These Think Tank pages carry thought-provoking items of potential interest that may otherwise be obscure or difficult to find.
- Offering social and economic commentary, futurological considerations, global and community news snapshots, and much more, they are intended to help set basic construction and development in the context of truly sustainable development.
- If you have a point of view, article, news, or other item that you would like to share with others interested in sustainability mind stretching, submit it here for Think Tank inclusion.
- Submissions will be assessed for inclusion based on relevance, novelty, challenge and legality. The views expressed will remain those of the authors and not Benfield ATT, who remain neutral on all such items.
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Title
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The Big Debate - Nature Vs Humans
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Author
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Keith Hudson, Futurologist
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Date Published
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29 July 2005
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The Big Debate
The following (click here) is a debate on the state of nature and the world and the human population between two of the most prominent spokesmen on both sides of the issue -- Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, and Bjorn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. As an environmentalist campaigner myself in the late 1960s and early '70s who wrote thousands of words about the looming oil shortages in the magazine I founded, Towards Survival -- albeit 40 years too soon perhaps! -- I suppose I should be firmly on the side of Carl Pope in the following debate.
But I find I am not. Emotionally, I am on the side of Carl Pope but recognise that Bjorn Lomborg is right in saying that doomsaying on all too many issues doesn't help unless we start to prioritise. Intellectually, I am on the side of Bjorn Lomborg but find that his assumptions about the values and ideals of modern developed countries -- to which he hopes that all the world's population may be initiated -- are too superficial.
One is far too pessimistic; the other too optimistic. My view is that, whatever happens, the earth will continue to go round the sun for a long time yet and that the world, as an ecosystem, will survive in some form or other -- whether man as a species does or does not. And, assuming that no gigantic asteroids hit us in the next few hundred million years (or even if they do) then there's a fair chance that another species more intelligent than us will evolve in due course.
And that, I suppose, exposes my own assumptions about the world, the universe, and life itself. I see life as part of a universe trying to discover itself. As the great physicist Fred Hoyle once said: "There's summat up". (To foreign readers of this posting I will translate this: "There's something mysterious going on in the universe.") I see intelligence and the curiosity urge to be at once the most important cause and motivation of life itself in all its myriad species.
To this end, I see both Carl Pope and Bjorn Lomborg as naive. They both seem to lack any clear understanding of just what sort of creature homo sapiens is. But just what are our real characteristics? Just what instincts are important and ineradicable? How can we best raise and teach our children, initiate our young people into adult society, and govern ourselves? Until we have far clearer ideas about these questions -- and seek to carry them out -- then neither Pope's nor Lomborg's strategy has much chance of success. It may be that only a small proportion of mankind might take this on and survive. If so, then homo sapiens will only be repeating what has happened repeatedly in the past when our species and predecessors had to adapt to seriously threatening environments and evolved accordingly. In our past, the environment was mainly that of fast-changing climates. Today's environment contains many more dangers of a man-made nature but, nevertheless, evolution will still proceed if we are to adapt successfully.
Keith Hudson
www.evolutionary-economics.org
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Title
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Hot on the Heels of Coolth
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Author
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Sue Roaf, Professor of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University
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Date Published
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Building for a Future, Spring 2005
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Hot on the Heels of Coolth
Kuwait is one of the two or three countries in the Middle East that has fairly massive reserves of oil left, along with Saudi, Iraq and Iran. So why, in the short term, is it one of the most vulnerable of all countries I have visited to the inevitable onslaught of the indoor lethal climates that will be associated with the energy shocks and extreme climate events that characterise the future scenarios?
Well, its like this. In 1903 when the British declared Kuwait a State, it was little more than a fishing village, located in one of the worst climates in the world. It had little fresh water and many of its nomadic inhabitants only lived there in the cooler winter months. By 1950 it had grown to a bustling port under British patronage and the economic stimulus of the oil industry. Boy, you should see it now. Miles of suburbs of huge, shiny, palaces and a steadily rising city centre where, till last year, the building height was restricted to twenty stories. Now, in its wisdom, the municipality has given permission for a hundred-story glass tower.
