Page 93 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

70 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Clark and Fast (2008) in founding the science of “qualitative economics”
made the point about economics since it needed to define ideas, numbers,
words, symbols, and even sentences due to the misuse of “clean” to really
mean fossil fuels and technologies that were not good for the environment.
The documentary film, Fuel (Tickell, 2009) made these points too as it told the
history about how “clean” was used to describe fossil fuels like natural gas to
placate and actually deceive the public, politicians, and decision makers. For
example, Henry Ford was a farmer and used biofuels in his cars until the early
1920s when the oil and gas industries forced him to change to fossil fuels.
Hawkins et al. (1999) refer to the environmental changes as the beginning
of “The Next Industrial Revolution.” This observation only touched the surface
of what the world is facing in the context of climate change. Moreover, the
irony is that China has already “leapfrogged” and moved ahead of the United
States into the GIR (Clark and Isherwood, 2008, 2010). While China leads the
United States now in energy demand and CO 2 emissions, it is also one of the
leading nations with new environmental programs, money to pay for them, and
installation of advanced infrastructures from water to high-speed rail systems.
These economic changes came first from Japan, South Korea, and the
European Union. Rebuilding after WWII from the total destruction of both
Asia and Europe meant an opportunity to develop and re-create businesses and
industrials and commercialize new technologies. The historical key in Japan
and then later in the European Union was the dependency on fossil fuels for
industrial development, production, and transportation. For Japan, as an island
nation, this was a critical transformation in the mid-19th century with the
American “Black Ships” demanding that Japan open itself to international,
especially American, trade. However, as recent events testify, Japan made the
mistake of bending to the political and corporate pressures of the United States
to install nuclear power plants despite the atomic bombings of two of its major
cities in WWII. The final results of tragedies from the 9.0 earthquake are not
final yet in terms of the nuclear power plants in Fukushima and its global
impact on the environment, let alone in Japan and the immediate region of
northern Asia.
Soon after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the GIR become
dominant in Japan and spread rapidly to South Korea as well as Taiwan and
somewhat to India. China came later when it leapfrogged into the 21st century
through the GIR. Germany, Japan, and South Korea took the lead in producing
vehicles that required less amounts of fossil fuels and were more environment-
“friendly,” often again called “clean tech.” Hence their industrial development
of cars, high-tech appliances, and consumer goods dominated global markets.
The United States ignored the fledging technological and economic efforts
in the European Union, South Korea, and Japan as the nation tilted into a long
period of self-absorption, bubble-driven economic vitality. The nation had a
history of cheap fossil fuels primarily from inside the country and the given
high-tax breaks and incentives (Tickell, 2009). The 2IR also had survived