Tag: climate

Green Cities

From the car-obsessed cities of the 20th to the cities of the 21th century. One is being built in China now

These new megacities could evolve into sprawling, polluting megaslums. Or they could define a new species of world city. Unlike New York or London, they are blank slates — less affluent, perhaps, but also free from legacy designs and technologies tailored to the world of the 19th and 20th centuries. That is a huge advantage. It took Boston 20 years and more than $14B just to reroute a freeway underground. New York can hardly install a second network of water pipes. Most of Los Angeles is too spread out for fast public transit or combined heat and power plants. And because these cities are so isolated from agricultural land, most of the food that locals eat gets shipped 100s of km. “Shanghai today is making 90% of the mistakes that American cities made” — spreading out, building up single-family homes, replacing naturally mixed-use neighborhoods with isolated zones for living, shopping, and working, and connecting it all with car travel. But fixing these problems is still possible. Dongtan breaks ground later this year on a plot about the size of Manhattan on Chongming Island.

2012-07-03: CO2-negative cities. It is well-understood that per-capita resource usage is lower in urban areas than in rural ones, and the first CO2-neutral cities are coming online. Covering vertical surfaces with plants would allow for CO2-negative cities.
2012-07-05: The first eco city, Dongtan, is so eco-friendly it doesn’t even exist.

Dongtan was a planned development described as an eco-city on the island of Chongming in Shanghai, China. Design began in 2005, and by 2010 the development had stalled. The project has been described as a failure.

2021-04-24: Green NYC

Global design firm WATG periodically rolls out speculative GIFs demonstrating how famous urban stretches can be realistically green-ified


2021-11-12: Not sure why it took so long for this to get a bit more traction, but here’s a proposal:

Urban Sequoia achieves substantially more significant CO2 reductions than has been achieved by applying these techniques separately. These strategies can be applied to buildings of all sizes and types. For cities, SOM’s prototype design is a high-rise building that can sequester 1000 tons of CO2 per year, equivalent to 48k trees. The design incorporates nature-based solutions and materials that use far less CO2 than conventional options and absorb CO2 over time. Materials like bio-brick, hempcrete, timber, and biocrete reduce the CO2 impact of construction by 50% compared to concrete and steel. A progressive approach could reduce construction emissions by 95%.

2021-11-13: Another, more ambitious concept:

Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has unveiled a project dubbed “the world’s first farmscraper,” to be built in Shenzhen, China. The 218-meter-high, 51-story Jian Mu Tower will contain a large-scale farm system with the ability to produce crops to feed 40k people per year, as well as offices, a supermarket, and a food court. The scheme’s façade consists of a 10k-square-meter vertical hydroponic farm extending the entire height of the building, estimated to produce 270k kilograms of food per year. The Jian Mu Tower seeks to “establish a self-sustained food supply chain” where the cultivation, harvest, sale, and consumption of food takes place under 1 roof.

Greenwashing

Given our society’s microscopic attention span, and the apparent need of the media to deflate trends they’ve helped pump up, coverage of green business would seem likely headed for a fall. And that might indeed happen, for any number of reasons. From the public’s perspective, this would make it seem like the greening of business was yet another cynical fad that’s now faded into the woodwork. Such perceptions aside, the topic isn’t going away any time soon. Here, in no particular order, are 10 reasons why I think the greening of business will be an enduring issue for years to come, regardless of the media’s attention span.

The real leaders will have focused their sights on being restorative — for example, not being merely CO2 neutral, but being CO2 negative, taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere than they put in.

Trucking

Route optimization software can save substantial fuel for trucks and airplanes.

Many look to alternative fuels and hybrid-electric vehicles. But information technology has an important role to play in making existing vehicles more efficient, particularly when it comes to aggregating small gains across large fleets. Take something as simple as reducing left-hand turns. For US drivers, this means less time idling in the middle of the road waiting for oncoming traffic to pass. Collectively, Roadnet clients save an estimated 205m liters of fuel a year and can cut 85k trucks and cars out of their logistics systems.

2013-07-26: What Was a Truck Driver? The US commercial truck fleet has 253m trucks, and employs 5.7m truck drivers. Within 20 years, that should go down to 0 drivers.
2014-05-30: Software truck convoys. This kind of mundane driverless car will be on the road very soon, already saves 10% fuel and can save up to 20% if the distance is further reduced.

2016-11-24: Automating trucking

Across China, 7.2m trucks and 16m drivers are responsible for intercity transportation of goods. This industry is worth $300b, and drivers account for 40% of the costs. Some long-distance trips across China require 3 drivers to complete. The truck freight industry in the US is even bigger, valued at $700b.

2016-12-16: Matching Truckers

Amazon is building an app that matches truck drivers with shippers, a new service that would deepen its presence in the $800B trucking industry. The app is designed to make it easier for truck drivers to find shippers that need goods moved. It would also eliminate the need for a third-party broker, which typically charges a commission of ~15% for doing the middleman work.

