Former Vice President and environmental profiteer Al Gore has partnered with former Mexican President Felipe Calderon to propose a global program of urban planning that would eradicate cars from cities while forcing cities to grow inward in a bid to make public transportation the eminent form of getting around.
Their plan, outlined in a presentation to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calls for a worldwide outlay of $90 trillion, to be spent shoring up the infrastructure of inner cities to make them more amenable to mass transit while banning cars outright.
The goal, of course, is to end the urban environment’s contribution to global warming. It’s an… ambitious… plan — to say the least.
“Here’s one way to solve global warming: Spend $90 trillion (£59 trillion) over the next few years to redesign all the cities — as in all the cities on Earth — so people live in more densely packed neighbourhoods and don’t need cars,” wrote Business Insider UK:
The key will be to persuade the mayors — again, all the mayors on Earth — that designing new cities this way will be vastly preferable to the old way, in terms of efficiency and prosperity for their residents. “The mistake we made in Mexico was to let cities develop however they want, and it’s a mess,” Calderon told Business Insider. “It’s in their [the mayors] best interests” not to repeat that “mistake,” Calderon said.
Lest a figure like $90 trillion alarm anyone, Gore and Calderon helpfully explained that amount is likely to be spent anyway as cities improve their infrastructures over time — so why not spend all that money in a concerted way across the globe?
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