Today's Top 10 is a guest post from Carlos Chambers who is a member of, and spokesperson for, Generation Zero.
Generation Zero is an "organisation of young New Zealanders working to cut carbon pollution through smarter transport, liveable cities and independence from fossil fuels".
He is active on Twitter via @nzcach.
As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to david.chaston@interest.co.nz.
And if you're interested in contributing the occasional Top 10 yourself, contact gareth.vaughan@interest.co.nz.
See all previous Top 10s here.
1. Why cities are key to driving economic growth and fighting climate change.
Cities are where a large part of the struggle to solve climate change will play out.
The short video above (1:54) gives insight into why and how.
It’s been exciting and inspiring seeing the New Climate Economy getting the findings of its report out to the world’s audiences.
It shows how we can drive global economic growth and fight climate change.
To back the claim up they provided analysis on achieving this across key areas - from cities and land use to finance and economics. Theirs is an optimistic message grounded in solid research and rational thinking.
The call to action is clear - "we already know how to do this. What we need now, are better policy choices and decisive leadership".
By 2030 around 60% of the world’s populations will live in cities. Cities are already economic engines, accounting for 80% of all economic output. But, did you know, none of the world’s 50 most populated cities meet international air quality standards? Air pollution, which mostly comes from urban areas can cost as much as 11 percent of GDP. Urban sprawl costs the US economy an estimated $400 billion per year.
But designed right cities can be the foundation of low carbon economic growth. We can build better cities, cities that are connected, compact and coordinated. Cities that put people and their needs first. Where the air is cleaner, and getting around is faster and cheaper. And the best part, we already know how to do this.
Investing in smarter transport systems, utilities and energy networks could save us more than $3 trillion in the next 15 years. For instance, over 160 cities already have bus rapid transit systems. These can carry up to two million passengers per day at low cost, as BRT can be less than one fifth of the cost of a metro.
What we need now, are better policy choices and decisive leadership.
For years we’ve been told that we cannot pursue strong economic growth and combat climate change at the same time.
This is a false choice.
These are the findings from the New Climate Economy report.
Together, we can create a better, more prosperous future.
2. Europe’s going big - can it, will it deliver?
A landmark US-China announcement on binding emissions reductions targets and the global climate negotiations kicking off again in Lima mean climate change is getting international love again.
Beth Gardiner of the NY Times looks at European Union leaders’ updates of 40 percent reductions by 2030 on the road to achieving the continent’s long term goal of 80 to 95 percent by 2050.
The balanced piece interviews a number of experts from academics and researchers to climate change consultants.
Questions are raised around the feasibility of the 2030 goal and the tools to achieve it - the EU’s emissions trading scheme and strong climate policy are singled out.
3. What is this? A centre for ants?
Or a car for Auckland?
I think good rail like the City Rail Link, better buses such as Bus Rapid Transit network and improving cycling with separated cycleways present the real wins for Auckland’s transport problems.
That said, it’s great to see these two entrepreneurs having a crack with Microcarm. Auckland will need all the help it can get and private sectors initiatives like this may prove an important piece of the puzzle.
A plan to ease Auckland's traffic woes is on the road to becoming a reality.
Manurewa's Toa Greening wants to bring 50 electric microcars, called the A-Car, into the country by the end of next year.
The car has two seats and is 99cm wide and 259cm long, about the same size as a large motorcycle.
FUTURE PLANS: Toa Greening and Pete Mazany want to see their business, Microcarm, lead the way.
"I started the Microcar project back in 2012," Greening said.
"It came out of frustration with Auckland's traffic. I came to the conclusion that we can't build our way out of it."
After six months spent analysing traffic research, Greening concluded the most efficient way to solve the problem is with the microcar.
The research showed that Auckland's traffic would start moving freely if 15,000 of the little cars hit the roads.
But getting to that point will take time and around $500 million so the company is starting with a smaller goal in the short term.
4. The new Aussie dream.
Balmain, Canberra where the traditional, dare I say historical dream of owning a quarter acre section is being tipped upside down.
Anna Anderson points out that the space a house offered is becoming less important to people, whereas proximity and walkability are increasingly seen as crucial.
The trend to quality urban housing is hardly a surprise. It’s promising to see developers in Australia supply and the market quickly pick up quality housing solutions like the four examples outlined in this.
With rates of urbanisation steadily increasing the demand for the housing solutions outlined in the article will likely go the same way in Australia and other urbanising countries.
