A cool road: pale road surface, mix of edible and decorative trees and plants, shade over 50% of the road

What are cool roads and why do we need them?

On average our suburb is 6 degrees warmer than it should be. This is called ‘heat island effect’. Of course, this problem isn’t unique to Chippendale – many cities and suburbs all over the world are too hot. These high temperatures are created by the absorption of heat from dark-coloured roads, roofs and other human-made surfaces.

This is shown in the thermal imaging photos of Chippendale taken by the City of Sydney in 2009. The scale moves from blue to red, where the darkest blue is less than 23 degrees and the deepest red is over 33 degrees. It’s the road surfaces that stand out in this image. They consistently hit the top of the thermal scale over 33 degrees.

In Chippendale, 24% of our suburb is made up of road surfaces. Reducing road temperatures is an important strategy for cooling our suburb and our city. With cooler roads, residents and businesses are a step closer to making a difference through other initiatives such as green roofs, installation of heat-reflective roofs & building surfaces, tree planting and other energy efficiency measures. With lower heat levels, buildings are cooler and air conditioning usage lower. Saving the planet saves money at the same time.

So how do we cool our roads? The good news is it’s quite straightforward:

1. Upgrade the surfaces of our roads so that they reflect rather than absorb heat
2. Increase tree cover through biodiverse tree planting schemes

By cooling our roads, we can achieve big improvements to everyone’s quality of life. These simple initiatives can:

• Save energy: costs are likely to drop by 5-10%
• Save lives: premature death from heat can raise mortality rates by between 25% and 45% on hot days
• Bring back moisture: this improves air quality and nourishes plant life
• Help nature flourish: by bringing temperatures down we encourage the biodiversity that our ecosystems need to function and flourish

Sustainable Chippendale has been advocating action to cool our roads since 2010. More information on the steps that can be taken to cool our suburbs can be found in the Plan I made to make Chippendale sustainable, called, The Sustainable Communities Plan; see  Section 5 titled Getting Around & Section 4 Urban Heat Island Effect Mitigation from The Sustainable Communities Plan created in 2010.

www.facebook.com…

Wondering how you can cool your own street? 

Here’s how:

1    Download the app called, Snap, Send, Solve on itunes or on google play
2    Take photos of your street and send it to your local council with the message: Please make this road cool
3    Then post your photo and message on my blog here or my facebook page:  https://www.facebook.com/sustainablehouse

We can cool our cities by cooling our roads; join me and we can cool our cities by 2 degrees by 2020 – now, that’s a plan, isn’t it?

Michael

With the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australia and others I’ll be presenting a seminar on how to build and operate sustainable public infrastructure.  The first one is in Sydney on Wednesday and Thursday 26 and 27 March. Country seminars will follow later in the year.

The seminar is called, Sustainable Public Infrastructure and you may register there.

IPWEA is going on the front foot to work with councils, elected folk and communities and engineers to get infrastructure into the sustainable mode.  CEO John Roydhouse, has already spoken to The Fifth Estate about the Institute’s initiatives in this field.

The seminar will involve a rich mix of councillors, engineers and research bodies where the focus will be on projects, leading examples from engineers and local government.  More on who will be presenting and the topics in a later post.

M

First, the good news:

“Good News- Solar Storage Plant Gemasolar Sets 36-Day Record 24/7 Output, by Emma Fitzpatrick, Reneweconomy, Oct. 8, 2013: The Gemasolar, a Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) facility, is the world’s first large scale power plant that uses molten salt to capture heat during the day so it can produce energy at night. The plant can operate up to 15 hours without any solar feed. For 36 days straight the plant continuously provided power to 27,000 homes near Seville, Spain while avoiding emissions of 30,000 tones of CO2.”

This quote is from the US magazine, Counterpunch, and its article on 26 December 2013, headlined:

Looming Danger of Abrupt Climate Change

I like the style and content of this magazine, particularly its practice of giving citations to support assertions, in similar style to George Monbiot’s columns in The Guardian.

The article reviews a report from The National Research Council of the National Academies (NRCNA),  “Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change, Anticipating Surprises.”

As the article reports, “The goal of the report is to prepare society to anticipate the ‘otherwise unanticipated’ before it occurs, including abrupt changes to the ocean, atmosphere, ecosystems and high latitude regions. The NRCNA timescale for “abrupt climate change” is defined as years-to-decades.”.

The NRCNA report mentions three primary areas of risks of abrupt climate change this century, as follows:

• Arctic Sea Ice- Abrupt Climate Change Already Underway
• Marine and Terrestrial Life  - of this one the article says:

“The National Research Council of the National Academies’ report also foresees eventual mass extinction of several species, sans further climate change, due to habitat destruction, fragmentation, and over-exploitation. This, they claim, would be equivalent in magnitude to the wipe out of the dinosaurs, but it would probably be centuries away.”

 And the third area of risk is:

• Destabilization of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Of this third risk, the report is quoted as saying:

“The NRCNA report further states: “… a large part of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet (WAIS), representing 3-4 m [10-13 feet] of potential sea-level rise, is capable of flowing rapidly into the deep ocean basins. Because the full suite of physical processes occurring where ice meets ocean is not included in comprehensive ice-sheet models, it remains possible that future rates of sea-level rise from the WAIS are underestimated, perhaps substantially.”

