Talking balls: Inhofe in 2015
Proving that 'weather' and 'climate' can be confused at the highest levels
of government, even by the Chair of the Senate Environment Committee
Inhofe's divisive appointment to chair the Senate Environment Committee in 2014 and the US 's 2017 announcement to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change underscored unwavering, if flawed, convictions. So in 2021 it was with much overdue relief that we heard Special Envoy John Kerry finally pronounce COP26 as "the last best hope for the world to get its act together". For the time being at least, after 11 years, US govt opinion would seem to have slowly turned about face.
Not talking balls: Kerry in 2021
Taking a line from Babylon 5, declaring COP26 as
"The last best hope for the world to get its act together"
Of course, conceding that we have a problem is just the beginning. We can now expect an uptick of unfruitful political venting about who contributed most to the mess in which we find ourselves. This will overflow into who should be doing most to fix it together with many contrived explanations as to why some of us should be excused from doing anything at all. Fixing a mess is always Someone Else's job.
While the blamestorming entrenches opinions all over again, armies of technical boffins will hopefully research greener technologies with which to quickly grasp their market share of consumers' greener demands - always assuming that consumers' demands actually become greener, which is not necessarily a given. While unprecedented floods, droughts and wildfires have raised eyebrows around the world, it is unclear that these are actually changing public consensus or consumer behaviour. For many people, saving the planet is the task of govts, conglomerates, philanthropist billionaires, teenage activists, hippies who glue themselves to highways, etc, etc, but in any case definitely Someone Else. A public which already segregates their trash for recycling has arguably done their fair share for the planet; asking more than this would be taking liberties with their personal freedoms.
a wind section plays to wind turbines to highlight green energy
Hong Kong is infamous for its uncomfortably sub-tropical temperatures and humidity; 2020 featured a record 50 nights in which the temperature did not fall below 28'C. Average humidity exceeds 80% for 6 months of the year. The increasingly long, stifling summers made air-conditioning an addiction at the end of the 20th century much like opium was at the end of the 19th. Today aircon reportedly accounts for 30% of the electricity used by Hong Kong each year, rising to 60% of the power used in the summer months.
Cavernous malls often maintain the air at 15'C for shopper's comfort
But while developing countries still consider aircon an expensive luxury to be used frugally, super-prosperous Hong Kongers have long since taken aircon for granted. It becomes mind-numbing to watch one, after another, after another, HK customer enter or exit a mall, store or restaurant, leaving the door wide open for all the aircon to flood out into the street. If it happens to be a 7-Eleven store (a reference to their aisle temperatures as much as their opening hours), then the staff already have frost-bite in their extremities, so they're happy enough to leave the doors open until they regain some sense of touch in their fingers.
Walking past spice shops, bookmakers, electronics emporia or ultra-high-end fashion stores, one feels wave after wave of super-chilled air flooding from open shopfronts across pavements for 5m or 6m before melting into the thermals rising from the roads' scorching asphalt.
No thought is given to the power needlessly generated to sustain this waste or the environmental cost of this casual indifference. Is it really naïve to expect a person to simply close a door behind them ? In HK, evidently yes; everyone is entitled to air-conditioned comfort, but ensuring it is used responsibly is clearly Someone Else's job. Shop staff for example; aren't they supposed to close doors ? And how can pop-in shoppers be expected to prioritise the environment when their prized Pomeranian is impatiently tearing up the roebuck leather upholstery in their double-parked Maserati SUV ?
How much of this is bewildering ignorance and how much is breath-taking arrogance is hard to know, although neither is encouraging. Strangely, while reducing the power used by air conditioning may actually be the 'low-hanging fruit' of the many environmental challenges ahead, on almost every discussion platform the strategies to manage power demand are largely drowned out by the hullabaloo about the best ways to generate yet more power.
It was in South Korea back in 2013 that questions surfaced over the veracity of quality documents for cables used in several nuclear power plants. The plants were immediately shut down reducing power supply to within a whisker of mid-summer's peak demand. The position was so precarious that the govt issued moratoria instructing workplaces and public buildings to reset their thermostats from 16'C to 26'C, to ration lighting where sufficient daylight was available, to switch off escalators when not busy, etc.
