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Edinburgh city initiative on ‘peak oil’
Edinburgh Evening News
EDINBURGH is set to become one of the first UK cities to actively reduce its dependency on oil.
“Transition” initiatives have emerged across the country – community-led schemes to build local economic resilience and help reduce carbon emissions.
A new steering group has been established in the Capital to promote the idea in Edinburgh.
Green councillor Maggie Chapman and Labour group leader Ewan Aitken helped persuade councillors to support it.
The Transition City initiative confronts the problem of “peak oil” and climate change, which is when not enough oil to keep the economy running is combined with a need to cut carbon levels.
(28 December 2007)
How Green is Your Neighborhood?
Bryan Walsh, TIME Magazine
Technology has gotten us into the climate change mess, and we assume that technology will get us out of it. Hybrid cars, wind turbines, algae biofuel – businesses and policymakers alike are searching for the technological fixes that will decarbonize our lives. But the deeper problem may be how – and where – we live our lives. The dominant pattern of development in America – large houses and sprawling, auto-dependent suburbs – requires a heavy input of fossil fuels and an output of carbon emissions. The adoption of cleaner technologies will take us part of the way, but what we really need to do is change our habitat, not just for the environmental benefits, but for our health, lifestyle and happiness.
Andrés Duany is writing the blueprint for a greener human habitat. The Miami-based architect is the co-founder, with his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zybek, of the firm DPZ, and over the years he’s become a leader in what’s called New Urbanism. It’s a philosophy of design that tackles not so much buildings themselves as the entire built environment. Duany and his peers in New Urbanism want to stem suburban sprawl in favor of medium-density towns and neighborhoods where houses, offices, shopping and leisure activities would all be within a walkable space. The automobile – which is responsible for a significant portion of most Americans’ individual carbon footprint – would become an option, not a lifeline. “This goes beyond simply having cars that will pollute less, like hybrids,” says Duany, a voluble 58-year-old who grew up in Cuba before moving to the U.S. in 1960. “It means not having to drive.” (Hear Duany talk about New Urbanism on this week’s Greencast.)
For most Americans outside a handful of urban areas, not driving is not an option. But auto addiction takes a hidden toll.
(19 December 2007)
Cities and energy consumption
Rachel Oliver, CNN
Humans can now officially be called an urban species. More than half of the global population now live in cities and the United Nations says that by 2030, 60 percent of us will live in them.
Yet according to U.N. Habitat, the world’s cities emit almost 80 percent of global carbon dioxide as well as “significant amounts of other greenhouse gases.”
Put simply, if you want to tackle climate change, tackle the cities.
The UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research recently went as far as saying that “the fate of the Earth’s climate is intrinsically linked to how our cities develop over the coming decades.”
(31 December 2007)