2023-01-17: Another take on the trucking industry

In 2022, that figure is 3m truck tractors on the road. From there, we can estimate the average yearly net transactions per truck at $340k per year. Multiply the 2 numbers together, and we get $1.04t!

Trucking is a potpourri of different services and needs. There’s drayage: the process of moving containers from docks to warehouses. There’s reefer (refrigerated truck): the truck trailer is temperature controlled. There’s hazmat: transport of hazardous materials. Flatbed, dry van, tankers, partials, hotshots, box trucks, and more.

Transportation CO2

CO2 emissions from shipping are 2x those of aviation and could rise by 75% in the next 15-20 years which will have a serious impact on global warming.

time for those humongous sails on tankers and container ships.
2020-02-04: Removing CO2 from transportation is going to be really difficult around the world due to NIMBYs.

There are a number of headwinds to the replacement of cars with public transportation, all of which are politically or technically nontrivial in ways that mass installation of solar and wind power isn’t:

  1. Public transport is the most convenient in large cities and least convenient in rural areas, but modern nationalism holds the rural to be more authentic and moral. Thus, when rural motorists riot the state is paralyzed with inaction and the media urges understanding of populist anger at elites, whereas when urbanites riot the state immediately engages in mass arrests and the media urges law and order.
  2. The pace of urban redevelopment is too low, thanks to local NIMBYism, making it hard for people to live in cities where car-free living is already convenient. Local housing activism always focuses on people already present; Berlin passed a new rent control law that is projected to reduce investment by 25%. Even Paris, which is building more housing, is doing so almost exclusively in the suburbs and not in the city proper.
  3. Local notables tend to drive even controlling for income and social class. One does not become a local notable by working at a city center office with people from many neighborhoods, many of whom are recent migrants to the city, but by staying within one neighborhood and interacting with old-timers. The latter kind of economic and social network is less convenient to travel by train. Thus, the loudest voices in a local discussion are against seizing space from cars and giving it to pedestrians, cyclists, buses, or trams.
  4. At low levels of public investment, the car will predominate, for 2 reasons. First, some state action is needed to give buses priority on roads. Second, public transportation has more moving parts that must be integrated – fares, schedules, infrastructure, equipment, development. This makes fiscal austerity a drag on the ability of a developed society to demotorize unless this austerity specifically takes the form of very high taxes on cars and fuel.
  5. A political process that slows down investment in order to mollify NIMBY opposition makes it very hard to shift priorities on the ground. In this sense, the freeway revolts and the changes they led to are the best thing that ever happened to car culture, even more than the freeways themselves; in the American context, the revolts happened largely only when the freeways intruded on middle-class neighborhoods.

2020-04-02: Ships are 3% of global emissions, and because it’s “only” 90k ships, easier to upgrade. The proper solution would be safe nuclear reactors, but of course we can’t have that due to paranoia.

Vertical Farms

Imagine a cluster of 30-story towers on Governors Island or in Hudson Yards producing fruit, vegetables, and grains while also generating clean energy and purifying wastewater. 150 such buildings could feed the entire city of New York for a year. Using current green building systems, a vertical farm could be self-sustaining and even produce a net output of clean water and energy.

So when does this go live? This would be useful to kick the agro lobby in the groin, of which more later.
2008-07-21: Land still too expensive for vertical farms in Manhattan

Would a tomato in lower Manhattan be able to outbid an investment banker for space in a high-rise? My bet is that the investment banker will pay more.

2014-05-18: LED lights can be tuned to the optimal wavelength for plant growth, lowering excess heat. 22h of light / day halves the time to maturity, and the indoor environment avoids pests and bad weather. This is probably the future of our agriculture. It allows to bring fresh produce into cities and lowers the huge footprint agriculture has on the planet. we lost 3x the size of the us since 1700 due to depleted soil, and agriculture is the #2 greenhouse factor.
2016-06-09: Newark may have better economics than Manhattan

Newark, NJ-based AeroFarms, the largest vertical farm in the world, employs aeroponics and LED lights to grow indoors all year round. Aside from aeroponics using 95% less water than soil farming and zero pesticides, we are able to grow locally, cutting out a very complex supply chain and enhancing shelf life versus products typically grown in California. We’re 75% more productive annually than the average farm because we bypass the complexity of it.

2017-01-09: It’s time to replace most agriculture around the world with this. Traditional agriculture has a huge water / co2 footprint, uses up a lot of land, and food is grown far away from where it is consumed. This uses 10% of the water.

