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But It's Delicious!
Remember when you were a kid and your Mom told you to do something "just because I said so." Didn't that make you not want to do it? But when she said "if you do it, I'll get you some ice cream!" you were much more motivated, weren't you?
Don't tell me what to do; instead, make it worth my while to do the right thing - and then I'll probably do it.
There was an interesting post a few days ago on the Consilience blog about around the country:
We're leaving money on the table by not improving energy efficiency (image by pfala, CC 2.5 licensed)
Would you spend $520 to save $1,200? That's the choice McKinsey & Co is offering to the U.S. about energy efficiency. In their , released last week, McKinsey shows how the U.S. can reduce its non-transportation energy use by 23%, eliminate the emissions of 1.1 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually, and save $1,200 billion, for a cost of about $520 billion.
They do recognize that achieving these results requires some new thinking on our parts:
Links
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:
A school in Reidberg, Germany, built using the passive house approach
I got back yesterday from the in Frankfurt, Germany. My biggest takeaways from the conference are:
I'm writing this here at San Francisco International while I wait for my flight to Frankfurt. I'll be attending the this weekend. I'm expecting to meet lots of interesting people, see all kinds of energy efficiency components like windows, doors, and heat recovery ventilators, and learn a lot more about how building to the Passive House standard is going to help California and U.S. achieve energy independence.
Some of my goals include:
A mythical character (image by Eddi 07, CC 2.0 licensed)
A handful of good articles from the past few weeks, on climate change and sustainable building.
Someone entered this topic in an online forum to which I subscribe:
The main problem with lowering the carbon level is down to individuals, to behaviour, to good citizenship and that is the biggest challenge of all... how many times to you see careless behaviours? how do you change that?
I just had to respond. I think this attitude is the best way to make sure that end in the end, nothing good happens. I'm reprinting my comment on the topic below, unedited (even though you all know about passive houses already).
Chain link fence (get it?) - (image by James Jordan, CC 2.0 licensed)
As I've been surfing green building sites and articles over the last week, I ran across these interesting items. I hope you find them useful.
Thermal bridging occurs wherever assembly components with low R-values relative to surrounding materials span from the inside to the outside of a building assembly.
It's code for something! (Image by Marco Fedele, CC 2.0 licensed)
As I discussed in my earlier post, Code changes and incentives are critical for energy independence, it's going to be tough to change the energy efficiency of our building stock until building and planning commissions provide incentives to owners and builders to take those extra steps, and spend that extra money.
