Roundup: This Week’s Classics

April 27, 2009 in energy efficiency, green building by nils | Add your comment

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I surf across hundreds of articles a week as I learn more and more about green building, energy efficiency, and climate change. Most are interesting, but a few become touchstones that I end up talking about with others, and returning to again and again. Some candidates for that status that I found in the last week are below:

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Bjorn Lomborg (of The Skeptical Environmentalist fame) argues that emissions reduction goals like the Kyoto Protocol are never going to work. Instead, we have to replace our dirty energy sources altogether with non-polluting sources. (Of course, increasing energy efficiency is a cheap way to replace half our energy usage.)

Fortunately, there is a better option: to make low-carbon alternatives like solar and wind energy competitive with old carbon sources.

Lomborg set of a firestorm of controversy when he argued in 2001 that although global warming was important, we would be much better off as a planet investing in other areas of human suffering, such as finding a cure for AIDS and wiping out malaria. He now has a more recent book about climate change specifically: Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (Vintage)
Green Building Advisor’s Peter Yost describes the goals of the Thousand Home Challenge put up by Linda Wigington of Affordable Comfort.

Encourage all manner of organizations to undertake deep energy retrofits, document the way in which 1,000 of these projects from all over the country achieve 70%+ total household energy savings, and develop the tools needed to make it possible to do thousands more
In “Forgotten Pioneers of Energy Efficiency” on Green Building Advisor’s “Musings of an Energy Nerd” blog, Martin Holladay describes the Saskatchewan Conservation House, built in 1977, the shining – and forgotten – example that would later influence Dr. Feist in Darmstadt to develop the PassivHaus.

The nearly airtight building had triple-glazed windows, R-40 wall insulation, R-60 roof insulation, and one of the world’s first heat-recovery ventilators.
Treehugger reports on Professor Eberhard Jochem, recently awarded the first Bayer Climate Prize. Eberhard, of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI), has shown through his experiments and theories that improving energy efficiency 80 percent in the industrialized nations is not only possible, but profitable.

More than almost any other researcher, Professor Jochem has worked out and proven that improving energy efficiency is the central lever for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the various areas of our industrialized society.