Category: Travel

As its name suggests, 50 Hudson Yards is another addition to the ongoing Hudson Yards mega-development that’s remaking a sizable chunk of Manhattan. The development also includes Heatherwick Studios’ eye-catching Vessel, KPF’s vertigo-inducing 30 Hudson Yards, and more. Foster + Partners’ tower will provide almost 3 million sq ft (roughly 280,000 sq m) of flexible office space and is envisioned as three blocks stacked on top of each other.

Source: City blocks go vertical as Manhattan supertall nears completion

AFTER TWO DECADES SPENT LEADING archaeological digs among the 1,900-year-old ruins of the former Roman emperor Hadrian’s sprawling Villa Adriana, Rafael Hidalgo Prieto thought he’d seen it all. Then the Spanish professor and his team discovered an imperial breakfast room unlike anything in the world.The palazzo area once featured a royal four-bedroom complex centered by a semicircular nymphaeum with a private dining area suspended over a pool of flowing water. Vaulted ceilings with niches for sculptures overlooked a marble triclinium—that is, a sumptuous Roman dining area where aristocrats enjoyed expensive food and drink while lying on u-shaped couches. The area was accessed by retractable wooden bridges and flanked by a wall that featured small waterfalls and a recessed fountain. The room was open on one side and looked out on a courtyard of ornamental gardens.

Source: Found: Emperor Hadrian’s Palatial Breakfast Chamber – Gastro Obscura

Hong Kong remained the world’s least affordable housing market for the 11th year, underscoring the income disparity in the financial city.The Asian hub topped Vancouver, Sydney and Auckland as the most unaffordable residential market in the world last year, according to a report published by think tanks Urban Reform Institute and Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Hong Kong’s median property price dropped slightly to 20.7 times its median household income in 2020, from 20.8 times the year prior.

Source: Hong Kong homes ranked world’s least affordable, Vancouver second worst | Vancouver Sun

Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli beat the Ineos Team UK yesterday in the eighth and final race of the Prada Cup in New Zealand’s Hauraki Gulf. Just as they did 20 years ago, the Italians will now go on to challenge the Defender, Emirates Team New Zealand, for the America’s Cup.Luna Rossa’s victory on Sunday gave them a total of seven wins and one loss against the British team. Analysts said the Italians’ boat was faster in the medium to light conditions in both races yesterday.The AC75 monohulls that both teams used—which have been substantially tweaked under the America’s Cup rules—are considered the fastest, most extreme vessels since the America’s Cup started in 1851. Some analysts consider the design and technology so far beyond sailing that it should be called another sport. The US team, American Magic, saw its boat hit a record 52.2 knots (60.07 mph) during its run in the semifinals, though the team was eliminated earlier this month by Luna Rossa. The world speed record by a sailing trimaran was set at 54.10 knots (62.25 mph), so the Americans were very close.

Source: The Italians Will Sail Team New Zealand in the America’s Cup Final – Robb Report

When it comes to train travel, nobody does it as well as the legendary Belmond Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. And, in 2021, the Simplon-Orient-Express will expand to include even more destinations for railway-bound travelers.The train service, which has long been heralded for its glamour and romance, announced in February that it will add five new boarding points across Europe including Rome, Florence, Geneva, Brussels, and Amsterdam.

Source: See Europe in Luxury With This Historic Train’s Stunning New Suites and Routes | Travel + Leisure

Bill Gates and the problem with climate solutionism

• 2/16/2021
• 5:59 AM
• MIT Technology Review
• Katie McLean
• Web site view

In his  new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates takes a technology-­centered approach to understanding the climate crisis. Gates begins with the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases that people create every year. He slices this pollution into sectors by the size of their footprints—working his way from electricity, manufacturing, and agriculture to transportation and buildings. Throughout, Gates is adept at cutting through the complexity of the climate challenge, giving the reader handy heuristics to distinguish between the bigger technological problems (cement) and the smaller ones (airplanes). 

At the Paris climate negotiations in 2015, Gates and several dozen other wealthy people launched Breakthrough Energy, an interlinked venture capital fund, lobbying group, and research effort. Gates and his fellow investors argued that both the federal government and the private sector are underinvesting in energy innovation. Breakthrough aims to fill some of this gap, funding everything from next-generation nuclear technology to fake meat that tastes more like beef. The venture fund’s $1 billion first round has had some early successes, like Impossible Foods, a maker of plant-based burgers. The fund announced a second round of equal size in January. 

