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| 5/23 |
| 2009/11/23-12/2 [Transportation/Car/RoadHogs, Reference/RealEstate] UID:53540 Activity:moderate |
11/23 "Warming's impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/sci_climate_09_post_kyoto
\_ what do you propose we average Joes do about climate warning?
Oh really? Yeah, exactly.
\_ Make life choices which reduce your carbon impact. Communicate
with your representatives that you consider this an important
and urgent issue. What else would average Joes do about
anything? -tom
\_ the average Joe will not give up his/her SUV and living
in suburbs and ex-urbs (which are the reasons that increase
our needs for energy).
\_ Some average Joe/Jane won't give up loving in suburbs
while willing to give up his/her SUV; Some average
Joe/Jane won't give his/her SUVs while willing to
telecommunte twice a week; some average Joe/Jane won't
telecommute while willing to become vegetarian; etc.
And, like you said, some average Joe/Jane won't give up
anything. Ideally, the problem can be very easily solved
by everyone giving up N things. But very few people in
the free world would be willing to do that. So we'll have
to rely on most people giving up 1 or 2 things out of their
own list of N things. (For me, I didn't give up living
in suburbs. But I wear a jacket at home in winter instead
of turning on the heat, use a fan in summer instead of AC,
line-dry my laundary in the backyard instead of using the
gas dryer, skip the plastic or paper bags when grocery-
shopping, gave up my SUV and got a Prius, and literally
dig through the household trash to find recyclable and
compostable items that my wife and in-laws fail to
separate out.) --- OP
\_ The average Joe will do whatever is effectively marketed
to him. SUVs and suburbs have been effectively marketed
to average Joes. We are starting to see better marketing
of environmental and quality-of-life issues, but we need
more. Also, we need to stop subsidizing carbon production,
which is where legislative action is needed; if the
suburb dwellers were paying the true cost of their
lifestyle, it would be much less attractive. -tom
\_ I get what you are saying, but this could be said
about any group. "Bike riders will do whatever is
effectively marketed to them". Otherwise the
marketing wouldn't have been effective. -- jwm
\_ That's a bit tautalogical, sure. But my
point is that the idea that everyone should
live in a big house in a faceless suburb
with two SUVs (or now, an SUV and a Prius)
is the result of 60 years of corporate
marketing, and corporations are really the
only beneficiaries. Just as corporate marketing
changed what the average Joe wanted, marketing
of social responsibility can change what the
average Joe wants. -tom
\_ I agree. The way we as a society have used
marketing has been damaging. --jwm
\_ I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that "corporations
are really the only beneficiaries." I really
like having land around my house. I use it to
grow food, for recreation, and for privacy. I
went to my coworkers ultra-chic condo which
cost over $1M and had koi and Italian fountains
everywhere, but I wouldn't care for living in
close quarters like he does. He even told me
he is looking for a single family home for
various reasons all related to the density of
the housing. You may think there's no benefit
to a SFR, but millions of Americans disagree
and that is how most Americans lived 200
years ago. I think that mixed-use/loft/high
density housing is something pushed on us by
corporations and SFR more closely reflects
the rural areas most Americans lived in prior
to the Industrial Revolution.
\_ Who said anything about condos? I live in
a house in a city (Oakland). -tom
\_ Plus the Richmond and Sunset Districts in
SF are also primarily houses. -- !PP
\_ So are Hancock Park and Beverly Hills
in LA, but most people can't afford
to live there. If they want a nice house
with land they have to leave the city.
\_ The complaint was against a "big house in a
faceless suburb." How can you possibly
argue that a big house in Oakland is
somehow superior to a big house in a
suburb like Lafayette? Same damn thing.
\_ 1) The house in Oakland is smaller.
2) The house in Oakland requires less
driving.
Pretty simple, really. -tom
\_ Neither of these are necessarily true.
\_ They are both true as averages.
-tom
\_ They don't _have_ to be.
These are external to the
idea of suburbs. You can
build smaller houses in
the suburbs. You can take
BART to SF from Lafayette
as surely as you can from
Oakland. One thing you _cannot_
do is build affordable SFR in a
city, which takes us back
to condos.
