I want to see a “green city” that works. Maybe try to find some optimal templates.
We don’t have to call it that. But I would like to see more attempts at a few things I have yet to see players acheive:
Urban farming - a city that grows a lot of crops and has its own food factory. I have a template I am experimenting on for this but it is hard to keep everyone’s needs in walking distance. I don’t think it all needs to be grow in the city but the more the better. I currently am experimenting with small fields in residential areas to boost crop production. IMO if there is one industry that should be somewhat decentralized it is food. Greenhouse mods are acceptable although they are not up to date.
Cleaner(er) energy - making a power grid work with only renewables will be a huge challenge that I would love to see. Maybe there can be a limit for one nuclear power plant and bonus points if it’s a single reactor, that way there is baseline power but I think you must have your own waste facility.
Waste obviously - recycle as much waste as possible. Incinerator power plants can be acceptable as a ‘necessary evil’ because, although they are big polluters, you still need a ton of trash for it to run at baseline and it would be irresponsible to export waste and make someone else deal with your trash.
Other than those 3 perameters it is up to the player what goes on in this green city, but the more self sufficient the better.
Please add any suggestions to this idyllic city challenge. I will work on my experiment as I have time and post about it when something is working.
A few problems with that:
Cleaner(er) energy - making a power grid work with only renewables will be a huge challenge that I would love to see. Maybe there can be a limit for one nuclear power plant and bonus points if it’s a single reactor, that way there is baseline power but I think you must have your own waste facility.
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The game uses only technology from the Eastern bloc up to around 1991, and hydro power plants are not included because of deeper engine limitations. What’s left is really not good enough for this.
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The game, as far as I can see, still has major bugs with its electric grid simulation that surface when you connect any power plants via medium voltage. Wind power plants can only be connected via medium voltage, though. The only solution I’ve found is to never connect wind power plants to the grid and only ever to use them as a localized backup solution for infrastructure that is so critical it needs to continue working even when the grid has problems or infrastructure that is so uncritical, I cannot be bothered to run a powerline to it.
I just use the transformer to connect to the grid. So medium to large. I’m pretty sure it works because the turbines increase output after I connect them despite wind speed remaining the same.
It is tricky because iirc the transformer can only handle like 4 or 5 mw. The second largest underground medium powerline (like 1.25mw?) should be enough to handle a windmill most days. Max out put is under 1.5mw and that rarely happens.
I have not tried this on a large scale however. Someday I will try to make a massive windfarm and discover exactly the limitations of adding to the grid.
No doubt their best use is to power a distant firestation or gas station. But it would be nice to have a nuclear power plant provide background power sparingly because of so much wind and solar.
If you could schedule shifts and only run industry during the day it would be easier to manage energy needs around solar.
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Simulation or physical reality being secondary, the question asked to be addressed has tremendous fallacies and baseless assumptions within it.
1 Urban farming is a solution. Within modern (as known) urban areas we can attain food autonomy by urban food production. BEEP: No it can’t. It will either have to sprawl out like US monstrosities of suburbia with a diameter of 50-100miles for 5million people, or it just can’t be achieved. Plain and simple, even with non-sustainable intensive monocultures you need at least an acre (o.4 hectares, 4k sq.m) for a family of 4 to produce barely adequate food to escape famine and malnutrition. Those joker pads of 100sq.m per family to produce vegies, in a triple cheesburger eating society, are just nasty jokes. Even this little of food production needs constant import of fertilization as 99% of what is eaten ends up on oceans and it is illegal to process as fertilizer. So again, an urban population without a mechanism of suppressing and exploiting rural populations to supply them with food can’t possibly exist.
