Global Warming 2

Johann Hari: We'll save the planet only if we're forced to

Johann Hari in this article was talking about how the humans harm their environment by using or producing green house gases, and how it won’t change a thing if single persons changed their lightbulbs or bought carbon offsets. However, he thinks that people must be forced by rules and fines to stop or reduce their footprint.

First, I don’t agree with the author when he talked about the single actions; I believe if a few people started to change their normal lightbulbs, instead of talking, many people will start to follow. Also, I think choosing what type of lightbulbs to use at home, or what car to drive, or how many gallons of gasoline I burn, for all this I think I must have the right to choose.

MASDAR City

Masdar City is a city with zero-carbon, zero-waste and it will be a home for 50,000 people and a workplace for about 40,000 persons. Also, it will include 1,500 business units. It is designed by the British architectural firm Foster and will be located in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE.

In Masdar there will be no cars, no smoke and everything is friendly to the nature. For energy Masdar will use wind farms and hydrogen power. Beside that it will use solar power for desalination. However 80% of the used water will be recycled and reused for irrigation and other purposes. For transportation it will use rail train and something called personal automated transport or podcar.

The Masdar project will take 8 years to finish completely. However, there are many question marks around it. Like, how people from outside the city will get in if there are no roads, for example visitors, police cars or ambulances, if there are no roads? Beside that, will the hydrogen power plant work, as we know that it has never been used in reality, only in laboratories?

Cool Cities

With the global warming problem getting bigger, many people started to take an action and seek for a solution. And one of those was the “Cool Cities”, which is a campaign or an agreement signed by various cities to reduce their pollution and footprint, like using hybrid cars and renewable energy, to make the future cleaner and safer.

Abu Dhabi started to walk the same path, starting from MASDAR City to hydrogen power plants. Also, many new rules, fines and campaigns were used to make the people aware of this issue.