Ed Harwood’s original prototype mini-farm still produces crops 6x every school year. The invention sits in a corner of the cafeteria by the round lunch tables and the molded black plastic cafeteria chairs, an improbable-looking teaching tool. Examining it, you feel a mystified wonder, and perhaps a slight misgiving about the inventor’s soundness of mind, remembering what happened to Wile E. Coyote. For concentrated ingenuity and handcrafted uniqueness, its closest simile is the Wright brothers’ first biplane, the Flyer, now on display in the National Air and Space Museum, in Washington. Like the Flyer, and like many other great inventions, Harwood’s prototype is also an objet d’art. Its dimensions are 1.5m wide by 3.6m long by 2m high. Essentially, it consists of 2 horizontal trays of thick plastic, both 25cm deep, 1 above the other, suspended in a strong but minimal framework of aluminum. Below the trays, at floor level, a plastic tank holds 1000 liters of water. The cloth is attached to the frame by snaps. On small pipes running along the inside bottom of the tray, Harwood’s special nozzles emit a constant, sputtering spray of water at a downward angle. The spray hits the bottom of the tray and bounces up, and some of it becomes the mist that nourishes the roots growing through the cloths. Eventually, most of the water drains down and returns to the tank to be reused.

2017-05-03: Different types of vertical farming

There are a lot of ways to farm indoors and below are 3 different soilless processes. Done properly at various scales, they’re as effective as at growing crops in skyscrapers as they are in studio apartments:

Hydroponics

Hydroponics001

One of the oldest and most common methods of vertical farming, hydroponics includes growing plants without soil and in a water solvent containing mineral nutrients. The simplest hydroponic method (called the floating raft system) suspends the plants in soilless raft like a polystyrene sheet and lets the roots hang to absorb the oxygen-aerated solution. Another common method is the nutrient film technique, which is popular for growing lettuce. Here, a stream of the nutrient-dissolved solution is pumped into an angled channel, typically a plastic pipe, containing the plants. This runs past the plants’ root mat and can then be recirculated for continuous use. New York’s Gotham Greens and Square Roots use hydroponics.

Aeroponics

Aeroponics001

It’s no surprise that NASA has been backing research on aeroponic growth for the past 20 years as it’s free-floating-roots aesthetic is typically used in futuristic scifi movies. With aeroponics, the dangling roots absorb a fine mist comprised of an atomized version of the nutrient solution sprayed directly onto the roots by a pump. Although aeroponics enables plants to grow much more quickly than hydroponics, it requires more solution and therefore is more costly. Newark’s Aerofarms uses aeroponics.

Aquaponics

Aquaponics001

Like hydroponic systems, an aquaponic system contains a soil-free plant bed suspended over a body of water containing nutrients necessary for plant growth. But within the body of water is a population of fish (typically herbivores) that produce waste that function as fertilizer for the plants. In turn, the plants help purify the water to make the water suitable for the fish.

Given that a balance must be achieved to ensure the system of both life forms, aquaponics requires greater attention than hydroponics or aeroponics although filtration and aeration systems can help manage these complications. Furthermore, the types of plants one can grow are much more limited as the necessary plant nutrients must be compatible with those necessary for the fish. Brooklyn’s Edenworks and Oko Farms use aquaponics.

2018-06-01: The economics are starting to work, even in NYC

Gotham Greens’ prices are competitive with local and organic lettuce brands, about $3.99 for a 4.5-ounce container. Still, the company is a small-scale producer vying for consumers faced with a financial decision: pay the price for local organic, save 50 cents by purchasing a well-known organic brand, or a whole $ for conventional greens from California or Arizona. “There is always a consumer who will pay for value. Gotham may be in a good position because they’ve got loyal regional markets, but replacing lower-cost producers will be tough.”

2021-08-27: Farmscrapers

Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has unveiled a project dubbed “the world’s first farmscraper,” to be built in Shenzhen, China. The 218-meter-high, 51-story Jian Mu Tower will contain a large-scale farm system with the ability to produce crops to feed 40k people per year, as well as offices, a supermarket, and a food court.


2023-07-29: Hydroponics comes to subsistence farming. Hardware costs are still too high and it needs a water solution for arid climates.

And the solution is replicable beyond India. Pastoralism is practiced in arid and semi-arid climates across South Asia, East Asia and Africa. Kamath has received inquiries from Bangladesh to Nepal, Bhutan to Kenya. “Many times I get asked how many fodder stations can be set up. Scaling up is very hard for hardware-based solutions”.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is the up-front cost –– setting up a hydroponic station costs $30k. “It takes 3 years to break even”. Even though Bahula invested in setting up the station on Palu’s land, she has to pay $20 each week to arrange water for irrigation, which is delivered by truck. “While the cost of the water is recovered from fodder sales, we do not make enough to cover labor costs”.


2023-09-16: The economics remain terrible

Vertical farming writ large is having a tough time. AeroFarms entered bankruptcy in July and Kentucky-based AppHarvest filed a notice of default in June. IronOx laid off staff at the end of last year. Dreyfus acknowledges the difficulties the industry is facing, but compares vertical farming’s progress to the early and much less profitable days of the solar industry, which once routinely lost money but has become more stable. “So many crops that were not profitable are going to become profitable” as more time is spent perfecting the technology and understanding the business.