Enter the new Kiwi dream.
The traditional housing progression from flat-sharing to renting, then buying an apartment and eventually upgrading to a house is being turned on its head. Some buyers are skipping the steps between couch-surfing and ownership of the quarter-acre block - instead buying straight into the apartment market. It's fast becoming the new Australian dream.
For many, apartments are the ideal set-up. But for those wanting the space offered by a three- or four-bedroom home the options are few.
On the western foreshore of Balmain, a new development Harbourfront Balmain is drawing interest from a wide demographic including upgraders, downsizers and families. The developers, Toga Group, made the decision to include a range of three-bedroom terraces and apartments ranging in size from 116-198 square metres to the mix of one- and two-bedroom apartments.
"There's a growing trend for families wanting to live in apartments or terraces in accessible areas like Balmain," says Fabrizio Perilli, chief executive officer of Toga Development and Construction. "It's now an accepted way of living."
5. Germany keeps winning.
The German private sector is starting to catch onto Chancellor Angela Merkel’s inspiring leadership. A large fossil fuel power plant owner and operator EON will spin these assets off and move to renewables joining the country’s clean energy revolution.
The article gives some fascinating public opinion stats. Despite strong efforts from Merkel and her government to-date introducing taxpayer funded subsidies for renewable energy and closing the country's nuclear reactors the public want to see more. Measured earlier this year, 67 percent of people think the government is not doing enough to move to renewables
The focus is not just on electricity and energy generation - the piece also looks at Germany jump-starting its electric car manufacturing industry. The goal is to have one million electric cars on German roads by 2020 and bolster the range and selection of models produced in Germany.
As one reader comments at the bottom - “Leadership”, from the Germans.
EON SE (EOAN)’s plan to spin off its fossil-fuel plants marks a watershed moment in Germany’s renewables effort that will likely bolster the country’s already leading position in clean energy.
EON’s announcement is the culmination of a push to wind, solar and other alternative energy forms that the German government began 14 years ago with subsidies to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels for power production. That plan gained added momentum in 2011 with a decision to close the country’s nuclear reactors following the Fukushima accident.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bold move is already beginning to pay off, with Europe’s largest economy for the first time getting more electricity from renewables this year than any other source. About a quarter of Germany’s power now comes from green energy, compared with 6.2 percent in the U.S. and 4.8 percent in France.
“We are in the midst of a giant transformation process of our energy system,” Deputy Environment Minister Jochen Flasbarth told reporters yesterday in Berlin. “Renewables are the increasingly dominant factor in the German energy mix. EON’s decision is a piece of the puzzle.”
6. Software is eating the world.
Should there be one set of rules for all companies? Does a monopoly in one industry have the same features as a monopoly in another? What about software? What about Amazon, Facebook, Google or Uber?
Some time ago I discussed the growing power of software firms and the challenges and opportunities with a friend. He emailed me this statement, “Issue: ultimate power is currently being consolidated in very few key holders i.e. Uber of 2025 will control a monopoly over the worlds transportation network”.
I was intrigued to read the Economist’s thorough take on the matter. It’s also inspired me to download Peter Thiel's new book “Zero to One”.
If competition and antitrust regulators and economists get their way my friend’s statement may be proved wrong in 2025. If not then he is likely on the money and the consumers of software may have to look after ourselves.
"WE ARE taking over the world of yoga.” At the graduation day for 500 Startups, a school for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, such statements of focused megalomania are the norm. “We will own this space,” predicts the founder of a company that helps shops send digital offers to nearby phones. A company which rates people’s online behaviour says it is planning “world domination”.
It is a joke that sounds like hubris, and there is indeed plenty of that to be seen. But in this context global ambitions on the part of the only-just-begun are oddly reasonable. If your idea for a service or product can be scaled up to cover the world, why would you not plan to do just that? And if your idea cannot be scaled up that way, should you not find one that can? After all, capturing a significant, even dominant share of the world market more or less straight out of the box is clearly possible. It has been crucial for the internet’s biggest successes: Amazon (About half of America’s book market, more than that in e-books); Alibaba (about 80% of e-commerce in China); Facebook (which claims 1.3 billion active members); and Google (68% of online searches in America, more than 90% in Europe).
