Cities

There's a fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine on a physicist's search for the laws that govern the growth of cities. He became interested in the subject after discovering how the size of an animal can predict its metabolism:

...he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.) This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent.

The article also makes an argument that dense cities are inherently green:

...that modern cities are the real centers of sustainability. According to the data, people who live in densely populated places require less heat in the winter and need fewer miles of asphalt per capita. (A recent analysis by economists at Harvard and U.C.L.A.demonstrated that the average Manhattanite emits 14,127 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide annually than someone living in the New York suburbs.) Small communities might look green, but they consume a disproportionate amount of everything. As a result, West argues, creating a more sustainable society will require our big cities to get even bigger. We need more megalopolises.

Incidentally, there's a Radiolab episode that deals with the subject, and being Radiolab, it goes without saying that everyone should listen:



I agree that "we need more megalopolises," and it's always worth pointing out how the intuitive sense that cities consume more than their fair share of resources is simply wrong, and actually the reverse is true.

Crossing the Green Line

A story on NPR points out how Israel's security interests are leading it to commit more resources to green energy:

It's something that is obvious when you think about it - Israel's relative strength in the region, and leverage with the west, is inversely proportional to global oil demand - but it's not something that normally comes to mind when thinking about Israel. It's nice to know that there is at least one country who's immediate security concern is, or at least should be, ending the world's addiction to oil. And this isn't just any country, it's a tiny place that happens to be a world leader in cutting edge technology.

The story points out how Israel has been slow to start investing in alternative energy, but there is really only one thing that can get a country to invest big and move quickly: national security.

Battery Switching Station

Just a follow up to an old post about electric cars: While the daily commute for most people is within the range of current EV battery technology (about 60km, I believe), this limited range is still a major obstacle to the mass adoption of non-hybrid electric cars. One interesting solution is to separate car-ownership from battery-ownership and create battery switching infrastructure. Rather than stopping in a gas station, you would stop in a battery-switching station, have yours removed, a freshly charged one installed, and be on your way, all in about the time it takes to fill up a gas tank. You might think the idea is a bit pie-in-the-sky, but a start-up in California has already designed such a station and demonstrated it in Japan. Here' s the video:

A turning point?

For those of us that accept the scientific consensus around global warming, the inaction on the part of the United States to regulate greenhouse gases has been infuriating and disheartening. The more the science around climate change evolves, the less fun this issue gets. There are politically controversial issues that you can enjoy debating, and form a sense of identity around whatever position you come to occupy. Global warming used to be one of those issues for me, but at some point it stopped being fun. It's too serious and keeps getting more serious all the time.

So the New York Times headline today: "E.P.A. Clears the Way for Regulation of Warming Gases," comes as a huge relief. Here's the good news:

As the E.P.A. begins the process of regulating these climate-altering substances under the Clean Air Act, Congress is engaged in writing wide-ranging energy and climate change legislation that could pre-empt any action taken by the agency. President Obama and Ms. Jackson have repeatedly said that they much prefer that Congress address global warming rather than have the E.P.A tackle it through administrative action.

Here's the scandal:

Two years ago this month, the Supreme Court, in Massachusetts v. E.P.A., ordered the agency to determine whether greenhouse gases harm the environment and public health and, if not, to explain why. Agency scientists were virtually unanimous in determining that they do, but top officials of the George W. Bush administration suppressed the finding and took no action.

In my view, this paragraph damns the Bush administration, maybe even more than Iraq. It willfully decided against performing the one duty a government has that really counts: protecting citizens from circumstances that are too big for individuals to face alone. They had the science but chose to ignore it, and the delay may turn out to be catastrophic.

This won't turn things around immediately, and to the extent that it does, it might turn out to have come too late. But without the US government on board, it was hard to see how there could even be a chance of finding a solution. When Dick Cheney said: "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy," he may have been cynical, but he wasn't entirely wrong.

A New Yorker article a couple weeks ago gave an explanation for why. When an individual decides to conserve by, say, riding a bike instead of driving a car, that person is actually decreasing the overall demand for gas (by a tiny amount), which lowers the price and gives others an incentive to drive more, raising the price and overall emissions back to where it was in the first place. If your goal is to go to your grave without a guilty conscience, than this works well. If your goal is to actually have an impact on climate change, it does nothing.

It's a collective action problem and governments have to take the lead by writing new rules of the game. The US has long been the largest emitter of green house gases, but more than that, it has a leadership position in the world that no other country has. Canada, for example, has basically been waiting to see what the US does before coming up with a plan of its own. And no other country has the same level of resources to put into research and development to create the technology that will really lead to a solution.

For the first time in a long time, this is good news.