There follows a readable and interesting description of this icy part of Earth with some very useful and not heartening recent research there.

This is the time for banquets, isn’t it?

Well worth a read – for me there were lots of things I found interesting about ice on Earth.

Which brings me to one of the conclusions I’ve reached during this marvellous quiet time of the year when I look at where I’ve been this year and where I’d like to go next year.  This is how I’m seeing others and how I’m  setting my priorities:

I’ve decided the real climate deniers are greenies.

What?

Yes.

For this reason; they faff on about green buildings, codes, projects, electric cars and bikes which, they say, will cut future pollution.

But they say almost nothing, and most say nothing ever, about existing pollution and their projects or solutions for it.

It seems when choosing where to direct their creativity and projects that most alarmists, greenies, policy-makers and pundits ignore, and seem to deny, the existing pollution.

Existing pollution has broken the climate with the one degree of additional temperature its given our Earth.  It’s still got another one degree of heating up to do.  Until we get it out of Earth’s atmosphere we’re bound to get that second degree.

In 1998 the UN’s 2000 scientists said unless we get rid of existing pollution by 2015 we’re going to get more than two degrees.

That’s next year.

This recent month I’ve taken a ‘helicopter view’ of media articles, twitter, facebook and internet magazines.

Over this month all but one of the articles speak of reducing future pollution.  There are interesting articles which count trends of decline in car numbers, trends of increase in public transport, growing number of solar panels, reducing costs of renewable energy sources . . .  Not one mention of existing pollution, of existing climate decline.

I just don’t get this bias.  Is it head in the sand stuff?  Or just loose thinking, of the type we find in people who march in step with the majority?

Dairy calves on Country Valley Dairy farm

There’s a new wave carrying hope with it at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.

Mayor Sally Betts of Waverley Council has initiated a project to turn food waste into compost in 24 hours and take it to a farm to grow soil.  As the soil grows it takes carbon pollution out of Earth’s air.

The project cuts cafe and council waste costs.

Using the compost cuts the farmer’s fertilizing costs and produces healthier cows and dairy products.

The story is  in this three minutes how-it’s-done video, The Bondi Gobbler.

Enjoy,

M

• The Narara Ecovillage Co-op is set up to build a world class ecovillage community to integrate social, ecological and economic sustainability.
• The site is the former Gosford Horticultural Institute – the photos show it has a mix of hills, fields, woods, houses and is a rural haven.
• Their website is the best reference to learn more about the aims and aspirations.
• They’re using a co-operative structure instead of a company because it more fully reflects their values as shown on their website.
• Members are the investors, the shareholders, the designers, the developers, the future residents. And it is the members who decide how to use the profits resulting from the project.
• people join the co-op by making a commitment to buy a lot (at some point), buying $20,000 in shares, and agreeing to do some volunteer hours for the co-op.
• When titles are available after the DA is approved, their shares will count towards their lot price.
• Choice of lots is mostly determined by the priority in time of purchase.
• The development will be in three phases, with Stage One house building to start around mid 2014.
• People pay an additional $30,000 to reserve a lot in Stage One, now about three quarters full.
• Members who want to be in Stages 2 or 3 need not pay any additional now, but will still be fully part of shaping the community.
• Average lot prices are expected to be around $250,000.
• Currently there are about 40 ‘memberships’ translating to about 80 members (singles, couples and families). The eventual population is expected to be between 3-400.
• For those that are wondering if this might be something that they want to pursue, there are two formal documents explaining the project and how to join the co-op: a Disclosure Statement (like a prospectus) and the Co-op Rules.

The project is being funded by those buying shares and is therefore an example of a village being developed by self-funding means.  It’s interesting that folks are prepared to buy into this project without knowing where their lot will be; that suggests to me that those buying are primarily buying ‘the dream’ and Lyndall agreed with me.

Let’s see if the project solves the urban heat island problem (which typically drive up subdivision temperatures by over 6 to 8 degrees), the typical up front costs for unsustainable road, water, sewage and energy infrastructure.

In my book, Sustainable House, there’s an example where I reduced developer charges from $27,500 to $7000 a lot in a Port Macquarie project in NSW by using sustainable road design and water, sewage and energy infrastructure.  Although that’s a bush fire problem area the roads are only 5 m wide thereby increasing lot yield and amenity.

Folks will be able to live there for energy and water bills less than $300 a year no matter how many people live in the house, just as I do in my house, Sydney’s Sustainable House.

And it will be interesting to see if the project matches the VicUrban (now, Places Victoria) Meridian project where low cost road design creates self-irrigating drains for over 12,000 fruit trees planted in the drains; details are in my book, Sustainable Food.

With large developers such as Investa (see, for example:  http://www.thefifthestate.com.au/archives/42612/) now publishing data on their journey to reduce energy and water use in their offices and shopping centres it would also be handy if all new projects seeking to be sustainable published data on costs, performance, living expenses, food sources and such.

