The 15-minute city (FMC) is an urban planning concept designed to meet the sustainability targets and indicators pursuant with Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11). The international construction of 15-minute cities is a global project that is being rolled out in the UK in cities like Oxford and Bath.

The local council’s FMC objective in Bath is to establish a “movement strategy” to engineer “how people move” and “how space is shared.” This will “shift” resident “away from decades of car dependency” and will instead compel them to prioritise “sustainable travel”—walking, cycling and public transport.

The overarching ambition in Bath is to achieve “climate goals.” The local authority is, like nearly every other UK local authority, on an SDG-driven “Journey to Net Zero.” This has led to the creation of four “traffic cells” in Bath. The clearly stated reason for the zoning is to enforce a “reductions in car use.” [Read More]

“If you reach Net Zero by 2050, if you do it worldwide, you avoid about a third of a degree of warming. If it’s just Europe and the Anglosphere, it’s closer to a tenth of a degree,” says Dr Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and professor emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “So you have avoided a tenth of a degree of warming at a cost of probably tens of trillions of dollars. Doesn’t seem like a bargain to me,” he adds. “How far will the population go in saying, we will sacrifice ourselves for a symbolic gesture?” [Read More]