2 Energy: An urban area can reach energy autonomy based on non-US, maybe European standards, rates of consumption (about 50% of US) with “green energy”. BEEP! No it can’t. Even if the entire urban area was to be covered by solar panels and wind-generators on top of them, and all people live under that panel with light only coming from the cracks between them, it still not enough. Only mildew can be grown in the dark. Add some mediocre ultra-expensive solutions of using tidal/swell energy for coastal towns, and making all beach look like an electric super-plant, still not enough. Plain and ef.ing simple. Just read the numbers, consumption, maximum possible production, efficiency, … not even close to be worth discussing it.
3 Waste recovery of raw materials can replace mining. No it can’t, at the levels of conditioning of people to keep replacing used goods with new at alarming rates, industrialized machines becoming less and less able to be repaired and maintained, no recycling can ever keep up and increases costs tremendously. Only the exploitation of refugees and desperate immigrants make some recycling possible and profitable currently to be sub-1% supplement to material consumption. It is very labor intensive and no automation has been devised to replace human critical ability. So BEEP BEEP again on assumptions.
4 Green energy: It is perceived and myth busted that organic substance can be used as an alternative fuel, bio-mass and the like. Think of the planet as a dry rock, of dead substance, sand rocks, etc. No life on it, then add an extremely thin crust of life (from microorganisms, to grass, trees, animals, whales, etc.). 100% of all those organisms eat living or recently deceased other lives to survive. A miracle of life among countless dead planets and moons. This total amount of organic substance, living or decomposing to provide food for more life, if burned, to the last gram of carbohydrate, can not produce enough energy to last humanity for a year. Even at imaginary levels of efficiency (energy transform heat - electric - mechanical). Then it will be a dessertified planet, without any life on it, or food for any humans to survive, let alone animals, plants, and microorganisms. So, again a myth, a fallacy passed by the oil industry itself, as oil and coal is heavily invested in this new party of environmental disaster called “green energy”™. And the nuclear industry is standing by laughing hard at the stupidity of it all, knowing they are the last true resort to an environmentally minded energy solution to capitalism going rogue.
Just the fact there is all this retooling in industry, replacing vehicles and machines from using fuel as energy to be using a much less efficient “electricity” (the dirtiest energy source there is) to be driven, multiplies profit and continuous industrial development and production for “the LITTLE TIME WE HAVE LEFT TO FUCK THE PLANET UP”. It has also multiplied mining by 7-10x of what it was 20y ago.
- Politically: We have managed to be indoctrinated and passively conditioned like experimental monkeys, to think of “public land/sea/lake/river” as “state property” for which, the dear state thinking for us and deciding for us, for our own mutual benefit, to pass all public land and water to private interests, because of the “green energy” myth. This private land, whether the experiment backfires, it is both altered/destroyed by private exploitation and can’t be reverted to public use and access without a bloody revolution. So maybe this was the goal to begin with.
In violation of most constitutions and “common sense”, public land/water contained (in the distant past/history of 20th century) the “right” of access and use by humans, even foreigners in a country can visit and climb mountains, bathe in rivers, lakes, and sea, walk through forests (the last that existed). A human right revoked, single handedly, without a real political discourse on it, as ALL political parties agreed public property IS STATE PROPERTY! Now, it is handed over to private armies/security, to prohibit access as to protect the infrastructure for privately produced electricity, water, etc. from out ex-public land. Our land, our water, our wind, our sun, by-proxy “donated” to multinational energy and water cartels.
Because of Green Energy, humans can no longer seek food autonomy, or any other autonomy, without breaking “private property laws”, and therefore ANY ATTEMPT to autonomy is now ILLEGAL! No food no autonomy, no land no food.
10 We have gone a full circle from the times of feudalism to return being slaves again to multinational corporations, absolutely dependent on their game for minimal survival. The huge difference from feudalism (Chinese, Indian, European, doesn’t matter) is we are now in multiples more than we were, with an 80% destroyed land, incapable in recovering for thousands of years (what takes for a forest to recover and become yet again stable and sustainable).
In summary: We have no time to play games, the clock is ticking. The chains on our legs and arms are getting heavier, it is either now or never.
