A comparison of the sustainability of different kinds of bikes and how progress in cycling has often come at the price of sustainability. Still however you spin it, electric cycling is much more efficient and sustainable than driving.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/02/can-we-make-bicycles-sustainable-again
“This was an act of self-defense.”
Very much looking forward to the movie “How to Blow Up A Pipeline”.
Here’s an absolutely staggering number to take with you: four trillion dollars per annum
That’s what it takes to turn the entire world sustainable. That’s an awful lot of money but also it’s not that much more than things like military expenditures or the assets of a handful of billionaires.
As Tooze says:
Rather than shrinking away from the $ 4 trillion in shock the really striking thing about it, is that it is far from utopian. If we take the Songwe, Stern, Bhattacharya figures at face value then the explosive conclusion is that sustainable development for the entire planet is within reach. All the more egregious and inexcusable will be our failure, if we do not. It is one thing to fail grandly in the face of an impossible challenge, it is quite another not to do something of immense important that is, in fact, manageable.
We can leave it at that.
Sustainable development is totally possible and it’s being blocked by a minority elite who stand to lose a bunch of assets and revenues if we would do this.
Cucumber saudis. Nice.
Two questions have long dogged Dutch farming. The first is whether quantity made up for quality: having tasted the tomatoes, cucumbers and chilies grown in its hyper-efficient greenhouses, one may be forgiven for not being able to tell them apart.
picking people over cows turns out to be politically fraught
Well, the cows are owned by millionaire farmers so it’s more a question of which people you are picking.
The Netherlands, a generally well-run place, has made a hash of adapting its economy to ecological constraints it knew about for decades. That does not bode well for everyone else.
Chaser.
We have housing crises in many places and it’s remarkable how pernicious this issue is given the number of problems it would fix for us to have enough affordable homes for everybody.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything
It is beyond funny that the right wing conspiracy theorists have latched onto the idea of creating liveable, walkable cities as the next threat to humanity.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/16/15-minute-city-planning-theory-conspiracists
There is a lot in this piece on the Khaleeji Ideology and the collapse of future and landscape that is happening in the Gulf.
“you think money can’t buy you happiness? 7bb come to Dubai”
“the color of the Khaleeji Ideology is decidedly green. The acid green of chromakey, the hacker green of a terminal screen, the subtle green of glass, which intensifies with an infinity mirror effect; the greens of astroturf and of lawns and golf courses maintained with desalinated water.”
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/horizons/498319/the-khaleeji-ideology/
anti-anti-utopia
It always struck me as absurd that degrowth “couldn’t work”. At this point, it’s probably the only thing that can work.
Something we’re also noticing here is that people with dogs gather in courtyards and on fields in groups and let their dogs roam free, illegally.
They do this in groups together so that if somebody tells them not to, they can use their numbers to intimidate and as described here they use that and many other strategies with officers of the law.
Owning a dog in a dense urban environment is a questionable choice already, but the people around us here take the cake. There are quite a number of socially at-risk individuals who have dogs where both the animal and the human are deeply and certifiably deranged. Both of them accost any human who walks by and it’s often a question of who’s louder the dog’s barking or its owner’s ranting.
I think a forced dog register and quotas/waiting lists for some areas would be a good first step to control the situation here.