\_ You're right, if reality were
completely different than it
is, houses would be smaller
in Lafayette and people
in suburbs would drive less
than people in cities. But
on this planet, houses are
larger in suburbs and people
drive more. -tom
\_ I think you need to
focus on the problems
you are trying to
address and "suburbs"
and "housing density"
are not them. You can
live in the city and
drive a lot (reverse
commute, which some
people do) and you
can build a huge
energy sucking house
in the city, too, if
you are rich.
\_ I said "make life
choices that reduce
your carbon impact";
someone else asserted
that "average Joes"
would not give up
their SUVs in the
suburbs. I'm pointing
out that that assertion
is unfounded. -tom
\_ I think that most people want both the
advantages of density (short commutes, walkable
neighborhoods, more community) as well as lots
of space for themselves personally. Most people
just want more of everything, but the planet
cannot support this kind of lifestyle for
6 billion people. This is just a simple fact
of physics, not something that has anything
to do with corporations. The earth is probably
already past its carrying capacity, according
to many scientists.
\_ The idea that people should live in
identical large houses with large yards
and large fences, a long drive away
from the places they want to go, was
basically invented in the 50s by and
for corporations. Before that virtually
all development was mixed-use, and
our population was denser despite being
much smaller. From 1950 to 1990, Bay
Area population more than doubled,
while density actually decreased. Most
of that change was due to the construction
of freeways and related destruction of urban
neighborhoods, with housing moving from
urban, mixed-use to suburban and isolated.
Now things are starting to swing back the
other way, which is a good thing. Very
little of this has much to do with what
the average Joe wants, except insofar as
he's susceptible to marketing. -tom
\_ This is a lie. Like I said, before the
Industrial Revolution more people
than not lived in large houses with
large yards a long drive away from
\_ There was driving
before the Ind.
Rev.??
\_ certainly not
autos but I would
guess PP means horse
and buggy drives
town. The population was not denser
at all. This era you wax nostalgic for
was an artifact of the Industrial
Revolution where workers moved to slums
in large cities in order to work in
factories. It's laughable that you think
that corporations in the 1950s invented
the suburban lifestyle. What corporations
invented was *DENSE CITIES*. From
1950 to 1990 what we saw was _AN
IMPROVED STANDARD OF LIVING_ and now
that our standard of living is
eroding we are seeing more people
living like cockroaches. Not only
that, _ALL_ of this has to do with
choices people make. You give marketers
_WAY_ too much credit. I live in a
house built at the turn of the century
and it's not hard to see why people
wanted to move to their own brand
new box in a new suburb. (Example:
one bathroom). That's not an
artifact of marketing, buddy.
\_ Overpopulation and resource depletion
leads to a declining standard
standard of living. Why is that
surprising to you? People have lived
in large crowded cities since at least
the Roman Empire, you are nuts to
think that this is a modern invention.
Sure, subsidence farmers lived spread
Sure, subsistence farmers lived spread
out, but cities were denser before
the automobile. Have you been to any
of Europe? I prefer my solidly built
turn of the century house to the ticky
tacky crap that passes for "luxury"
these days. And btw, people used to
live in much smaller houses, so you
are wrong about the "large houses"
part, too. -!tom
http://www.moyak.com/papers/house-sizes.html
\_ 1. I prefer my old house, too,
but that's because I like
the character. You can realize,
though, why post-WW II families
thought that moving to a new,
modern house with a yard and
2 bathrooms was appealing.
2. By "large houses" I mean a
large footprint (less dense).
Houses have gotten larger over
time, but the lots they are
built on has not.
\_ So "large house with large
yards" really means "small
house with large yard" in
your language? Could you
please clarify which defn
of "large" you are using next
time, so I don't get confused?
Thanks in advance.
3. Large crowded cities were not
a very common way of life.
This is a modern innovation.
From Scientific American,
September 2005:
"From the beginning of the
Christian era to about
1850, the urban population
of the world never exceeded
7 percent. The Industrial
Revolution quickly changed
that--today 75 percent of
people in the U.S. and
other developed countries
live in cities, according
to the United Nations."
You tell me which is more
recent.
