Some very thoughtful person got me this for Christmas and I can't wait to dive in:
There is near consensus about what humans are doing to the planet we all share and we need to find a new way of shaping cities - where the majority of us now live - to minimise our impact on both climate (via emissions) and the immediate environment. By 2050 it is forecast that 7 in 10 humans will live in an urban area, but our current cities are not fit for purpose when the climate emergency is taken into account.
It seems that billionaires like Elon Musk have lost interest in earth, as they strive to bring the possibility of living on Mars closer. But another famous spaceman, William Shatner, AKA Captain James T. Kirk of Star Trek fame, spoke movingly about the grief he felt when taken into space:
I realized that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I did my share in popularizing the idea that space was the final frontier...
But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.
The good news is that we already have much of the knowhow to make our cities better places to live - for both us and the planet - and other countries have already taken steps to make their building regulations much more environmentally friendly.
This is now, slowly, starting to catch on here in the UK:
Passivhaus, for example, provides a framework for delivering high quality energy efficiency and thermal performance (as demonstrated above) via high levels of insulation, extremely high performance windows, mechanical ventilation and airtight building fabric. Goldsmith Street, a recent development in Norwich, is the UK's largest social housing estate built to their exacting standards. This is already the norm in other parts of Europe.
Surely, all new UK homes should conform to this standard?
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