A parallel effort, an international pact called Mission Innovation, says it has persuaded its members (the executive branch of the European Union along with 24 countries including China, the US, India, and Brazil) to commit an additional $4.6 billion every year since 2015 to clean-energy research and development.

These various endeavors are the through line for Gates’s latest book, written from a techno-­optimist’s perspective. “Everything I’ve learned about climate and technology makes me optimistic … if we act fast enough, [we can] avoid a climate catastrophe,” he writes in the opening pages. 

As many others have pointed out, a lot of the necessary technology already exists; much can be done now. Though Gates doesn’t dispute this, his book focuses on the technological challenges that he believes must still be overcome to achieve greater decarbonization. He spends less time on the political obstacles, writing that he thinks “more like an engineer than a political scientist.” Yet politics, in all its messiness, is the key barrier to progress on climate change. And engineers ought to understand how complex systems can have feedback loops that go awry.

Yes, minister

Kim Stanley Robinson does think like a political scientist. The beginning of his latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, is set just a few years from now, in 2025, when a massive heat wave hits India, killing millions. The book’s protagonist, Mary Murphy, runs a UN agency tasked with representing the interests of future generations and trying to align the world’s governments behind a climate solution. Throughout, the book puts intergenerational equity and various forms of distributive politics at its center. 

If you’ve ever seen the scenarios the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change develops for the future, Robinson’s book will feel familiar. His story asks about the politics necessary to solve the climate crisis, and he has certainly done his homework. Though it is an exercise in imagination, there are moments when the novel feels more like a graduate seminar in the social sciences than a work of escapist fiction. The climate refugees who are central to the story illustrate the way pollution’s consequences hit the global poor the hardest. But wealthy people emit far more carbon.

Reading Gates next to Robinson underlines the inextricable link between inequality and climate change. Gates’s efforts on climate are laudable. But when he tells us that the combined wealth of the people backing his venture fund is $170 billion, we may be puzzled that they have dedicated only $2 billion to climate solutions—less than 2% of their assets. This fact alone is an argument for wealth taxes: the climate crisis demands government action. It cannot be left to the whims of billionaires.

As billionaires go, Gates is arguably one of the good ones. He chronicles how he uses his wealth to help the poor and the planet. The irony of his writing a book on climate change when he flies in a private jet and owns a 66,000-square-foot mansion is not lost on the reader—nor on Gates, who calls himself an “imperfect messenger on climate change.” Still, he is unquestionably an ally to the climate movement.

But by focusing on technological innovation, Gates underplays the material fossil-fuel interests obstructing progress. Climate-change denial is strangely not mentioned in the book. Throwing up his hands at political polarization, Gates never makes the connection to his fellow billionaires Charles and David Koch, who made their fortune in petrochemicals and have played a key role in manufacturing denial.

For example, Gates marvels that for the vast majority of Americans, electric heaters are actually cheaper than continuing to use fossil gas. He presents people’s failure to adopt these cost-saving, climate-friendly options as a puzzle. It isn’t. As journalists Rebecca Leber and Sammy Roth have reported in Mother Jones and the Los Angeles Times, the gas industry is funding front groups and marketing campaigns to oppose electrification and keep people hooked on fossil fuels. 

These forces of opposition are more clearly seen in Robinson’s novel than in Gates’s nonfiction. Gates would have done well to draw on the work that Naomi Oreskes, Eric Conway, and Geoffrey Supran—among others—have done to document the persistent efforts of fossil-fuel companies to sow public doubt on climate science. (I also tackled this subject in my own book, Short Circuiting Policy, which explains how fossil-fuel companies and electric utilities have resisted clean-energy laws in a number of American states.)

One thing Gates and Robinson do have in common, though, is the view that geoengineering—massive interventions to treat the symptoms rather than the causes of climate change—may be inevitable. In The Ministry for the Future, solar geoengineering, or spraying fine particles into the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun’s heat back into space, is used after the deadly heat wave with which the novel opens. And later, some scientists take to the poles and devise elaborate methods for removing melted water from underneath glaciers to prevent it from flowing into the sea. Despite some setbacks, they hold back sea-level rise by several feet. We might imagine Gates showing up in the novel as an early financial backer of these efforts. As he notes in his own book, he has been funding solar geoengineering research for years.

