The New York Times published an op-ed piece written by Al Gore yesterday, in which he proposes a five-point plan that will allow the United States to produce 100 per cent of its electricity from energy-efficient sources within 10 years:

• The government should offer incentive for the construction of renewable energy plants.
• A new grid should be built to transport renewable energy from its production sites to cities.
• The government should give incentive to automobile companies to switch their production to hybrid cars.
• All buildings should be equipped with energy-efficient windows and lighting in order to stop pollution and reduce energy bills.
• The government should put a price on carbon emissions and lead the way to replace the Kyoto treaty by a better one.

Gore says that these initiatives will also help improve the state of the economy.
I found the section on the automobile industry particularly interesting:

We should help America’s automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available as the rest of this plan matures. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids would also help to solve the problem of electricity storage. Think about it: with this sort of grid, cars could be charged during off-peak energy-use hours; during peak hours, when fewer cars are on the road, they could contribute their electricity back into the national grid.

This made me think of a profile of Mitchell Joachim, written by traffic expert Tom Vanderbilt, that I read in Wired’s October edition. Joachim is an architect who focuses on reducing the ecological footprint of cities.

Among the biggest sources of waste, he argues, is the automobile—not only in energy but in the space it occupies (cars, he notes, spend more than 90 per cent of the day parked.) For nearly a century, Joachim says, “cities have been designed around cars. Why not design a car around a city?” So he did just that. One of his concept vehicles, the City Car, was named to Time magazine’s Invention of the Year list in 2007.

His various cars would  be less machine than Facebook on wheels. Instead or rpm gauges, there’d be social networking software telling drivers where their friends are and how to get there. Nade from neoprene and other soft materials, cars would no longer suffer traffic-fouling fender benders, merely what he calls “gentle congestion”—picture a flock of urban sheep grazing against one other. Like Zipcar vehicles, the cars would be shared. They would “read” potholes and send warnings to nearby drivers and city repair crews. Urban parking would be eased by intelligent real-time supply and demand management, with people bidding remotely for available spots. Of course, there’d also be more spaces to begin with, since his cars could be folded and stacked like shopping carts. The average New York City block could handle 880 of the vehicles, he says.

Al Gore, meet Mitchell Joachim.

Source: The New York Times, Nov. 9, 2008
Wired, Oct. 2008

The Afghan government wants to build an eco-town that will be home to three million people in the north of Kabul. The city, already baptized Deh Sabz, is being designed by the French firm Architecture Studio and will be financed by the Afghan government as well as independent developers. The project was born in response to the overpopulation problem faced by Kabul, where 80 per cent of the population lives in shantytowns, according to the firm. Ninety per cent of its energy needs will be provided by renewable energy sources.

Source: “Le gouvernement afghan étudie la construction d’une ville nouvelle écologique près de Kaboul,” Le Monde, Oct. 16.

This really cool animated and interactive website will introduce you to the characters living in this energy-efficient beanstalk. Meet Mr. Roo, Yagi-Chan and their friends!

Prince Charles loves traditional towns where you can walk to the supermarket and wander around little streets. He’s spreading that idea through his Foundation for the Built Environment, which works with residents to apply the principles of new urbanism in British communities and in third-world countries. The projects also aim at developing renewable energies in cities by installing windmills or solar panels, for example.

Source: “Le prince Charles veut exporter son modèle d’urbanisme ‘à l’ancienne,’” Le Monde, Oct. 25

Carin Smuts has proven that sustainable architecture doesn’t have to be elitist. The South African architect won the second Global Award for Sustainable Architecture a few days ago in Poissy, France. Smut has been working for almost two decades in South African townships, where she builds low-cost housing and public buildings. She says her work is sustainable —she calls it “micro-sustainable”— because her projects are designed in collaboration with the local populations in order to understand their needs as well as the daily reality of the neighbourhoods.

Source: Le Monde.

