Joey S., 38, married to Oksana S., with 1 child, Timmy S., 4 years old, is an online volunteer resident of Model Polar City One, to be built in Longyearbyen, Norway in 2015. Joey who holds down a day job in Colorado, and has expressed interest in serving as a volunteer resident of Model Polar City No. 1, which is still in the planning stages and has a long way to go, of course, before completion and actual residency.
However, when Joey was told that current plans call for the creation a place online where people like him can be a part of this, he replied:
"That's the right course of action. Build an assembly point, rally the troops, get the ideas flowing."
[See preliminary images of polar cites here: http://pcillu101.blogspot.com]
Current work: "I'm a project manager and line manager at Canonical Ltd, the people who sponsor Ubuntu Linux."
How did you first hear about polar cities experiment?
"I read about it in the Gizmodo.com article by Matt Buchanan." (see link below)
Why do you want to become a volunteer virtual resident online, until we get the first model city up and running , maybe in 2012 or 2015?
"I feel it's an interesting idea for two reasons:
1) due to global warming...
a) If it goes hot as predicted, it'll be a good place to live;
b) if it goes COLD (the mini-ice age theory) as predicted, it will be an interesting analog to Mars because Mars will have many of the same challenges. So, it's a win win situation either way.
2) The Mars connection .... We can learn from the existing studies done to house astronauts on a very cold Mars, improve that for our model polar city, and eventually if humans do colonize Mars, then future generations can use the experiences from our polar cities experiments."
When asked was his hopes and dreams for the future are, and for the future of humankind now and in the far distant future, say year 2121 or 2500 or so, Joey replied:
"I'm a space nut. :-) -- I want the human race to embrace space travel and start colonizing other worlds. This is a great way for us to dodge the bullet if an asteroid takes out the Earth. I would love for humankind, all of us, worldwide, to focus on those technologies because there will be beneficial results we can use here on Earth."
If you come aboard Model Polar City One, what skills and ideas will you bring with you, and what contributions to the community and to the future do you want to make?
"I have formal training in emergency services (fire, medical). In addition, I'm a volunteer on the local SWAT team for the sheriff here in Colorado. I'm very good with computers. I'm a project manager and very good at organizing things. I've run command and control centers and had short stints as a dispatcher. I've had some brief experience with the Mars Society's Arctic ResearchCenter. (I helped to build some of the equipment and did a tour as a Mission Control specialist). "
Any other ideas for Model Polar City One in Longyearbyen, Norway, when we get there?
"Yes, as for specifications (e.g., we probably will want to have two front doors with a space in between; an outer door of lexan or something (so that is it polar bear-proof), and an inner door, with an insulating air-sandwich in between. "
Welcome aboard, Joey!
"I'm glad to be here. This will be interesting!"
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LINK TO NEWS ARTICLE ABOUT POLAR CITIES:
BACKGROUNDER: (introduction to polar cities concept)
6 comments:
ReADER LETTER --
Hello sirs,
i have some questions of polar cities. when will they be built? And you should probbley try to fit more people in it rather than 200,000
which is still alot...
In an article about global warming, about Lester Brown's new book, Stephen Leahy, reporter for IPS in Toronto, wrote:
"While solutions are readily available, what is lacking, Brown says, is awareness that our modern civilisation is at risk and a willingness to take action.
"Saving civilisation is not a spectator sport," says Brown. "We have reached a point in the deteriorating relationship between us and the earth's natural systems where we all have to become political activists."
Speed is essential, however. Humanity is crossing natural thresholds and triggering feedbacks that may not be reversible, such as the melting of the world's glaciers and polar regions.
"We can all make lifestyle changes, but unless we restructure the economy and do it quickly, we will almost certainly fail," says Brown. "Time is our scarcest resource."