The Thick of It

The title for Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky, is a reference to this nascent technology, since implementing it on a large scale could turn the sky from blue to white. 

Kolbert notes that the first report on climate change landed on President Lyndon Johnson’s desk way back in 1965. This report did not argue that we should cut carbon emissions by moving away from fossil fuels. It advocated changing the climate through solar geoengineering instead, though that term had not yet been invented. It is disturbing that some would jump immediately to such risky solutions rather than addressing the root causes of climate change.

In reading Under a White Sky, we are reminded of the ways that interventions like this could go wrong. For example, the scientist and writer Rachel Carson advocated importing nonnative species as an alternative to using pesticides. The year after her 1962 book Silent Spring was published,
the US Fish and Wildlife Service brought Asian carp to America for the first time, to control aquatic weeds. The approach solved one problem but created another: the spread of this invasive species threatened local ones and caused environmental damage. 

As Kolbert puts it, her book is about “people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Her reporting covers examples including the ill-fated efforts to stop the spread of Asian carp, the pumping stations in New Orleans that accelerate that city’s sinking, and attempts to selectively breed coral so that it can withstand hotter temperatures and ocean acidification. Kolbert has a keen awareness of unintended consequences, and she’s funny. If you like your apocalit with a side of humor, she will have you laughing while Rome burns.

By contrast, though Gates is aware of the potential pitfalls of technological solutions, he still praises plastics and fertilizers as life-giving inventions. Tell that to the sea turtles swallowing plastic garbage, or the fertilizer-driven algal blooms destroying the ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico. 

With dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, geoengineering might indeed prove necessary, but we shouldn’t be naïve about the risks. Gates’s book has many good ideas and is worth reading. But for a fuller picture of the crises we face, make sure to read Robinson and Kolbert too.

With the computing power that drives the popular cryptocurrency bitcoin now consuming nearly as much energy as Argentina, analysts are warning the renegade technology’s carbon footprint will only get worse as it becomes more popular.Bitcoin “miners” say those impacts will lessen as utilities shift to renewable energy sources, and their continuing, global quest for the cheapest power for their incredibly electricity-intensive operations gives them their own motivation to shift off fossil fuels. But bitcoin still represents a massive and rapidly-growing source of demand, at a time when grids will be expected to simultaneously shut down fossil fuel generation, build out new renewable sources of power, and meet a wider range of energy needs as space heat and vehicles rapidly electrify.

Source: Bitcoin Draws as Much Electricity as Argentina as Consumption Quadruples in Four Years – The Energy Mix

Really!!??

A year after flight bookings started to slump in the face of the growing coronavirus crisis, UK airlines still have no certainty about when they might fly at scale again.The government has made all but essential trips abroad illegal, and this week imposed the most draconian rules ever known for arrivals to the UK with hotel quarantine.During the coronavirus pandemic, carriers including British Airways, easyJet and Virgin Atlantic have collectively lost billions of pounds.But analysis by The Independent shows they intend to recoup some of their losses by setting very high fares for in-demand flights – even a year ahead. Prime departures on the key ski link from London Gatwick to Geneva for February half-term 2022 are selling at more than £1,000 return.

Source: Air fares soar as UK airlines seek to staunch losses | The Independent

Community groups and angry citizens from Pickering, Ontario are going up against what one news report calls “a billionaire and a business-friendly government” to try to stop the Lower Duffins Creek Wetland, a provincially significant local green space, wildlife habitat, and buffer against climate impacts, from being bulldozed for a massive warehouse and entertainment complex.They’re organizing blockades, reaching out through student networks, and hosting at least one “shoe strike” at Pickering city hall to symbolize the mass protest they’d be bringing together if not for pandemic restrictions, according to multiple local news reports. And they’re backed by a request for judicial review in Ontario Divisional Court, launched by Ecojustice on behalf of Toronto-based Environmental Defence and Ontario Nature.

Source: Pickering-Area Citizens Launch Blockade, ‘Shoe Strike’ to Protect Sensitive Local Wetland – The Energy Mix