France looking enviously at Germany - where a third of under-30s are vegetarian or vegan…
1 Like
Good God. Bald ohne wurst?
Did you hear about that recent upside-down sausage competition in Germany Wozza?
It was won by the wurst !
2 Likes
That’s die Wurst I’ve heard 
1 Like
It seems the best jokes are the wurst 
2 Likes
With the price of energy going up I am not sure if I will be able to make ends meat.
1 Like
Ha ha!!
Looks like the desert countries, with deep pockets, may have a possible solution
Worryingly, the blurb announces this innovative city will be “ Where the best and the brightest live.” And I am not sure if “Some 380,000 jobs will be created by 2030” means slave labour construction crews.
But why ni-pic? If the world really has reached the tipping point cities “ Only 200 meters wide, but 170 kilometers long and 500 meters above sea level” in deserts may be our only option.
Nah
1 Like
It’s difficult to get your head around just what an enormous civil engineering task building something like this would be. Let’s try
170,000x250/9,000,000 gives a population density of roughly 4.7m2 per person - or 212765 per square km; for reference Monaco, the worlds most densely populated area, is just 19360 or so people per square km - hope you enjoy getting to know your neighbours.
That already sounds impossible but the people are going to be housed in 500m tall skyscrapers so surely they will have lots of space? Right?
The World Trade centre towers were 63m on each side and 110 stories or 417m tall, taking into account the central elevator/service shafts that’s about 2800m2 per floor. Let’s say you would build the full 500m which actually gives more like 130 floors or 375960m2 per tower.
A 250m square patch of Neom needs to house 13,300 people. If that patch has two towers (one in each corner) that is 50 people per floor, give or take. Dividing each floor into 20 dwellings gives 2.5 people per dwelling on average - which sounds plausible at first glance.
BUT
You have to provide services for almost a quarter of a million people every 4km, bearing in mind that is 10x more population density than anywhere else on the planet. I hate to be crude but where the heck are you going to get rid of all the shit?
The World Trace Centre complex is estimated to have cost 3.56 billion in 2022 dollars, as that was all seven buildings let’s assume that one tower cost $1bn - eight every km for 170km is $1.3trillion just in living space.
Presumably everyone living in this monstrosity needs an office so perhaps the other two corners are towers as well - so double the bill to $2.6 trillion. Given all the additional infrastructure costs I think Thunderf00t’s estimate of $14 trillion for the whole thing is in the right ballpark.
The WTC complex took 9 years to build - again that was all 7 buildings but presumably they all went up in parallel and the towers probably took all 9 years - we’re talking about trying to build 1360 of them (give or take, just for domestic accommodation) - so that’s either going to take the workforce which built the twin towers roughly 6,000 years or you are going to need literally 10’s of millions of people to build the thing.
I really don’t see this happening.
1 Like
Good, it is horrible.
2 Likes
Interesting phenomenon in Japan…
Marx was part of the general change of world-views in the late 19th - early 20th centuries (change from seeing the world as atomised individual components, people, or causal chains, to seeing it fundamentally in terms of field effects - as in Maxwell, Saussure, etc - and ultimately ecology).
For Marx, what happens is the result of the interaction of everything in the real world, including human activity. Although his focus was on historical change, ecology in fact takes exactly the same view - of natural systems.
This relates to my previous posts on why climate scientists are not having sufficient impact (the changes we need to make are fundamentally economic changes - and scientists are not economists - so they keep telling us how bad things are, and how much worse they will get unless we act - but not exactly how we make the necessary changes to our economies, or handle fall-out like mass unemployment). So I can see that in principle a marriage of marxism and ecological thinking might provide the necessary insights.
1 Like
seems the UK Tory Govt is reneging on its manifesto promise about Fracking despicably using the death of Queen Elizabeth as a cover…
I don’t think Tory voters in the red wall are going to be too impressed…
The view from A Different Bias
Unbelievable.
Absolutely appalling. Vandalism, irresponsible mindless vandalism.
1 Like
The only aspect that isn’t mindless - just greedy - is the pathetic subservience to fossil fuel money.
love the “snout in the trough” caricature of Truss
1 Like
Roundup of (rare) good news stories on environmental action…