\_ Prior to the industrial
revolution, people outside
of cities were organized
in family units; multiple
generations would live
densely within the same
house or on the same land.
The land provided most of
the daily needs of the
group, requiring little
travel relative to current
practice. The concept of
"commuting" is a modern
invention (and a carbon-
expensive one). -tom |
| 5/23 |
|
| news.yahoo.com/s/ap/sci_climate_09_post_kyoto Australia 7 News By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer - Mon Nov 23, 12:00 am ET WASHINGTON - Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated -- beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then. As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before. And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen: The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half. Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn't forecast results quite this bad so fast. "The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. And here's why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 65 percent. Officials from across the world will convene in Copenhagen next month to seek a follow-up pact, one that President Barack Obama says "has immediate operational effect ... an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution." The last effort didn't quite get the anticipated results. From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period. When the US Senate balked at the accord and President George W Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters -- the US, China and India -- were not part of the pact's emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the Kyoto Protocol and that is a major issue in Copenhagen. And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said. "Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the US Geological Survey. That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto. "By far the most serious differences that we've had is an acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said in an interview this month with The Associated Press. In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists and policy wonks. Now biologists, lawyers, economists, engineers, insurance analysts, risk managers, disaster professionals, commodity traders, nutritionists, ethicists and even psychologists are working on global warming. "We've come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone's face," said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist. The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. Back in 1997 "nobody in their wildest expectations," would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 27 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves -- adding up to the size of Delaware -- came off the Antarctic peninsula. While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn't raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 15 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall. In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, scientists didn't anticipate ice sheet loss in Antarctica, Weaver said. And the rate of those losses is accelerating, so that Greenland's ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as they were just seven years ago, increasing sea level rise. Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich. Also, permafrost -- the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane -- is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said. Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That causes acidification, an issue that didn't even merit a name until the past few years. More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say. In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals" and how they are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist Terry Root. Now scientists are talking about which species can be saved from extinction and which are goners. The polar bear became the first species put on the federal list of threatened species and the small rabbit-like American pika may be joining it. More than 37 million acres of Canadian and US pine forests have been damaged by beetles that don't die in warmer winters. And in the US West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than doubled. The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the US West, were nearly full in 1999, but by 2007 half the water was gone after the region endured the worst multiyear drought in 100 years of record-keeping. Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global warming is partly to blame. The number of major US weather-related blackouts from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993-1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. "The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997 and it's all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. |
| www.moyak.com/papers/house-sizes.html Housing: Then, Now, and Future by Moya K Mason Many things have changed in the homes we live in over the last three hundred years, including size, availability of construction materials, shape, advances in architecture, location, governmental incentives, technology, family size, a move away from restrained architectural ideologies, and a general rise in living standards. These have, in turn, changed and shaped family and social relationships by providing different opportunities and more personal privacy and space. The first North American homes were very small, one room, one-storey structures that were based on European building techniques brought by settlers and eventually adapted to the building materials, climatic conditions, and topography of the New World. The majority of these structures had less than 450 square feet of space, but were eventually remodelled and expanded over time. Through the middle years of the 18th century, older houses everywhere were added to and vigorously remodelled, with room heights rising a foot or more, and parlours added in the homes of ordinary well-off farmers and other gentry. The average urban row house was narrow, usually only 15-20 feet across, extending back for 30-40 feet. With the mounting pressure for effective land utilization, row houses became narrower and deeper over time; Some large homes existed, as well, in the 1800s, some ranging between 2200 and 2800 square feet, which is about the size of a good-sized