Categorie: future
With vegetables, we’ve been doing it for years: most current vegetables never existed, in an autonomous evolutionary process. We as humans have slowly transformed them so that they grow the way we appreciate them, and want them on our plates. (Or the industry has adapted them the way we want…
There are many ways you can start “accounting” for CO2 (as comments on the previous article also showed), but at the end of the day what matters are absolute CO2 emissions, from whatever activity. And cutting down a tree and using it as a column (or a table, or a…
Storage (binding) of CO2 in wood/timber is a hot issue at the moment*. But how should that be calculated really? Before I go into more detail, a few preliminary remarks: (the part on ‘calculating’ has been later added, and ‘CO2’ has been adapted) Building in wood is always a good…
Everything used to be better, in former times, the older generations think. The Youngsters don’t know the old days so think it’s all better now, that’s their standard. It’s always a bit more nuanced, of course. But let’s turn it around, question the elder with regard to the younger standard:…
For a new book, I explore the space-time relationship of many human activities, as a measure of our system impact, and to see if there are alternatives that can do with less. Space time in the sense that the conversion of solar energy is the basis of life here on…
It’s about time to face the hard truth here in the Netherlands: building below sea level isn’t handy, to say the least, to say modestly it’s destroying capital, and to say it hard: it’s endangering people. The soil is sinking, the sea level is rising, the rivers are overflowing, the…
We can develop beautiful so-called scientific methods to calculate all the effects of our impact, but in the end only two data are relevant: energy and material use, and the rest is derived from that: all emissions, to air or water, pollution, disappearance of forests, , and climate warming and…
In recent years I was a Fellow of the Technical University of Eindhoven, more precisely working with the Building Physics department, in particular with Prof. Wim Zeiler, Installation Technology. And we had interesting discussions, because we strive for the same thing, while we come from different backgrounds. Those discussions can…
I recently was triggered a few times by the term: ‘Energy Poverty’ in all kinds of reports and tweets [1-4] . Usually referred to as having little access to oil, gas and coal, in what is then called the poorer part of the world. But does that exist, energy poverty?…
What I feared was confirmed: Bill Gates’ new book is a noncommittal plea for innovation, technology and economic growth. Sold as providing the ultimate solutions to our climate crises, the book doesn’t get much further than measures we already know and many platitudes about what should be done next. As…
