Analysis of "A Climate Love Story"
This is a reaction to a piece on UCSD.edu called A Climate Love Story. The cringe-worthy opening paragraph is:
So you had a lot of dual income, no kid (DINK) households and on top of that the war sucking up all available resources. There were few or no luxury goods to spend all that money on.
Cigarettes, sugar and other luxury items were rationed. Women were drawing silk stocking seams down the backs of their bare legs because you couldn't get silk stockings.
People were actively encouraged to grow Victory Gardens so that more farm-raised food could go overseas to feed our soldiers. At some point, civilian car factories were converted to make military vehicles and no civilian cars were being made.
Under these conditions, savings rates during the war were extremely high, exceeding fifty percent at one point. They had a lot of income and no means to piss it away on consumer goods. That simply wasn't an option, so it took no self discipline to just sock it away in the bank.
Then when the war ended, the soldiers came home and had access to help with mortgages and the country turned its attention to the longstanding housing crisis. There was huge unmet need for housing -- aka DEMAND -- and, critically, large numbers of people had resources for buying a house. So homes flew up at breathtaking speed and the modern suburb was born.
The next several paragraphs of the article A Climate Love Story wax eloquent about abundant clean energy and new tech solving all our problems and giving birth to a heaven on earth. Nowhere is passive solar design mentioned.
Passive solar design and vernacular architecture are important historical approaches to meeting human needs with a minimum of effort and resources. The best way to solve a lot of our problems is to supply high quality of life for LESS ENERGY.
That's the cleanest energy of all: The electricity you do NOT need to generate while staying comfy anyway because buildings and cities are designed so well that they need only a modicum of electrical inputs to provide a high quality of life.
The rest of the article "busts" the ooh, shiny intro and one of the concerns it brings up is ecological diversity. One of the solutions to this problem is to build more walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods and otherwise implement infrastructure that makes it feasible for people to live without a car.
More support for cycling infrastructure. Better public transit. More ability to simply walk to what you need to access on a day-to-day basis.
This is a better quality of life for humans and also does less harm to the essential ecological resources that provide us the air that we breath and all else we need to live. And it's old tech, it's old human wisdom, it's something humans have known how to do for a long time.
We don't need to reinvent the wheel. We have the technology we need already. We just need to roll it out en masse like we rolled out post-World-War-II suburbs at breathtaking speed.
The year is 2050. Things are unimaginably better than anyone in 2022 might have predicted. Such turnarounds are not without precedent. After all, the boom time in the 1950s came on the heels of the Great Depression and a crippling world war against ominously dark forces. From the depths of those hard years, it would have been hard to foresee the glory days around the bend.I've studied World War II and its aftermath to try to sort out where things went wrong with the current housing market. During WWII, most men were in the military -- and drawing a paycheck for it with good benefits -- and their wives were working factory jobs or other jobs normally held by men and babies mostly weren't being born because sex mostly wasn't happening because the men were overseas.
So you had a lot of dual income, no kid (DINK) households and on top of that the war sucking up all available resources. There were few or no luxury goods to spend all that money on.
Cigarettes, sugar and other luxury items were rationed. Women were drawing silk stocking seams down the backs of their bare legs because you couldn't get silk stockings.
People were actively encouraged to grow Victory Gardens so that more farm-raised food could go overseas to feed our soldiers. At some point, civilian car factories were converted to make military vehicles and no civilian cars were being made.
Under these conditions, savings rates during the war were extremely high, exceeding fifty percent at one point. They had a lot of income and no means to piss it away on consumer goods. That simply wasn't an option, so it took no self discipline to just sock it away in the bank.
Then when the war ended, the soldiers came home and had access to help with mortgages and the country turned its attention to the longstanding housing crisis. There was huge unmet need for housing -- aka DEMAND -- and, critically, large numbers of people had resources for buying a house. So homes flew up at breathtaking speed and the modern suburb was born.
The next several paragraphs of the article A Climate Love Story wax eloquent about abundant clean energy and new tech solving all our problems and giving birth to a heaven on earth. Nowhere is passive solar design mentioned.
Passive solar design and vernacular architecture are important historical approaches to meeting human needs with a minimum of effort and resources. The best way to solve a lot of our problems is to supply high quality of life for LESS ENERGY.
That's the cleanest energy of all: The electricity you do NOT need to generate while staying comfy anyway because buildings and cities are designed so well that they need only a modicum of electrical inputs to provide a high quality of life.
The rest of the article "busts" the ooh, shiny intro and one of the concerns it brings up is ecological diversity. One of the solutions to this problem is to build more walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods and otherwise implement infrastructure that makes it feasible for people to live without a car.
More support for cycling infrastructure. Better public transit. More ability to simply walk to what you need to access on a day-to-day basis.
This is a better quality of life for humans and also does less harm to the essential ecological resources that provide us the air that we breath and all else we need to live. And it's old tech, it's old human wisdom, it's something humans have known how to do for a long time.
We don't need to reinvent the wheel. We have the technology we need already. We just need to roll it out en masse like we rolled out post-World-War-II suburbs at breathtaking speed.