suburban home today. During the 19th century, the different functions of the house were compartmentalized into separate areas. As with most other rooms, the bedroom was largely an invention of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Until then all but the most privileged colonists lived in one or two rooms and beds stood throughout their homes. Twentieth Century Lot sizes began to grow after the turn of the century. Early 20th century bungalows were one-storey or storey and a half dwellings of between 600 and 800 square feet. In most new houses of the early twentieth century, square footage was drastically reduced to compensate for the increased expenses of plumbing, heating, and other technological improvements... Housing studies also related the reduced square footage to the decline in domestic production of goods. There was no longer a need for places to store away quilts, home-canned vegetables, and dowry linens for future use. Bungalows in the 1940s had lots measuring 60 by 100 feet. Electricity and central heating were the domestic amenities that altered floor plans and furniture placement (Volz).. These improvements had important effects on domestic social relations, and in particular, access to personal space and privacy. Older heating and lighting technologies restricted the use of space in the home, drawing household members into each other's company in the process. Physical size of homes continued to grow, while household size was shrinking. Rise of suburbia: abundance of land, cars, and government incentives made home-ownership very popular. Houses were getting bigger: the small house was on the decline throughout most of the century, while the number of people living in a household decreased by 50% in the years 1881-1991 (Ward). We've gone from having no bedrooms to: In the recent past the middle-class bedroom has become an ever more private place. With its own attached bathroom, telephone, and TV set, the 'main suite' has assumed something of the character of a self-contained apartment. Walled up in their flat within a home, middle-class parents have built an unprecedented barrier between themselves and their offspring. It should come as little surprise, then, that their kids have responded in kind. Since the 60s the number of larger homes has grown while the average number of household residents has shrunk - quite dramatically in fact. One result has been that young children now commonly have a bedroom each, while most adolescents regard this condition as an entitlement, not a privilege. The rooms themselves offer a separate place for schoolwork, and often include radios, televisions, and phones among the many electronic gadgets once available only centrally within the house. The novelty of our age is that our use of the space in our homes changes with a rapidity that can be confusing. These transformations are the result of demographic, economic, lifestyle, environmental, and technological pressures. Home offices, media rooms are new spaces, while old spaces like living rooms are now being used as computer rooms. Video entertainment, games, computers, and the Internet serve to isolate and also demand more personal space, separating us from the other people we live with. Homes are divided into a multitude of private zones for individual use, and we partake in fewer shared activities. The average new house has expanded in size from about 1500 square feet in the mid-70s to over 2000 (Friedman and Krawitz).. People want more space -- family homes have grown by 1/3 in size over the last twenty years. Sizes of lots are decreasing, as sizes of homes are increasing. The median size for a new single family home in 2003 was about 2300 square feet (National Association of Home Builders).. Family size has decreased almost 25% over 30 years, while the size of new houses has increased about 50% (Heavens).. It comes as no surprise that houses have grown in size and cost over the years. At the beginning of the last century, the average home was 700 to 1,200 square feet. In 1950 the average home was 1,000 square feet growing to an average size of 2,000 square feet in 2000. Costs in 1900 were about $5,000, $11,000 in 1950 and $200,000 last year. report is that although homes have grown in size, lot sizes have begun to significantly decrease in size. In its profile of a typical new home in 2010, the report suggests the average lot size will shrink by another 1,000 square feet while the house size will increase to 2,200 or more square feet. The new home profile also anticipates more mixed-use communities, neo-traditional designs, neighborhoods with smaller lots and narrower streets. New communities will offer more diverse architectural designs. They will encompass live/work houses, commercial centers and close proximity to amenities and services. Larger homes on smaller lots will be one of many design challenges affecting new home construction in the years and decades to come. When height restrictions are not too strict, the solution is to go up and down. Homeowners could carve out more livable space, which may have been previously delegated for storage, in their basements and attics. The median size of the respondents' current homes was 1,770 square feet. In 2000, the median size for new single family homes was about 2,070 square feet of floor space. In 1976, the median lot size of new homes was 10,125 square feet. Last year, that median size had slipped to 8,750 square feet. Most people responding to the survey indicated they were for acre to acre lots. While size is on the decline, the desire for bigger homes is rising. Homebuyers want one-story homes, but builders have been responding to the demand for more living space by building more two-story homes. More stories allow expansion of interior space without increasing a home's footprint - the amount of land it uses. This has become more important as land becomes less available and more costly in many metro areas. To understand what will happen in the next 300 years to housing is a difficult task because we just don't know how technology, culture, and social relationships will evolve, thus changing how we use our homes, and how our homes change us. One thing is certain: land will be at a premium and expensive. The other certainty is that the population will continue to skyrocket and there just won't be the space for everyone to have large lot sizes for their homes. |