For most people, the biggest users of energy are heating (or air conditioning in warmer climates) and transportation — this suggests most environmentally-friendly way to live is in a flat in an inner-city location. A flat takes much less energy to heat that a house, both because the flat itself is smaller, and because the entire building is much larger, so it has less surface area (from which heat can escape) relative to its volume. The limited available space means less temptation to accumulate large quantities of consumer junk, and inner-city people are less likely to need cars than suburban people, as the high density of development means amenities are more likely to be in walking distance and that public transport is likely to be much more useful.

The original New Towns were intended to be relatively self-sufficient, with companies choosing to locate there as there was more room to develop than in older towns and cities. In this respect they were a failure, as most New Towns ended up as little more than dormitory communities whose residents commute to jobs in older towns and cities. If the new eco-towns have the same problem, the consequences are likely to be even worse, as they (unlike the original New Towns) were engineered to make car usage more difficult.

Perhaps planned settlements are in general a bad idea, because they often lack an economic raison d’etre (“jobs” in layman’s terms). One possible exception would be planned capital cities (such as Washington DC, Brasilia or Islamabad), because a capital city naturally has one huge employer already (the central government).

But, guess what? Immigration has gone to zero. Mexicans have reduced their birth rate from 6 to 2 and are staying home where opportunities have been increasing.

Does this let the Lib Planners made changes?

No…they turn a deaf eye to the data (as always) and continue to berate the voters with even more big budget, high density projects that will bankrupt the region if not voted down!

There has been a trend in recent decades–Eastern spirituality came to the West and hippies created their own interpretation–towards believing that it is wrong to intellectualize. It is a highly stupid idea, but nonetheless, many people have come to believe that the intellect does not give good results, rather, it is more important to feel, to intuit, to visualize, than it is to examine things under the light of reason. Reason is seen as cold and impersonal, whilst ecology is seen as something that you have to feel, to become joined with, to “go with the flow”, to let your intuition guide you, and so on.

It was highly amusing to see it mentioned in a BBC article about Doctors’ private jargon used in medical notes: they sometimes jot down “GROLIES”, meaning “Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt”.

While you might be confused about the post above, we are equally confused about your comment.

Eco-towns aren’t the expression of individuals making choices about where and how they live. Eco-towns are the UK government’s response to the housing shortage (largely a product of its own short-sightedness) and the demands of the environmental values it has attached itself to. LLB think that Eco-homes will make people happier. For those who have designed their own eco-homes, perhaps this is the case. For the people who will be placed into low-cost, mass produced eco-homes, there will be little choice about the way they live their lives. As we have said before, what are being created are eco-slums. Eco towns are not merely epiphenomena. Looking at them gives us an opportunity to try to understand why the Government has absorbed environmental rhetoric. Our argument is that environmentalism is not prolific because of its own momentum, so to speak. Instead, what’s driving the rise of green ideas is the establishment’s need for them. As we say in our introduction ‘Exaggerated environmental concern is merely serving to provide direction for directionless politics.’

You say that we should be engaging with the producer of ‘Earth: The climate Wars’ on Commentisfree. But we already have – our post on the film was cited by Renouf, and linked to in his post. My article on Spiked about the film was also linked to by one of the commenters there.

And where has this stuff about not challenging the likes on Monbiot come from? We’re always on about Monbiot! We’re bored of Monbiot! And Lynas, who is no less a figure in the Green movement, and is the subject of our last-but-one posts.

Rich