Regulators worry that such dominance lays consumers and competitors open to all sorts of abuse. A European Parliament resolution calling for the European Commission to consider the break-up of Google by splitting its search engine from “other commercial services”, which was to be voted on shortly after The Economist went to press, is a bit of cheap political grandstanding. But the commission’s concerns about Google are real.
7. On the topic of targets...
I want what Tony’s smoking...
The Australian Government’s current trajectory on climate change is summed up by a quote from Prime Minister Tony Abbott that coal is “good for humanity”.
The World Resources Institute, a US Development Agency promptly and correctly told Abbott off, citing renewable energy as a much better way to boost countries’ economic growth.
Abbott seems confused - concerning from the leader of a country with the highest emissions per capita and heavy reliance on fossil fuel industries.
Time to pull your head out of the sand Tony. Perhaps the Germans can help?
Australia is one of just four nations not on track to meet emissions reduction promises, a UN report has warned, while a US-based research firm has poured scorn on Tony Abbott’s insistence that coal is “good for humanity.”
A report by the UN Environment Programme states that the world should aim to be “carbon neutral” by 2070 at the latest. Exceeding a budget of just 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide would risk “severe, pervasive and in some cases irreversible climate change impacts”.
In an analysis of each signatory to a UN goal to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels, the report found that just four nations – Australia, Canada, Mexico and the US – needed to do more to meet their respective emissions reduction targets by 2020.
8. The power of crypto currencies.
Kim Hill interviews Andreas Antonopoulos - entrepreneur, writer, university lecturer and guru on all things Bitcoin and crypto currency.
He was a keynote speaker at New Zealand’s first ever cryptocurrency conference in Queenstown last weekend. He has also built three startups using Bitcoin technology and dedicated his career to the area - what he calls the "edge of a technology transformation".
Andreas finds interesting, relevant and elegant ways of articulating why Bitcoin and other crypto currencies built on the Blockchain technology exist, how they work and what they can be used for.
While the arguments go both ways, I am firmly optimistic and excited by crypto currencies. The things they enable are as big and broad as you can dream of. Distributed Anonymous Corporations (DACs) are one example. You can read about Lazooz, a ridesharing application a bit like Uber or Lyft which functions on its own native crypto currency.
If you haven’t properly understood the concepts then Kim and Andreas’ chat is 24 minutes of your life well spent.
9. Access over ownership.
In 1950 the American Dream was owning a house and the maximum amount of consumer goods.
In 2050 the American Dream may be owning nothing, but having access to everything.
The Sharing Economy is the tool enabling this shift from ownership to access. At a high level the sharing economy involves - utilising inefficient assets so the resources of those who have, can be accessed by those who want.
What happens when the importance of access to things trumps the value of owning those same things? The end of ownership. From computer hardware, to houses, trucks, cars, and more, the notion of ownership is changing as software enables the matching of people and organizations that have things and those that need them.
Joining a16z’s Balaji Srinivasan to pick apart this trend are Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and chief product officer; John Stanfield co-founder and CEO of Local Motion; and Ben Uretsky, co-founder and CEO of DigitalOcean.
10. A giant leap for mankind?
With China and the United States announcing brave new commitments to limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and the European Union reaffirming its own, its helpful to look at what this means for staying within the two degree temperature rise limit.
The World Resources Institute have done it, comparing both countries’ historical trajectory with new targets, analysing what this will mean and whether its realistic. In the author’s views the adoption of a common assessment and reporting standard presents a key challenge, while declining “technology costs” (think renewables, utilities, transport) and demographic changes (think population trends, urbanisation and the new Aussie/Kiwi dream) provide a promising context for achieving these goals.
Moves like this from the world’s XXL emitters suggest changes are underfoot in the way they are thinking about the need to cut emissions. Obama forcing climate change onto the agenda of the G20 summit, hosted in Australia, is further evidence that decisive leadership may be starting to happen.
If New Zealand is going to stick to Tim Groser and the central Government’s approach of being a 'fast follower' we better start following and ramping up our own targets.
With the historic climate announcement by President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping, the United States and China joined the European Union in committing to new limits on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These three economic powerhouses emit about as much each year as the rest of the world combined, so their commitments have important implications for the world’s ability to stay within its carbon budget.
While China and the United States are at different stages of development – reflected in their historic and per capita emissions – the numbers suggest both countries’ proposed reductions are a meaningful deviation from business as usual. Further efforts will be needed, however, to ensure these targets are met and that ambition is enhanced.
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