Categorie: future
Last week, I watched the film about Oppenheimer, and that piece of history made me realize that what we are experiencing now is, in fact, a kind of (nuclear) arms race: who can grow the fastest, who can protect themselves the most, to acquire wealth, and who can extract the…
Basing our current lifestyle on 100% renewable energy is not going to work, (see two episodes earlier [1]) What then if we adjust our lifestyle now to the amount of renewable energy cq electricity available today, and distribute it fairly, with some creativity? Then we are done installing and investing….
The debate whether or not 100% renewable electricity supply is feasible, is ongoing. 100% at the current standard of living, that is. The standard of us, here in the rich countries. There are quite a few snags in that. It has to be built more or less from scratch, (we…
Of course, it makes some sense, improving our house with some insulation, a heat pump and so on (or not, I’ll come back to that soon!) , but if you could choose where to live or build, or move, where would you go, given that you want to be prepared…
I was asked that question last year by Thomas van Belzen of Cobouw,[1] and it got me thinking. It was an interview in Dutch, but let me return to it in English and in more detail at the beginning of 2023. The first reaction is of course: why build, we…
The Quest in Egypt is actually quite simple: Not look for reductions of fossil, but how to live off the sun, and its derivatives, wind and water power. And where possible make things a little more effective with a little gravity and geothermal power. That’s it, in terms of energy…
The newspaper article on Saturday on the front page of the economics section of the NRC national newspaper , opens with the headline: “believing in growth or shrinkage.” With that, I was immediately on the fence. Because it’s not about believing. It’s physics. You can calculate how much energy and…
During my time as a professor I was regularly at odds with the Academy of Architecture’. I feel affiliated with ’the art of building’, but not with architecture or construction as art. That was more or less the reason for the quarrels. Not surprising, because in my guidance I start…
Last week, two interesting reports were published analysing how regulations can better support ‘sustainable’ material use. Very esteemed colleagues, united in a Dutch ‘Gideons tribe’ to make the buildings sector move faster, have been working on this. [1] I can agree in general with the contents and analyses ( to…
There are actually only two options (‘scenario’s’): Either we go into CO2 lockdown, or we party on until the whole thing collapses…. The latest IPCC report makes that perfectly clear again. What we are doing now is a case of “soft nurses make bad wounds”, with our decades-long unbridled optimism…
