A Series on Sustainable Planet, People, and Prosperity
Like Alice’s, my world is getting “curiouser and curiouser.”
We took off from Tucson at 7:00 Monday morning and landed in Hong Kong at 9:00 Tuesday evening for the start of a three-year adventure. The flight was timeless hours of shutout sunlight and psychedelic video overdose. There was a futuristic forest planet inhabited by Will Smith as a space general and computer-created sort-of-familiar giant animals, nature-created but stranger-than-fiction Birds of Paradise in a National Geographic documentary, a Hollywood-created Jackie Robinson helping to pave the way for Will’s fictional career, Jay Gatsby in a fantastical New York, and Iron Man keeping the world safe for all of them. Somewhere in all that resonant mess (given my new home) of strange but familiar and unusual but ordinary there was even a reference to James Boswell.
Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport terminals, modern and glass, could be anywhere in the world except luggage carts are free. The metro is inexpensive, clean, very fast, oh-so quiet, and seamlessly connects to other public transportation modes. Going to the airport you can check in for your flight and check your bags before boarding the 24-minute trip from downtown to the airport. Residential internet service of 300 to 1,000 Mbps is standard. In Tucson our service was only 20, way more expensive, and the fastest available speed was 105.
High-rise buildings are the norm in Honk Kong but they are built using bamboo scaffolding. With summer high temperatures in the 90s compounded by corresponding humidity (I can’t say it’s a dry heat anymore) energy guzzling window air conditioners (I calculate ours to be about 10 SEER) are ubiquitous. Does room-by-room cooling with low-efficiency equipment use less energy overall than whole-house air conditioning? Our apartment has tankless heaters. But efficiency may be compromised unless the building superintendent can figure out how to get the one for our shower to work properly if the high-volume shower head is delivering water at less than full blast.
Can we learn about sustainability from Hong Kong? Alice’s Duchess said, “Every story has a moral; you just need to be clever enough to find it.” I’ll let you know what I find.
Header photo by 10219, courtesy Pixabay.