Categorie: society

On Freedom: and a Short and a Long term government

Our biggest problem is that people, or humanity, do not observe or respect boundaries , to anything, and when facing them, they also want to constantly push those boundaries. And when starting to talk about boundaries, it quickly becomes a discussion about the freedom to choose for oneself. During Corona,…

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Not De-Growth but Re-Growth !

Degrowth is currently a topic of significant interest, presenting the idea of “degrowing” as a necessity to address our problems. (this is based on a previous article on Linkedin). The implicit message is clear and seems to point in the right direction. However, it all depends on how we define…

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Forget tech-optimism…

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…

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Continue partying, or (CO2) lockdown ?

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…

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a CO2 budget for a municipality

Slowly understanding growth that with regard to CO2, it is not so much about gradual reductions, but about staying within an absolute maximum: the Carbon budget. The maximum amount of CO2 that can still be emitted to maintain a chance of a maximum of 1.5 degrees of warming. Recently I…

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Golf – the decadence in our use of space

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…

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Living of presents , all year round…

In the coming weeks, the Black-Peter discussion will undoubtedly re-surface: its a Dutch tradition celebrating Saint Nicolas assisted by “black Peters’ coming from ‘Spain’ and distributing presents for children in shoes next to the fire place, by Black Peters climbing down the chimney. Hence the black color. Recently there has…

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DELY : Disabled Earth Life Years

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…

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Double dilemma? discussions as Fellow

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…

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Jaime Lerner – Curitiba

Just recently, in May, Jaime Lerner passed away. He more or less invented sustainable urban development. A little tribute. Everything has to be sustainable or circular these days, including the cities. Now, is there a city that has already applied many of these principles, where there is something to learn?…

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