The Obama administration unveiled a $4bn (£2.5bn) plan to upgrade public housing for low-income Americans today, as part of an ambitious green job-creation project.
Obama sent the vice-president, Joe Biden, and other senior officials to Denver for a formal announcement of the renovation scheme, which will replace windows, insulation and even light bulbs in ageing and neglected housing stock.
I was also intrigued by this idea for financing green home renovations:
The administration envisages a plan where home owners will arrange to have their homes retrofitted for greater energy efficiency simply by ticking a box on their utility bill, and then have the cost of the renovations factored into their bills.
Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface carpets, talks about making business sustainable for ‘tomorrow’s child’, and about the false choice between the environment and the economy illustrated by Interface’s success in transforming a petroleum-intensive company into an innovative and inspiring leader in closed-loop design and company-wide sustainability:
“Costs are down not up, reflecting some 400 million dollars of avoided cost in pursuit of zero waste … this has paid all the costs of the transformation of Interface … and dispels a myth of this false choice between the environment and the economy. Our products are the best they’ve ever been, inspired by design for sustainability.”
He finishes with this poem by one of his staff members, Glenn Thomas,
Tomorrow’s Child
Without a name; an unseen face
and knowing not your time nor place
Tomorrow’s Child, though yet unborn,
I met you first last Tuesday morn.
A wise friend introduced us two,
and through his sobering point of view
I saw a day that you would see;
a day for you, but not for me
Knowing you has changed my thinking,
for I never had an inkling
That perhaps the things I do
might someday, somehow, threaten you
Tomorrow’s Child, my daughter-son
I’m afraid I’ve just begun
To think of you and of your good,
Though always having known I should.
Begin I will to weigh the cost
of what I squander; what is lost
If ever I forget that you
will someday come to live here too.
The Guardian is running an interesting series called ‘Green your home’ in which they follow homeowners as they write about their experiences with green retrofits. A recent post from Alok Jha caught my eye for its interesting consideration of the relative costs and impacts of various efficiency measures:
Before I started this project, for example, I was convinced that double-glazing would be the crucial thing for my house but was blanching at the cost. But Russell’s report shows that it might not be the best use of my money: yes, it would reduce my energy footprint but at a cost of more than £10,000 (and that’s upgrading the sash windows to UPVC), it would take more than 100 years to pay back the investment.
Much more important are the draughts around the windows and external doors. Seal those and install some heavy curtains and I can get almost all the benefits of double-glazing for a few hundred pounds, a fraction of the cost for double-glazing.
Steven Strogatz on similarities in the mathematical patterns of cities and animals:
Jim Brown and Brian Enquist have argued that a 3/4-power law is exactly what you’d expect if natural selection has evolved a transport system for conveying energy and nutrients as efficiently and rapidly as possible to all points of a three-dimensional body, using a fractal network built from a series of branching tubes — precisely the architecture seen in the circulatory system and the airways of the lung, and not too different from the roads and cables and pipes that keep a city alive.
These numerical coincidences seem to be telling us something profound. It appears that Aristotle’s metaphor of a city as a living thing is more than merely poetic. There may be deep laws of collective organization at work here, the same laws for aggregates of people and cells.
If you’re interested in learning about the 100K House in Philadelphia, a project whose goal is build houses to LEED platinum standards at an affordable $100/square foot, then you might be interested in this recent blog post:
Those of you who are new might be wondering exactly who we are and what we are up to. You might also not be willing to scan through 250 blog posts to find out. For you we have made a list of 10 key posts that describe the project and our philosophy behind it. If you want to know a whole lot about the project and our company these posts are a great place to start. Be sure to read the comments too. There is always great stuff in the conversations.
Worldchanging considers the carbon footprint of solar panels and finds that they save a lot of energy and carbon:
A recent life-cycle analysis published at the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) showed that in a nice sunny place like Spain, PV panels reach energy payback (when they’ve saved as much fossil fuel as it took to make them) in about one to three years, depending on the type of panel.
A commenter points out that this issue is a bit of a red herring as the
manufacturing and the processes to make solar cells will be using the sun’s energy directly to make these products with NO carbon footprint. A totally green process is all in the news RIGHT NOW as one solar company after another announces installation of their own solar panels for their total energy manufacturing consumption.
It should be noted that the life-cycle impact also considered the effects of mining, processing of materials, etc.
Peter Thomson, on Gristmill, writes about switching out an oil-eating monster in his basement with a combined heat and power system which only cost 15% more than a conventional high efficiency gas boiler:
Combined heat and power—or cogeneration, as it’s also known—captures the waste heat from generating electricity to heat a building. Thomas Edison himself thought it up in the late 1800s, but only now, in the face of 21st century energy challenges, is it starting to catch on for small-scale use. Ours is one of the first 80 or so residential MCHP units to be installed in the entire country. And it should cut both our total annual energy cost and our carbon footprint by roughly half.