Why Polar Cities might be needed by 2121 AD, and a model polar city for educational purposes by 2015....
from the Lester Brown press release:
“In late summer 2007, reports of ice melting were coming at a frenetic pace. Experts were ‘stunned’ when an area of Arctic sea ice almost twice the size of Britain disappeared in a single week,” writes Lester R. Brown in his new book, ''Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization''
“Nearby, the Greenland ice sheet was melting so fast that huge chunks of ice weighing several billion tons were breaking off and sliding into the sea, triggering minor earthquakes,” notes Brown, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.
These recent developments are alarming scientists. If we cannot stop this melting of the Greenland ice sheet, sea level will eventually rise 23 feet, inundating many of the world’s coastal cities and the rice-growing river deltas of Asia. It will force several hundred million people from their homes, generating an unimaginable flood of rising-sea refugees.
“We need not go beyond ice melting to see that civilization is in trouble. Business-as-usual is no longer a viable option. It is time for Plan B,” Brown says in Plan B 3.0, which was produced with major funding from the Farview, Lannan, Summit, and Wallace Genetic foundations, the U.N. Population Fund, Fred and Alice Stanback, and Andrew Stevenson.
“Plan B 3.0 is a comprehensive plan for reversing the trends that are fast undermining our future. Its four overriding goals are to stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and restore the earth’s damaged ecosystems,” says Brown. “Failure to reach any one of these goals will likely mean failure to reach the others as well.”
Continuing rapid population growth is weakening governments in scores of countries. The annual addition of 70 million people to world population is concentrated in countries where water tables are falling and wells are going dry, forests are shrinking, soils are eroding, and grasslands are turning into desert. As this backlog of unresolved problems grows, stresses mount and weaker governments begin to break down.
The defining characteristic of a failing state is the inability of a government to provide security for its people. Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and Pakistan are among the better known examples. Each year the number of failing states increases. “Failing states,” notes Brown, “are an early sign of a failing civilization.”
“Even as the accumulating backlog of unresolved problems is leading to a breakdown of governments in weaker states, new stresses are emerging. Among these are rising oil prices as the world approaches peak oil, rising food prices as an ever larger share of the U.S. grain harvest is converted into fuel for cars, and the spreading fallout from climate change.”
“At the heart of the climate-stabilizing initiative cited above is a detailed plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2020 in order to hold the future temperature rise to a minimum. This initiative has three major components—raising energy efficiency, developing renewable sources of energy, and expanding the earth’s tree cover. Reaching these goals,” says Brown, “will mean the world can phase out all coal-fired power plants.”
In setting the carbon reduction goals for Plan B, we did not ask “What do politicians think is politically feasible?” but rather “What do we think is needed to prevent irreversible climate change?” This is not Plan A: business-as-usual. This is Plan B: an all-out response at wartime speed proportionate to the magnitude of the threats facing civilization.
“We are in a race between tipping points in natural and political systems,” says Brown. “Which will come first? Can we mobilize the political will to phase out coal-fired power plants before the melting of the Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible? Can we halt deforestation in the Amazon basin before it so weakens the forest that it becomes vulnerable to fire and is destroyed? Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Himalayan glaciers that feed the major rivers of Asia?”
Although efforts have been made in recent decades to raise the efficiency of energy use, the potential is still largely untapped. For example, one easy and profitable way to cut carbon emissions worldwide is simply to replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs that use only a fourth as much electricity. Turning to more efficient lighting can reduce world electricity use by 12 percent—enough to close 705 of the world’s 2,370 coal-fired power plants.
In the United States, buildings—commercial and residential—account for close to 40 percent of carbon emissions. Retrofitting an existing building typically can cut energy use by 20–50 percent. The next step, shifting to carbon-free electricity to heat, cool, and light the building completes the transformation to a zero-carbon emissions building.
We can also reduce carbon emissions by moving down the food chain. The energy used to provide the typical American diet and that used for personal transportation are roughly equal. A plant-based diet requires about one fourth as much energy as a diet rich in red meat. The reduction in carbon emissions in shifting from a red meat–rich diet to a plant-based diet is about the same as that in shifting from a Chevrolet Suburban SUV to a Toyota Prius hybrid car.