Workers were installing solar panels on the roof of one of the Vatican’s auditoriums last week. The panels will generate enough energy to heat or cool the 6000-seat room, used by the pope in case of bad weather for his weekly audiences with pilgrims. Pope Benedict VI has voiced his concerns about the environment several times since his election in 2005. The panels will allow the Vatican to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 200 tonnes every two weeks, according to one of the workers.

Source: BBC News.

Citizens of the San Francisco Bay area can now hire journalists to investigate issues relevant to their community. Spot Us, a new nonprofit initiative, uses the principle of crowdfunding by allowing people to vote for and finance story ideas that they judge interesting. The articles are then posted on the website and given or sold to local newspapers that want to publish them.

In order to limit the influence of financial contributors who might be driven by personal interests, donations are limited to 20% of the cost of the story.

Spot Us was founded by Dave Cohn, a 26-year-old journalist, with the help of a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. It might very well be the future of reporting!

spot.us

The NYT: “A different way to pay for the news you want,” August 23, 2008

Remember the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that UN group of scientists that said that climate change is due to human activity? Apparently they’ve decided to give the world one or two advices on how to reduce carbon emissions. They want us to eat less meat because meat production generates to much pollution and cows release methane through flatulence. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, said we should start by having one meat-free day a week. Eventually, governments should push us to reduce our meat consumption by 60% by 2020. Of course, the meat industry is angry.

I’m sure the IPCC members are wise people but they are scientists studying climate patterns, not policy-makers. This recommandation is simplistic and doesn’t take into account whether people already make an effort to eat food that is produced locally or not or try to reduce their emissions in other ways. Climate change is a global problem that can’t be solved by isolated measures such as this one. I don’t think this is educating people about what they can do in a proper manner.

The Internet and its social networking websites have sparked off endless debates about privacy. Scientific American brings its voice to the debate with an article written by law professor Daniel J. Solove. Should we just get over it and accept that every detail of our lives be published online, even rumors? Or is privacy a fundamental right that has to be protected?

In this article I learned about JuicyCampus, a website where students from everywhere in the U.S. can rant, spread rumors and divulge details concerning fellow college classmates, all that anonymously. The web 2.0 is going to give us its share of headaches…

Have you heard of the Kindle? This little e-book reader launched by Amazon in November 2007 has been making a lot of noise. Of course, the main question everyone is asking is whether it will ever replace actual books. In the May/June issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Ezra Klein wrote extensively about his experience with the Kindle. (A video is also available on CJR’s website.) Klein comes up with this interesting idea that the Kindle might actually change the way we read an exchange ideas with authors. By eliminating printing and distribution fees, books could be updated more often and in direct reaction to the readers’ feedback.

The possibilities are endless, and many are obvious. Currently, authors are hampered by the nature of the publishing process. Books are begun years before their publication date, and finished months before they will ever reach readers … With electronic text, however, the original “book” could be just the first step in an ongoing relationship between author and reader. In the most simple form, the book could be updated with new chapters and commentary …

This could profoundly alter the relationship between authors and their audiences. One of the finest bloggers around is The Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias, who’s also the author of the new book Heads in the Sand, an examination of the politics of American foreign policy. Currently, his blog is supported by The Atlantic. But what if readers of his book were offered the opportunity to subscribe to his commentary for $5 a year? Imagine that some thirty thousand copies are sold, and half those readers decide to pay for Yglesias’s further thoughts. That’s now a yearly income of $75,000, flowing directly from readers to author, unmediated by ads or institutions.

I don’t think that e-books will ever replace paper, they could just very well evolve into something different. But people’s fears that paper might one day disappear seem unjustified to me. They’re scared to abandon paper because they’re scared to adopt a new technology, just like the church was scared when the printing press was invented (I guess the monks weren’t too happy to see their jobs being suppressed.) We now think of that attitude as being reactionary, and therefore we should be wary of our own reactions.