Quartz: China’s new Davos pledge—blue skies, literally, in three years

Air pollution in China is so bad that it darkens skies in the daytime, gives citizens cancer, and hinders its ability to produce solar power, thanks to the country’s coal consumption. China’s Communist Party promised to fight pollution in its latest five-year plan and even bring back blue skies, but Liu is the first to put a timeframe on the pledge. [...]

“Green and low-carbon development is what the Chinese people and people across the world want the most,” Liu said. In the next three years, he said China will “scale up pollution control, lower intensity of resource consumption, make our development more eco-friendly and our skies blue again.” [...]

He did, however, talk about the need for “rational choices,” another dig that seemed aimed at Trump. It is “crucial to make prudent and rational choices, choices that will serve mankind well” on issues like terrorism and climate change, Liu said.

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Business Insider: Incredible images of Washington, DC before it was a city

Before Washington, DC became the capital city of the United States, it was a sprawling, 100-square-mile plot of plantations, forests, and hills.

The city's urban plan was the brainchild of French immigrant and architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who envisioned an egalitarian design for the District — a vision that was a physical manifestation of the American dream. In the 18th century, L’Enfant filled DC with plenty of public space, including parks, plazas, and wide sidewalks.

Over time, DC transformed from a modest Native American settlement into the dense metropolis it is today.

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Slate: We’ll Always Have Sky City

Expecting to find Sky City an empty shell, I’d stocked up on water and peanuts at the train station. Instead, the streets hummed with the mosquito-whine of scooters and bustled with pedestrians: Parents pushed strollers, young couples queued for Pocky, teenage boys lounged on shady benches, and elderly women shuffled under their neon umbrellas. I snuck into the back entrance of what I thought was an abandoned hotel, only to discover myself in the chandeliered consulting room of a plastic surgery clinic. It advertised a procedure of “exquisite carvings” that would give patients a “U.S.-nose.” [...]

I learned it had been two years since a new management company had taken over the town. Where an earlier breed of “build-it-and-they’ll-come” developer had judged success in concrete poured, this more enlightened manager had recognized the importance of luring services and stores that would attract residents. The company’s chairman promised he would bring Sky City a Montessori school, “French research institutes,” and spas offering the “world’s most authentic and advanced beauty treatments”; a year later, he pegged the town’s population at nearly 40,000 people—though a bored twentysomething at Madenjoy Real Estate told me that between 14,000 and 18,000 residents had moved in. Still, it appeared something was working: According to Hangzhou Daily, when 663 new units went on sale in August, they sold out in less than four minutes for an average of 14,000 yuan per square meter—about $200 per square foot, slightly more than the average price in Houston. (The average price-per-square-foot for apartments in downtown Hangzhou, two hours away by public transportation, is about triple that, which might explain the high proportion of young families—Paris as starter home.) The developers behind the Hangzhou Paris did not consider it an “eerily depressing ghost town.” They described it as the foundation for a new satellite city.  [...]

Not every former ghost town has come to life. In Shanghai’s Holland Village (no relation to Liaoning’s), most storefronts along the main street stood empty or deserted, their dusty concrete floors littered with desiccated bouquets or curled posters. Like something out of fairy tale fever dream, I met an elderly woman who lived inside the town’s wooden windmill—the previous tenant, a wedding photography studio, had left it in her care after business went south. Several buildings, including replicas of Amsterdam’s Maritime Museum and De Bijenkorf department store, were under construction—just as they had been during a previous visit in 2008. Since then, the developers had successfully completed a stone cathedral, which they’d outfitted with crucifixes, a crèche, and a wooden altarpiece, then rented to local businesses for use as offices.

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openDemocracy: A 'Minister for Loneliness' is a sticking plaster for the ills of neoliberalism

According to research by the Coop and the Red Cross, loneliness affects at least nine million people in Britain. The Campaign to End Loneliness reports that over three-quarters of GPs say they are seeing between one and five patients a day who have come in mainly because they are lonely. Reflecting no doubt this growing social reality, there has been a lot of talk in the media about the problem of loneliness over recent years, and charitable and campaigning organizations dedicated to addressing the problem have mushroomed. Most recently, following the death of MP Jo Cox, who campaigned energetically on loneliness, the Jo Cox Commission on loneliness was set up by the Government last year, and has recently published its recommendations. The Government has acted rapidly, giving responsibility for loneliness to the Minister for Sport and Civil Society, Tracey Crouch, and promising to publish a cross-governmental strategy on the issue later in the year to implement the other recommendations of the Cox Report. So that’s it then: due to the efforts of many determined campaigners, loneliness has finally come to the attention of our leaders, and they have a plan! We can move on to other matters. [...]

Starting with the historical roots, which go back to the Enlightenment thinkers, loneliness is to some extent the negative corollary of the modern desire for individual freedom from the restrictions and constraints of traditional institutions and forms of life: religion, family, village, tyrannical bosses and so on. Individuals want to exercise greater choice over their work, the place they live, their moral and political beliefs, their sexual orientation and so on.

But the downside of this desire is the creation of the more mobile and restless individuals that we are today, who choose to opt out of traditional communities like extended family, neighbourhood, church, or union. The difficulty is that we cannot always find substitutes for the fellowship and feeling of community these institutions provided and which they need. Increased demand for individual liberty tends to produce more lonely individuals. This is why it is so important for modern societies to create institutions and places which foster community and togetherness, places that people know they can find company and fellowship whilst not sacrificing their individual freedom. [...]

The second way that neoliberalism fosters loneliness is by eliminating anything which is not “productive” in a narrow economic understanding of this term - anything which does not produce a return-on-investment for shareholders. Governments of all colours have in recent years implemented policies which dissolve or undermine youth clubs, sports clubs, libraries, and charities supporting disabled or older people, or other vulnerable groups - exactly the kind of collective projects which protect people from loneliness in modern freedom-loving societies. At the same time, the army of volunteers who once ran such community projects is drying up, exhausted from having had every last drop of their productivity - that is, their energy - squeezed from them in their day job. These are some of the real causes of contemporary loneliness.

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Scientific American: Cleaning Up Air Pollution May Strengthen Global Warming

New research is helping to quantify just how big that effect might be. A study published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that eliminating the human emission of aerosols—tiny, air-polluting particles often released by industrial activities—could result in additional global warming of anywhere from half a degree to 1 degree Celsius.

This would virtually ensure that the planet will warm beyond the most stringent climate targets outlined in the Paris climate agreement. World leaders have set an ambitious goal of keeping global temperatures within 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius of their preindustrial levels. But research suggests the world has already warmed by about 1 degree—meaning even another half a degree of warming could push the planet into dangerous territory. [...]

The research also suggests that removing aerosols could have striking regional consequences by causing major changes in precipitation and other weather patterns in certain parts of the world. Aerosols don't linger in the atmosphere for very long, meaning they don't have time to spread around the world the way carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases do. Their effects tend to be strongest in the regions where they were emitted in the first place. [...]

Many nations, including the United States, have made significant strides in cutting down on air pollution—often for health-related reasons—over the last few decades, and other countries are stepping up their efforts now, as well. Additionally, global efforts to cut down on greenhouse gases are likely to have a spillover effect on aerosols, because air pollution is often a byproduct of the same industrial sources that produce carbon emissions. Reducing one type of emission can help cut down on the other.

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