Though progress is often slow, city planners and politicians are gradually waking up to the fact that when cities offer safe and affordable alternatives to cars, we start to travel differently.
More and more young people are choosing bicycles, buses and trains over owning a car out of the sheer cost. In Berlin, it’s public transport, not cars, which is the coolest way of getting around.
In Copenhagen, a city that has a long held reputation for being bike-friendly, a whopping 62% of people choose to cycle their commute.
In the French city of Lyon, the number of cars entering the city has fallen by 20% compared to just a decade ago. As the city’s network of bike hire stations continues to grow, town planners are hoping for a further 20% decline.
In London, where cycle super-highways are becoming popular, the share of journeys made by car has fallen by a quarter since 1990.
Car free days are rising in popularity in many of the world’s largest cities, giving people a taste of what it’s like to live with less noise, traffic and pollution. Bogota was one of the first cities to introduce a car free day, and it’s now become so popular that it’s been extended to a full week.
Bogotá’s Ciclovía is fantastic! I was there in the mid-nineties and they closed a major artery, the Carretera Séptima, on Sundays. Here some pictures.
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(The, now deleted, argument was that Greenpeace is supposedly not credible becaused they supported the anti-nuclear movement. Which, according to them, hampered climate protection)
It is right that nuclear plants emit less CO2 per unit of energy than coal plants. That does not mean that it is right to put any money in that, because for the money which would be needed to produce 1 GWh of nuclear power, many times of that amount could be produced by much cheaper renewable power - and in far less construction time.
Ultimately, it is not relevant if for a first, 1% or 3% of backup energy is generated by gas plants, and 97% to 99% by cheap renewables. Again, reducing CO2 emissions at the scale we need is a quantitative-economical problem, and if for the money that would be needed to get electricity production 100% clean right now, we could, say, improve insulation of 30% of our countries houses, and install heat pumps there, more would be achieved in shorter time.
And a third thing - it is often represented as if the goal of nuclear power was to replace coal and gas plants. That was never the case. Suggesting this is misinformation. The idea was always to have a cheap baseline source from the nuke plants which would cover the minimum of each day - perhaps 10% of the daily maximum - and cover the rest mostly by also cheap coal and gas power plants. That was the goal of the electricity companies which operated both coal and nuclear plants. Producing peak load from nuke plants would not have been economical, and was never the goal. (And the only exceptions are countries like France, which build their nuclear fleet for the sake of producing own nuclear arms - at whatever price.)
The whole discussion about nuclear power by the ecological movement since the 1970ies was to provide a clean and safe alternative to nuclear plants.
Do you see what this logo shows in its center? It was designed in 1975:
That was the goal of the environmental and the anti-nuclear movement and the greens. I am honoured to have been able to work and contribute a tiny little bit to that goal - together with many, many brilliant scientists, engineers, inventors, enrepreneurs, and crazy people. We did succeed to made it possible.
By about 2000, we had Megawatt wind power plants and the technical base for that was ready.
Mankind is holding the keys to our future in their hands. Don’t throw them away, the alternative is planetary hell.
Everything in the 25 years since was foot-dragging by conservative politicians, fossil lobbism, and often fossil corruption.
P.S. I see that often that somebody posts some at least misinformed, perhaps misleading argument - and when a good counter-argument is posted, the first argument is deleted. This lets me think in astroturfing.
Another pattern that I am seeing now that when I post something around the topic of sustaiability / fossil fuels etc., I get plenty of highly critical comments around posts that I make around other, completely different topics (say, Linux window managers). Most of these critical comments have no logical substance - what they aim at is to discredit and leave a bad atmosphere and mood.