In the Plan B energy economy, wind is the centerpiece. It is abundant, low cost, and widely distributed; it scales easily and can be developed quickly. The goal is to develop at wartime speed 3 million megawatts of wind-generating capacity by 2020, enough to meet 40 percent of the world’s electricity needs. This would require 1.5 million wind turbines of 2 megawatts each. These turbines could be produced on assembly lines by reopening closed automobile plants, much as bombers were assembled in auto plants during World War II.
In the development of renewable energy resources, Brown notes, we are seeing the emergence of some big-time thinking—thinking that recognizes the urgency of moving away from fossil fuels. Nowhere is this more evident than in Texas, where the state government is coordinating an effort to build 23,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity (the equivalent of 23 coal-fired power plants). This will supply enough electricity to satisfy the residential needs of over 11 million Texans—half the state’s population. Oil wells go dry and coal seams run out, but the earth’s wind resources cannot be depleted.
Solar technologies also provide exciting opportunities for getting us off the carbon treadmill. Sales of solar-electric panels are doubling every two years. Rooftop solar water heaters are spreading fast in Europe and China. In China, some 40 million homes now get their hot water from rooftop solar heaters. The plan is to nearly triple this to 110 million homes by 2020, supplying hot water to 380 million Chinese.
Large-scale solar thermal power plants are under construction or planned in California, Florida, Spain, and Algeria. Algeria, a leading world oil exporter, is planning to develop 6,000 megawatts of solar-thermal electric-generating capacity, which it will feed into the European grid via an undersea cable. The electricity generated from this single project is enough to supply the residential needs of a country the size of Switzerland.
Investment in geothermal energy for both heating and power generation is also growing fast, notes Brown. Iceland now heats nearly 90 percent of its homes with geothermal energy, virtually eliminating the use of coal for home heating. The Philippines gets 25 percent of its electricity from geothermal power plants. The United States has 61 geothermal projects under way in the geothermally rich western states.
The combination of gas-electric hybrid cars and advanced-design wind turbines has set the stage for the evolution of an entirely new automotive fuel economy. If the battery storage of the typical hybrid car is doubled and a plug-in capacity is added so that batteries can be recharged at night, then we could do our short-distance driving—commuting to work, grocery shopping, and so on—almost entirely with cheap, wind-generated electricity.
This would permit us to run our cars largely on renewable electricity—and at the gasoline-equivalent cost of less than $1 per gallon. Several major automakers are coming to market with plug-in hybrids or electric cars.
With business as usual (Plan A), the environmental trends that are undermining our future will continue. More and more states will fail until civilization itself begins to unravel. “Time is our scarcest resource. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize,” says Brown. “These deadlines are set by nature. Nature is the timekeeper, but we cannot see the clock.”
The key to restructuring the world energy economy is to get the market to tell the environmental truth by incorporating into prices the indirect costs of burning fossil fuels, such as climate disruption and air pollution. To do this, we propose adopting a carbon tax that will reflect these indirect costs and offsetting it by lowering income taxes. We propose a worldwide carbon tax to be phased in at $20 per ton each year between 2008 and 2020, stabilizing at $240 per ton. This initiative, which would be offset at every step with a reduction in income taxes, would simultaneously discourage fossil fuel use and encourage investment in renewable sources of energy.
“Saving civilization is not a spectator sport,” says Brown. “We have reached a point in the deteriorating relationship between us and the earth’s natural systems where we all have to become political activists. Every day counts. We all have a stake in civilization’s survival.”
“We can all make lifestyle changes, but unless we restructure the economy and do it quickly we will almost certainly fail. We need to persuade our elected representatives and national leaders to support the environmental tax restructuring and other changes outlined in Plan B. Beyond this, each of us can pick an issue that is important to us at the local level, such as phasing out coal-fired power plants, shifting to more-efficient light bulbs, or developing a comprehensive local recycling program, and get to work on it.”
