The Renewable City: The Future of Low-Carbon Living

Abstract

This Protocol is dedicated to the city of Istanbul and its civic achievements, and the liberation of all cities and humankind from fossil and nuclear energy, in a world that is harmonious, peaceful, connected, democratic, bound- and boundaryless, ubiquitously demilitarised and united in the quest to pursue the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, in order to jointly confront and avert the imminent self-immolation of humankind by anthropogenic global heating.

This paper was originally formulated for and commissioned by the Cooperative Research Centre for Low-Carbon Living, Australia, and borrows from my edited book, Urban Energy Transition—Renewable Strategies for Cities and Regions. It is an homage to best and next practice in renewable city building, and an expression of hope for a future, sic.

There is a great potential contribution to be made to transforming how we think about our immediate living environment and general place in the world—and the opportunities posed by lowering carbon emissions (‘carbon’ here always used as short for carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions: not all GHGs actually contain carbon) embodied in the production of and generated in powering, heating and cooling our residential environments, work spaces and the built environment in general. Commercial energy is to a large extent applied in the building and transport sectors, hence the focus on urban living in shifting the energy paradigm is both astute and profound. Energy renewability, embodiment, efficiency and sufficiency continue to form a magic quadrangle from which to draw instruction for action. Embodiment in particular presents an important growth perspective: as low-carbon living (LCL) gives way to what I would like to call ultralow-carbon life (ULCL) it is essential to lower the quantities of ‘carbon’—greenhouse gases—in the atmosphere to keep the well-tempered greenhouse from sliding into a hothouse state.

This paper is also an urgent call to heed the need for rapid proliferation of LCL principles and projects, and their mobilization across the built environment production system. It is a call to build an open market for this by creating the required regulatory and policy frameworks, and to remove all the overt and hidden ways in which fossil content is subsidized. This is no longer just urgent but has now become manifestly overdue, as a result of political delays and incumbent industry inertia. And given the importance, even primacy of cities and urban areas in global human settlements, the Renewable City—urban environments, economies, movements and systems entirely relying of renewable energy resources—is now an essential precondition to any hope to stabilize the global climate. The future of low carbon living lies in ultra-low carbon cycle balance, and, consequently, highly carbon retentive cities and regions. Or better yet: a truly carbon negative built and cultural environment, one that removes, sequesters, stores and binds greenhouse gas already in the atmosphere. This cannot be enough: a massive regenerative action agenda needs to ensue to attempt at ‘global gardening’, the un-development and re-nurturing of Earth’s biosphere.