In an innovative joint venture, the Canadian natural gas giant Enbridge Gas Distribution has teamed up with green electricity marketer Bullfrog Power and the city of Toronto to promote solar thermal systems that promise to slash residential hot water heating costs by as much as 60 percent, or about $260 a year.
The Story of Stuff is an alarming video in which Annie Leonard provides a brilliantly fast-paced and accessible synthesis of problems associated with many current industrial production and consumption systems, including a revealing history of planned obsolescence. One notable fact: 99% of all stuff produced in America is trashed within six months. The video finishes with a hopeful nod to closed-loop production, equity and fair-trade, zero-waste, green chemistry, etc., and brings to mind Barack Obama’s recent call to “encourage young people to create and build and invent — to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.”
As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.
Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, as a component of a movement called “smart planning.”
Most of the major automakers are racing to develop electric vehicles, and the first of them are slated to arrive next year. The question many people have is just where we’re supposed to charge those cars when they aren’t in our driveways.
Better Place is but one company trying to solve that riddle, and it’s approaching it from two sides. First, it wants to blanket cities with charging stations that would be installed in public parking lots and other locations. That’s relatively straightforward; far more challenging - some would say ludicous - is its plan to establish networks of battery swap stations. That was the focus of today’s demonstration in Japan, where the Ministry of Environment has signed on with Better Place to spur the adoption of EVs.
As I noted in an earlier post, battery-driven electric vehicles are jumping to the forefront with fuel cell based cars suffering from a number of technological obstacles. From today’s New York Times:
Cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells, once hailed by President George W. Bush as a pollution-free solution for reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, will not be practical over the next 10 to 20 years, the energy secretary said Thursday, and the government will cut off funds for the vehicles’ development.
This article provides an excellent example of how creative and ingenious people can be at finding clean ways to produce energy when they put their minds to it.
Lockheed and a few other companies are pursuing ocean thermal energy conversion, which uses the difference in temperature between the ocean’s warm surface and its chilly depths to generate electricity.
Experts say that the balmy waters off Hawaii and Puerto Rico, as well as near United States military bases on islands like Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or Guam in the Pacific, would be good sites for developing this type of energy.
Hawaii and many other islands rely on imported oil to generate most of their electricity, which is expensive, and last year’s spikes in oil prices have reinvigorated their search for homegrown alternatives.
An interesting and thoughtful post by Lauren on ThinHouse on how easy it is to forget the mundane and everyday—yet very important—measures we can take to save energy:
Ten minutes ago I did something that cost no money, took 45 seconds, involved a single screwdriver and immediately reduced our home energy consumption in one major category by 10 percent. That we hadn’t done this months and months ago shows how caught up we have been in the big, sexy projects, how easy it is to be swept away by high-tech gizmos, how seductive – even for those of us on the look-out – this whole greenwashing thing is.
Going VERTical is a great new blog on the design and construction of a green home to be built to LEED platinum standards in Ottawa. They’re just getting started, and I’m looking forward to following along on this journey:
Our number one consideration in a home? Health - for us as individuals and for the planet that we live on. For me, simply put, health means less toxic and sustainable - a better living environment and a smaller carbon footprint.
Some of you might be thinking - sounds like more work than building a standard home. Others may be thinking - what do you mean in tangible terms by less toxic and sustainable? To respond to the first - yes, this will be somewhat more work than building a standard home, and we welcome that.
I’ll have to think about it more, but at first blush I like it—at least it has a spark of humanity. “Intelligence” carries connotations not only of adeptness but of sophistication and even elegance. After all, there’s something marvelous about how a mind like, say, Einstein’s took what seemed like a jumble of parts and derived compact, holistic explanations out of them. Intelligence doesn’t imply less, like efficiency, but better. And that’s what people want—not less, but better.
In an excellent talk on TED, Willie Smits presents a model of rainforest ecology restoration which created jobs for three thousand people, revitalized the local economy, led to an explosion in biodiversity, and restored a healthy environment for people and orangutans both.
Smits believes that to rebuild orangutan populations, we must first rebuild their forest habitat — which means helping local people find options other than the short-term fix of harvesting forests to survive. His Masarang Foundation raises money and awareness to restore habitat forests around the world — and to empower local people. In 2007, Masarang opened a palm-sugar factory that uses thermal energy to turn sugar palms (fast-growing trees that thrive in degraded soils) into sugar and even ethanol, returning cash and power to the community and, with luck, starting the cycle toward a better future for people, trees and orangs.