For the first time since anyone could remember, office girls no longer needed to keep warm by wrapping their legs in blankets under their desks. Guys no longer had to wear fleeces and neck-scarves while warming their mittened-fingers over their keyboards. Hot coffee did not have to be drunk within 2 minutes before the surface iced over. South Korea responded to this challenge as they do to most things; with solidarity, discipline and a fighting spirit. They swapped woollen suits for office-casual linens, drank a lot more water and supplemented smoking breaks with ice cream breaks. It was a powerful demonstration of what the public can achieve with a fresh mind-set and some minor adjustments to their daily routine. A national energy emergency was averted without spending money, without new technology and without real sacrifice. If the people of one country can act so quickly to mitigate a power crisis, then surely people anywhere, or indeed everywhere can adopt similar measures to mitigate climate impact?
To some extent, it was HK's early prosperity during the manufacturing boom of the 1970s which fueled the current addiction to aircon. People moved en masse into tightly-packed, 40 storey concrete apartment blocks which absorbed huge amounts of solar energy during the daytime then slow-cooked the residents as they basted in the beds of their notoriously undersized bedrooms at night.
High rise, low tech:
HK's older apt blocks with a myriad of plumbing and aircon strapped across the facade.
Adjacent tidy new blocks with the same old tired technology clinging to each wall.
A3 sized holes in the external walls provided space to insert compact aircon units to draw heat from the apt, releasing it outside to accelerate the cooling. City dwellers would not normally have bought such primitive, loud technology but the relentless construction of new tower blocks all around them made the noise of these 'wall-bangers' pale into insignificance. Today, a glance upwards shows hundreds upon hundreds of these units still clinging to the external walls of most buildings built before 2000. The units are inefficient, expensive to run and very poor dehumidifiers. But because these burdens are borne by the tenants, the landlords have no incentive to update them. Of course it's an entirely different story for Hong Kongers who are fortunate enough to own their own homes. Like the later-developing economies of Singapore, Japan and South Korea, HK's homeowners have long since installed modern, energy-efficient inverter units which also dehumidify very well. They have learned that drying the air provides as much comfort as cooling it - but uses only one third of the electricity. The added benefits of mildew and mould not festering in wardrobes, bedding and curtains are obvious health improvements which still remain inaccessible to large sections of HK's tenant population.
Changing personal behaviours and upgrading defunct technology may be the best that most individuals can do to save energy. However, even without global or national strategies, there remains a lot that local government can do; especially by way of regulating development.
Developers of HK's prestige office towers, hotels and malls are expected to include centralised cooling and heating systems as part of their projects but developers of apartment tower complexes are curiously not obliged to provide anything. Cooling and heating of apartment blocks is left to the individual unit owners who only have recourse to the market's most energy intensive technology - it is the exact opposite of an economy of scale. A simple step would be to mandate that developers include a centralised cooling and heating plant for each tower block constructed, with a preference for more efficient water-cooled version over air-cooled.
Tin Shui Wai in HK's New Territories, 500m from the water separating the mainland's Shenzhen.
New housing projects feature 6 to 12 new blocks; ideal candidates for DCHS
In the sprawling developments of HK's New Territories, developers often build a collection of blocks around a mall, pool or other community venue. A further step would be to connect all these with one District Cooling/Heating Systems (DCHS). This simple technology uses pipelines extended into the harbour to cool huge chillers which in turn serve multiple buildings and venues.
District Cooling & Heating System;
multiple buildings and venues sharing one system chilled by seawater
On average DCHS saves 35% of the power used by centralised air cooled condensers on top of individual buildings or 20% of the power used by equivalent water-cooled plant. The energy savings compared with cooling and heating each apartment individually would be significantly higher. Given the vast amount of waterfront available in HK it is astonishing to reflect that only 4 government and 5 private (modestly sized) DCHS are planned for the city to date.
Map of Hong Kong Island and New Territories;
red border shows how much urban development is within 1km of waterfront
Compared with the rurally dispersed populations of many countries, HK's 7.5m densely packed, vertically racked, waterfront stacked inhabitants could not be more ideally placed to benefit from the reduced costs and energy needs of a city-wide expansion of DCHS.
The govt. has certainly shown a willingness to approve the few DCHS which have been tabled to date but this falls far short of actually mandating them for the hundreds of new property developments edging inexorably over the horizon. Cynics could be forgiven for thinking that DCHS will never be more than just wishful thinking as long as the developers themselves have nothing to gain. And this may be fair comment until that famous 'Someone Else' is prepared to finally push them to do it.
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