The electric car cometh, part 2

TED just released a talk by Shai Agassi that is very related to my last post. In it, he lays out a convincing argument for the mass adoption of the electric car, including a system of battery-swap stations based on the idea of a separation in car ownership and battery ownership. It gets really exciting when he starts going over the successes he's already had with the idea, including in Israel and Denmark.

UPDATE: The Times magazine published a great article on Agassi. Here's a particularly compelling sentence:

Agassi figured that a company controlling a world network of charging stations would become so profitable so quickly that it could subsidize its customers’ electric cars, much the way mobile companies give out free phones to people who sign two-year contracts.

The electric car cometh

Spring is here, and with it familiar feelings of fear and loathing have returned. Now that my bicycle is again my primary means of transportation, I’m remembering how much scorn I feel towards anyone who happens to be in a car. I realize that it’s unjustified self-righteousness, and I completely forget it when I’m driving one, but I really can’t help despising Montreal drivers during biking season. Rather than thanking me for getting myself around without contributing to the coming environmental apocalypse, I get the feeling that most drivers are about as fond of cyclists as cyclists are of them.

The problem for me is mostly the fear of being killed, but no less a source of frustration is the idea that I’m breathing in whatever the tail-pipe in front of me is putting out. There’s a reoccurring thought I have while on the road: future generations will look back on a time when the combustion-engine dominated our city streets, to the point that people shrug off frequent “smog warnings” as if it’s a normal part of the weather report, the same way we think of the coal-polluted London of the industrial revolution. Cyclists may continue to fear for their lives, but the electric car is coming, and soon.

The question isn’t so much “if,” or even “when,” but “who.” Last week, the New York Times had an article describing the Chinese government’s plan to establish an electric car industry. Since it currently doesn’t have much an automotive industry, in a relative sense anyway, China could leap over the old technology in the same way many parts of the country went straight to the cell-phone, skipping land-line technology altogether, while the west and Japan already have factories built for the old technology. According to the article:

Beyond manufacturing, subsidies of up to $8,800 are being offered to taxi fleets and local government agencies in 13 Chinese cities for each hybrid or all-electric vehicle they purchase. The state electricity grid has been ordered to set up electric car charging stations in Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin.

Of course there’s a part of all us that fears China’s march towards global domination, but I see these developments as a clear good. China has already become the world’s leader in global-warming causing pollution, and anything that can be done to ameliorate that will benefit everyone. Also, with any luck, the added competition should spur on the development of electric-vehicle technology everywhere.

The Chinese government isn’t the only one trying to get into the electric car industry. The GM Volt is a plug-in electric hybrid that should be on sale in 2010, and even more promising are the smaller start-up companies working on their own prototypes:



One of the coolest things about plug-in electric cars is the idea of "smart charging." Apparently it’s possible to have the car communicate with the power grid. It would only start charging during times of excess power capacity, late at night. On the CBC radio science show “Quirks and Quarks,” there was talk of future cars that are left alone for long periods of time – such as those sitting in an airport parking lot – buying power from the grid late at night when power is cheap and selling it back during peak hours when it’s expensive. The owner of the car would return from his trip having made money from his parked car. Cars would become batteries that would smooth out power consumption and actually be good for the grid.

Car sales have plummeted during this recession, but people will eventually have to start buying cars again. When they do, we should all hope the cars people are buying are electric. It’s, unfortunately, probably not reasonable to hope everyone will buy bicycles instead.

the future

Listening to Quirks and Quarks on CBC radio this morning, I was struck by how the host Bob McDonald casually comments on the steadily approaching environmental calamity. In one segment he refers to the collapse of honey-bee populations in North America as a "canary in the coal mine" for general environmental health, and in another he interviews a scientist discussing a study showing that climate change is killing our forests.

It occurs to me how often I swing from optimism to pessimism and back again when thinking about the future, depending on which kind of scientist I was most recently listening to. For example, last night I got excited about a TED Talk by a geneticist who claims that with more research we can: "solve our energy problems, reduce CO2, clean up our oceans and make better wine," and then suggests: "stay healthy for another 20 years and you'll see 150 maybe 300." Here's the talk:



In another, even more far-out Ted Talk, a futurist discusses the past 5000 days of the Internet and predicts the very sci-fi world of the next 5000. For example, the web seems to be on course to developing into one giant, integrated machine surpassing the human brain in complexity:



I think a lot of us live with a cognitive dissonance where we believe, on the one hand, society is moving towards some kind of technological utopia and, on the other, a Mad-Max type post-apocalyptic hell following complete environmental collapse. I think the balance between technological optimism and environmental pessimism are key parts of my generation. We waver between hope and excitement and a "what's the point, the world's fucked anyway," attitude. I suppose in the end it'll just come down to timing.