The first big mistake they made was to subsidise the price of energy. 1 unit of electricity there costs only 0.05p and, even with their astronomical energy use, a typical domestic bill is only in the hundreds of pounds every year. If they paid UK prices for a kilowatt hour, their bills for electricity alone would be £5-6000 a year and as a teacher there only earns between £35,000-£50,000 a year, that would hurt. The subsidies were put on when oil was only $5-10 a barrel. It spiked to $60 a barrel on the night I lectured there to the elite audience at the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah. One authoritative source claims that we may be looking at $100 a barrel by 2007 and $300 a barrel by 2015. Yikes, even Kuwait, the richest country on earth in terms of per capita income, cannot afford to keep paying for such subsidies for long. But, I was assured, if they were removed, it would cause a revolution.
This is a prime example of where cheap prices have encouraged unsustainable consumption habits, just as they have here in the UK, to a lesser extent. It is even suggested that because of the widening gap between supply and demand that this summer will see the first prolonged brown and black-outs in Kuwaits history. Is this a good metaphor for the global condition, or what?
I wondered, if there is a power outage in Kuwait, in a heat wave in summer, obviously many buildings would be unoccupiable, but where would one find enough coolth to maintain comfort conditions in a really heavy passive building? This question is answered by the windcatchers I went there to lecture on. Any building is more of less coupled to the sky or the earth, as can be seen in figure 1. At different times of the day comfort can be found in different parts of a house depending on their location, orientation and connectedness to the sky or the earth, either by proximity, openings or more active systems. In very clever windcatchers in Yazd, Iran, basements can also be temperature coupled to underground channels that bring cool water from high aquifers in distant mountains providing an even more effective source of coolth (Figure 2). One old land owner at the Bagh-e Khan in Yazd designed what he called the best air-conditioning system in the world by putting a small 70watt fan in the tunnel that drew air from his windcatcher 50m from the basement living room, over the mountain coupled qanat (canal) stream (Figure 3). It was blissfully cool in his basement, even on the hottest afternoons, and of course the fan could be easily run by a single roof mounted PV panel. Such earth-coupled, windcatcher / solar powered, systems could provide adequate coolth in temperatures in the high forties.
In Kuwait the sea temperature in summer is around 320C (160C in winter) and the earth temperature is around 280C at a depth of 6-9m. This could work to provide enough temperature reduction to give adequate coolth for locally adapted populations to survive, relatively comfortably, in deeply passive houses even when the lights do go out. Um then if one used a little evaporative cooling etc. etc. yes it would work. Of course if you live in thin, light, over-glazed buildings (lets not even go to fixed window!) you would be sizzling studies show that internal temperatures in such buildings would reach 500C within half an hour. When will they ever learn? Is it only a matter of time before we all go coolth-mining even in Britain?
Sue Roaf
Sue Roaf is Professor of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University, owner of the world-famous Ecohouse, author of 'EcoHouse 2'; 'Closing the Loop: Benchmarks for Sustainable Building', and 'Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change'.
Sue's current projects include the Oxford Solar Initiative, is a Freeman of the City of London, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and is a Liberal Democrats Councillor.
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Title
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Extinction Risk from Climate Change - Some Home Truths
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Author
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Horst Biedermann, Director General - EURIMA
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Date Published
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February 2004
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The publication (Nature: Vol. 427, 08 January 2004), of an international study on extinction of species caused by global warming, has reaffirmed the importance of controlling greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration. And the control of energy wastage has been pushed even further up the political agenda by the publication (Science, 09 January 2004) of a paper by the UK Government's chief scientist, Sir David King, calling for action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions at once. "Delaying action for decades, or even just years, is not a serious option," comments Sir David.
Although cars and factories are frequently assumed to be the main source of greenhouse gases, the lead author of the Nature magazine study, Professor Chris Thomas, acknowledges that; ". . more building insulation would be a good thing."
Welcoming these calls to reduce carbon dioxide levels Horst Biedermann, Director General of the European Insulation Manufacturers Association (EURIMA) said that Europe's buildings were the single major CO2 (greenhouse gas) polluter, not cars and factories. "The energy used to cool, heat and light our homes and other buildings accounts for more than 40% of all CO2 emissions in Europe. That's bigger than all forms of transport put together, and more than the total output of the industrial sector. Simply upgrading the insulation standards of older buildings would prevent the emission of up to 370 million tonnes of CO2 annually. That would be a major contribution to our Kyoto commitment."
A brochure on insulation and climate change; "CO2 emissions, what can you do?" is available free of charge from EURIMA. It is available in English, French and German, or it can be downloaded from the association's web site at www.eurima.org.
Horst Biedermann
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