We all need to educate ourselves on environmental issues. For its part, the Earth Policy Institute is making Plan B 3.0 available for downloading free of charge from its Web site.
“It is decision time,” says Brown. “Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we have to make a choice. We can stay with business as usual and watch our economy decline and our civilization unravel, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that mobilizes to save civilization. Our generation will make the decision, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.”
Another volunteer, in Bangor, Maine, notes:
"I talked with some co-workers the other day about the best
way to setup such a polar cities discussion community online. I've got the software, it's called
Joomla. Allows us to create a totally open-ended community, that
people can join and post too. I also have a easy way to get a site up
and running while we are developing the "interactive site" that way we
can start posting to the website ."
In an earlier post, our first email exchange, Joey wrote:
"Great job on the Polar Cities material. Saw it today on the news sites. I was just telling my wife last week that I wish there was some way to a:) get affordable housing in Longyearben and b.) have a "green" home in the polar regions.
I work for a distributed company, so I can live anywhere in the world. Living in one of these polar cities model research sites would be very fun for us (and our small child). I wish you the best with this project."
http://www.timescall.com/news_story.asp?ID=10046
Climate hideout
Polar city researcher resides in Longmont
By Charlie Angelo
Longmont Times-Call
LONGMONT — Joey Stanford is not a global warming expert. He’s not sure if it will threaten human life in the future.
“I don’t know if it will happen or not, but it’s important to prepare,” he said.
Stanford, who works for a London-based computer company from his home in Longmont, is part of a team of volunteers working toward a survival plan in the event of extreme global warming in the future.
He is a leading researcher for the Polar City Project and has volunteered to be a resident in the first polar city.
According to www.polarcity.org, “Polar cities are proposed sustainable, high-population-density cities, to be built near the arctic rim, designed to house human beings in the future, in the event that global warming causes the central and middle regions of the Earth to become uninhabitable for a long period of time.”
The Polar City Project was started in January 2007 by Dan Bloom. Alaska, northern Canada, Norway, Iceland and Russia are potential sites for polar cities, Bloom said in an e-mail. The work of British scientist and author James Lovelock inspired the idea, he said.
The Polar City Project is only an idea for now. Initially, according to Stanford, the team planned to have Model Polar City One built in Longyearbyen, Norway, by 2010.
Because of myriad design questions and a lack of major investors, however, it’s not likely to be built until after 2020, according to Stanford.
“Right now, we’re trying to get a handle on what it would take to get this going,” he said.
Some of the logistical issues Stanford faces are food and water supply, fire suppression, the process of moving people into the structures and protection from polar bears.
“There are just so many aspects involved,” Stanford said. “Who would govern these polar cities, for instance?”
All of these unknown variables make it impossible to accurately predict the construction costs of a polar city at this point, he said.
Polar cities might never be built, Stanford acknowledged, but he said his research will still be valuable.
He sees a parallel between sustaining life in Earth’s polar regions and doing so on Mars.
“Even if they aren’t used to solve global warming,” he said, “these ideas are reusable for space missions.”
The Polar City Project is currently focused on increasing its exposure and finding funding, Stanford said.
“We’re using the worst-case scenario to drive research and encourage thought,” he said.
Charlie Angelo can be reached at 303-684-5253 or tcreporter4@times-call.com.
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In six months, we'll all be screaming for more Global Warming™.
Longmont 7/21/2008 4:28:47 PM
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Thanks, Mr Angelo, for this story about Mr Stanford and his work on polar cities. Your article represents the first time ever a mainstream media print newspaper has printed a story about this somewhat controversial idea. It's not a prediction, just mere speculation. And thanks to Mr Stanford in Longmont, who has added a very good entry to the Wikipedia website about polar cities, this idea -- while not exactly taking off -- has been gaining momentum step by step. Thanks to the Longmont Times-Call for printing a very interestint and unique story. It's the first time polar cities has ever been mentioned in print anywhere in the world!
Taipei 7/21/2008 9:33:36 AM
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