A coming debate will be the suburb versus mega-city - - which is better? The context of better will be sustainability, economic activity, and innovation. The mega-city is going to win this debate. The evidence is mounting against the suburbs - - from the Manhattanite who emits 14,127 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide annually versus someone living in a New York suburbs to the economic reality that whenever a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity, from construction spending to the amount of bank deposits, increases about 15% per capita.
This debate over size is critical - - because bigness allows society to work toward three goals - - "Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less." A great place to understand this is in an article in The New York Times Magazine this past Sunday - - A Physicist [Solves} The City by Jonah Lehrer. The article profiles the work and ideas of Geoffrey West - - the physicist who came up with the biological relationship that while an elephant is 10,000 times the size of a guinea pig, it needs only 1,000 times as much energy. West recently turned his attention to the city and bigness. Keep an eye on West and some of the urban metrics that he comes up with.
West has a great observation in the article that gets at the heart of sustainability - -
West illustrates the problem by translating human life into watts. "A human being at rest runs on 90 watts," he says. "That's how much power you need just to lie down. And if you're a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you'll need 250 watts. That's how much energy it takes to run about and live food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy need to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can't have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It's not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales."
A link to the New York Times article can be found at - -
A Physicist Solves The City
An interesting look at the insanity of man, unfortunately. But I don't think people have a reality on the actual size of a blue whale, which is approximately 30 men laid in a line, head to toe. Unfortunately to make room for the 11,000 watts, some men have come up with the idea (reverse engineering, sort of) that if you get rid of all the whales, there will be more watts available for man. Certainly makes sense to some people (not mentioning names...) but it does align with your comment.
ReplyDeleteFurther face slapping on Thermodynamics and Economics is U of Utah's Dr. Tim Garrett's finding of about 10 miliwatts required for every inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar.
ReplyDeleteGarret asserts, "In other words, ...the wealth of civilization has a direct link to how much energy we can consume."
Interview transcript here.
His latest paper is a significant shock.
[pdf, http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0428]
"There are no plausible, thermodynamically supported solutions that avoid inflation rates less than 100% and lead to stabilized atmospheric CO2 concentrations within this century.
"It is only with very rapid decarbonization that current economic growth conditions can be sustained while keeping CO2 levels below 1000 ppmv by century's end."