searched for this. It doesn't show up in the first 50 Google results (this blog is finally first for that search), AskJeeves says it's: red.
Hmm... this might be worth writing about at some length.
The 2 things that jump out at me about the "Real Climate" article are that they (as well as Wired) ignore the option of neither heating nor cooling actively. This isn't something you can readily do with an existing house without a big investment, but if we're thinking in theoretical terms, the best house is one that is designed to maintain a comfortable range of interior temperatures most of the time without active energy inputs.
I found the closing thought to be a bit shallowly expressed (at best) or shallow in general (if they haven't really thought it through.) Among this is the basic truth that urban living is inherently green, and if more people lived in cities (and if more cities were kept livable so people would want to move there). then per capita carbon emissions would go down."
I can accept this only if it's altered to say "if more people lived in dense urban cities INSTEAD OF SUBURBS." While dense urban environments can theoretically be greener than the god-awful suburban sprawl we find in much of the US, that's really the only way to declare it green. Modern cities require massive inputs of energy to move in enough food for their residents to survive, and that's just the tip of a city's energy consumption. "Greener than..." is not the same as "Green"
2 comments:
Thanks for pointing this out. That Wired article seemed really bogus to me when I read it. Now I know why!
Hmm... this might be worth writing about at some length.
The 2 things that jump out at me about the "Real Climate" article are that they (as well as Wired) ignore the option of neither heating nor cooling actively. This isn't something you can readily do with an existing house without a big investment, but if we're thinking in theoretical terms, the best house is one that is designed to maintain a comfortable range of interior temperatures most of the time without active energy inputs.
I found the closing thought to be a bit shallowly expressed (at best) or shallow in general (if they haven't really thought it through.) Among this is the basic truth that urban living is inherently green, and if more people lived in cities (and if more cities were kept livable so people would want to move there). then per capita carbon emissions would go down."
I can accept this only if it's altered to say "if more people lived in dense urban cities INSTEAD OF SUBURBS." While dense urban environments can theoretically be greener than the god-awful suburban sprawl we find in much of the US, that's really the only way to declare it green. Modern cities require massive inputs of energy to move in enough food for their residents to survive, and that's just the tip of a city's energy consumption. "Greener than..." is not the same as "Green"
Post a Comment