PS Watch planet of the humans, not propaganda about it/against it, and keep an open mind that it was not financed by petroleum/coal/nuclear/vehicle industries/
I appreciate your comment but my post is more in the context of this game than the context of international development (which is ripe with a variaty of problems) or environmentalism (which is basically replacing Christianity as the justification for colonialism). I mean “urban farming” is (usually) just gentrification in the US.
What im trying to do here is plan land use and be able to track crop/food needs for a video game city builder. In my head canon I can pretend all citizens have access to land and grow crops for food, which is certainly more food sovereign than reliance on the global market, or centralizing massive farms that have huge distribution needs.
Yes, I am sorry, knowing very little about games I didn’t realize at the time this was actually a game, the content though is politically interesting.
I like your comment about environmentalism approaching religion, I hope not all, but one should take account of the process that derailed environmentalism to this stage (apolitical and irrational non-scientific). Even X-ianity as a vehicle to colonialism didn’t do the damage “environmentalism” has. I remember long ago in my university days, I read this study this guy did for the world-bank to evaluate the possibility to convert rain-forest into farm land near the Amazon. The study as a whole came out very negative, predicting the land would turn to sand and nothing will grow or be able to live on this land in X years (single digit number). The WB fired him after, although in the fine print they had to have this study published as they paid for it, and the executive summaries presented was to go ahead and recommend to Brazil deforestation, use of land as farmland, population moved to the areas to increase development, if the WB/IMG/IBRD was to help Brazil out to get from the hole of bankruptcy. So the eco-disaster started under full knowledge of it becoming a disaster, so Brazil yet again would go bankrupt and default on loans, so banking sharks can go in and privatize all resources, sentencing the population to eternal poverty and the land an ecological disaster, from which they can profit.
Some decades later, w.europeans “environmentalists” decide to promote Bio-Diesel, nearly at every fuel station in DE, FR, NE, BE, LX … now. So these environmentally minded companies go down to SE Asia jungles and acquire unimagineable right to exploit the forest, cut it down to create land for growing this seed that is not eatable by any animal, but yields maximum oil for biodiesel. The cost of this tropical wood produced by deforestation went so low that the cost to take it to the nearest ports became higher than the wood itself. So what do they do? They gather the logs into hills of logs with their automachinery (3’ for strippting and uprooting a tree that is 50-100’ high) and set it on fire. The fires were so big the smoke clouds could clearly be seen by satelites showing the entire SE Asia corner as zoom area. The same bozos are occupying seats on world conferences on climate change discussing CO reduction! This makes biodiesel extremely destructive for the earth ecosystems. In numbers, it can never add up to a significant fuel if the entire earth was used to plant it - no food! But euro-environmentalists will pay even more for a biodiesel mix than straight diesel believing they are paying to help the environment. Whose environment? SE Asia’s?
It is one of those things where you ask whether you have lost your marbles or has everyone else around turned to a matrix zomby.
Yeah in such a case it is safe to say humanity has been completely usurped by capitalist relations. Not to mention the world bank is reasonably described as the child of the Pentagon/DoD. It’s is all treated as normal and justifiable.
I saw a documentary about trains and rail maintaince recently. One of the featured trains was hauling thousands of tons of grain to be used for biofuels. All I can do is shake my head.
The WB/IMF/IBRD was a byproduct of a historical event in midst of ww2 in Breton-Woods (an agreement). In this instance it became public that governments under pressure of war, released their power to regulate currencies, debt, interests, by allowing private banking to cross borders and regulate itself as a market. From that 1st public step of a slide, governments kept passing their jurisdiction as regulators of public life to private interests. Constitutional violations were easily manipulated by propaganda to sweeten the sell out. So global capital formed a global superstate within the banking system, where now state/nation governments are subordinates to this autocratic superstate.
As long as the superstate remains nameless it has no enemies. It is the dictatorship of the anti-proletariat if you want to think of it in Marxist terms.