Good luck to the Narara venturers,

M

Referring to the reports today the online magazine, Reneweconomy, reports that:

“CLP Holdings, the Hong Kong based company that is one of the largest power companies in Asia, said it wouldn’t invest any more money in coal-fired generation in India following the disastrous results of its latest 1,200MW investment, which is losing money from lack of access to coal and poor quality supplies. It will focus entirely, it says, on renewables such as wind and solar from now on in India.”

One report from Deutsche Bank says that China’s use of thermal coal is likely to peak within a few years, and by 2017 it could become a net exporter of thermal coal rather than a large importer.  This, says Deutsche Bank, is likely to have a significant impact on coal prices – downwards.

The other recent report on Monday this week is from credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, which the Reneweconomy articles says:

 ”. . .  predicts credit downgrades and negative outlooks in the oil sector because of the potential carbon constraints driven by global climate change policies.

S&P says future carbon constraints need to be factored into credit assessments for the oil sector – along with uncertain future oil prices and rising operational costs – and financial models that rely on past financial performance are no longer adequate.”

The Reneweconomy article also says:

“And in the past few weeks, investment banks such as UBS, along with Macquarie Group andDeutsche Bank have all noted how the solar industry is reframing energy markets in Europe, and beyond, and turning once profitable coal and gas fired generators into marginal businesses, and forcing many to close or to embrace a more rapid change to renewables and distributed generation.“.

The times they are a’changin’. . .

M

“Consider this: The world’s top nine wheat-importers are in the Middle East: “Seven had political protests resulting in civilian deaths in 2011,” said Sternberg. “Households in the countries that experience political unrest spend, on average, more than 35 percent of their income on food supplies,” compared with less than 10 percent in developed countries.

Everything is linked: Chinese drought and Russian bushfires produced wheat shortages leading to higher bread prices fueling protests in Tahrir Square. Sternberg calls it the globalization of “hazard.”.

This is where we are:

• No one has saved a planet before;
• Some of us – greenies, in particular, narcissists and attention-seekers – profess to have solutions which are no more than untried experiments;
• We’ve changed the climate on our planet  so we can’t grow enough food for our ever-increasing human animal numbers;
• When we can’t get enough food to live we attack the systems of government and order which we blame for the lack of food;
• Our systems of government are unable to stop the damage we’re doing to our climate, to increase the amount of food we grow, nor solve ever-increasing droughts and floods;
• Mainstream media and politicians lack the courage, wit and passion to tell these truths to us all.

Ahhhh . . . .

I write this as the unseasonable rain sings on my iron roof filling my rain tank, my bees have retired for the night to their hive, and my chooks to their straw floored hutch.  The figs flower for the first time on my young fig tree, and the tree tomatoes, too, for the first time on the Tamarillo in our road gardens.

And that’s enough; that’s all we need.

Such a simple story to tell, and be part of here where we grow food in our road gardens.

Thank you Mr Friedman, thank you rain, bees, trees, tank and chookies (Pesky and Cleo).

Til next time, may the food be at your place, in your garden and out on your road’s ‘nature’ strip.

M

The video shows the 75 minute collapse in 4.41 minutes.

Ice in chunks as high as 90 or more storied buildings and the size of Manhatten Island (87 square kilometres) rises three to four hundred metres high as the ice smashes and collapses.

It took the glacier 100 years to break up and become 8 miles (~ 20 k) smaller – from 1902 to 2001.

Then, from 2000 to 2010 it broke up 9 miles (>  22 k).

That’s a bigger rate of decay in ten years than the previous 100 years.

There’s a film about it, Chasing Ice.

Watching it is one way to get some stillness into yourself – and a mix of awe and other feelings,

M

If you’re interested in new ideas, design, medicine, communications, city life – how we work and connect with each other and in our cities, workplaces and homes . . . here’s someone who says shame is an issue we’ve all  got to deal with.  Lots of handy observations like, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation . . . “.

Shame, Brene says,  is connected to guilt about, and the conditions of, over-eating, depression, anger, addiction . . .

When we have the courage to say, “I’m good enough’,  we gain a sense of worthiness and then we have a chance to gain other things  that seem to be what we’ve come here for  . . .  connections, vulnerability . . .

Shame ‘doused with empathy’ can’t survive, observes Brene, a research storyteller.

For a talk about vulnerability – The Power of Vulnerability – by Brene go here; it’s the one referred to in the talk above.

Called, Snap Send Solve,  it says it’s “the free app that lets you report issues and provide feedback to your local council in under 30 seconds Australia wide.”

It works like this: take a photo with your phone, then choose a category for the photo, then send it off as an email from  your phone.  It’s a pity it can’t yet be sent as a text message but that may come.

There are about ten categories for you to put your photo into – trees, garbage, and so on.  They need a few more, I suggest, such as ‘streetlights’, ‘stormwater’ but there is a ‘general’ category where you may put an issue which is not named.

Perhaps because it provides real time, that moment, evidence of what’s being put to the council, and because the photo goes straight to the Council where you took the photo – the App sorts that for you automatically – there are reports from folks to me that it’s having more impact than phone calls and emails or letters.

We’ll see.  Let me know your experience on this blog and share the actions you take, please.

Thanks,

M