On 4/16/2011 6:14, Warp wrote:
>    Not so in Finland. The heating of homes in cities is centralized

This works when things are planned out in advance. In the USA, most college 
campuses, apartment complexes, business parks, etc work this way. (And use 
chilled water for cooling.) When you build things a little at a time (like, 
a few hundred houses in an area every year for 15 years), I imagine making 
this work out would be more difficult, planning-wise.

>    Automobiles can be made less polluting via legislation

I'm pretty sure that California was the leader in this to the point where 
everyone else (at least in the USA) adopted the same standards, just because 
it was easier.

>    Improving public transportation to reduce the need for private cars is
> another efficient way to reduce pollution.

I'd certainly prefer public transportation to work well. Distances in the 
USA aren't always conducive to that. Figuring out a way to make public 
transit profitable and feasible using existing infrastructure would be 
great. (Like, one idea I saw is that you run essentially trains along the 
highways every 10 minutes or so, and have spots where people can drive 
motorcycle-sized cars up on to the flat-bed for the long part of the 
commute, but still get where they're going at the end without having to 
build a public transit stop every 2 blocks. The USA tends to be much more 
spread out than most of Europe that I've seen.)

>    If every country in the world used the same ecologic techniques as the
> best ones, the amount of pollution in the world would be significantly
> lowered.

And it still wouldn't matter, because in 50 years we'll have 3x the population.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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