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No Manhattan Project, But Don’t Say No To Breakthrough Innovations

April 10, 2009 in accelerating change, analysis, carbon mitigation, energy efficiency, energy generation, energy storage, opinion, technology by nils | 1 comment

a polar bear and her baby

The polar bears say "keep the innovations coming - it's getting warm out here!" (image by Just Being Myself, CC 2.0 licensed)

While I agree with Joseph Romm on Climate Progress that we can’t count on a “Manhattan Project”-style endeavour to engineer our way out of the climate crisis in the short term, nonetheless, I think it’s reasonable to have a certain expectation that technology will improve over the right timescale, so we can be ready to take advantage of it.

A few weeks ago Martin Brown had a great post on his Fairsnape blog on Recession Thoughts and Tips. One of his many excellent suggestions was

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Disagreeing With The New Yorker On Stimulus Vs. Sustainability

March 30, 2009 in analysis, green building, opinion by nils | Add your comment

Eustace Tilley Considers Electric Cars

Eustace Tilley Considers Electric Cars

I’m a big fan of the New Yorker, and read most issues cover to cover. Their politics usually align with mine, and I always enjoyed Hendrik Hertzberg sticking it to the Cheney administration. But I have to take issue with some of their economic opinions. In particular, David Owen’s Talk of Town, Economy Vs. Environment, in the March 20 issue got me hot and bothered.

Owen’s basic position seems to be that to be sustainable we can’t spend, and if we spend we’re not sustainable. Therefore, the stimulus package and a long term goal for sustainability are incompatible. (With the subtext, apparently, that stimulus is more important.)

I have several issues with Owen’s position. For example, Owens doesn’t say much about spending on sustainability – there $15 billion of that. Much of that, because it’s focused on energy efficiency, will result in improved productivity. It turns out you can get a lot of productivity from sustainability improvements. It’s one of the magic tricks – called the “triple bottom line” – you spend less or the same up front, you save more, and you’re healthier and more productive. In this case sustainability is actually directly improving the economy.

Individual Action Is Not Enough

March 26, 2009 in agriculture, analysis, energy efficiency, green building, opinion, policy by nils | Add your comment

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).

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Biohaus: First Certified PassivHaus in the U.S.

March 13, 2009 in green building, opinion, policy by nils | 2 comments

Front View of the Waldsee BioHaus

Front View of the Waldsee BioHaus

The other day I posted about one of the first passive houses built in the U.S. I just ran across another passive house example – this one is the first U.S.-built home to be certified to the German Passivhaus standard. The house was built at the Concordia  Language Villages in Minnesota in 2006, partially funded by the first-ever grant to a U.S. recipient by the German environmental foundation Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU).

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Green Building Salon – A Few Conclusions

February 3, 2009 in green building, opinion, policy by nils | 3 comments

|||| striaticon

Perception is reality when it comes to green energy (image by striatic, CC 2.0 license)

I was thinking about what we accomplished/learned at our initial green building/green energy salon a few days ago, and came up with a few top candidates:

  • Liability – this is one of the biggest issues at the front of mind for builders and architects – they have to guarantee their buildings, and that makes them very wary of new technologies. One big challenge for green building will be coming up with ways to break through that barrier (the other alternative, of course, is to wait long enough that the new technologies prove themselves – but even this needs to be optimized). For example, perhaps the government could help take on some of the liability to reduce the risk for architects and builders trying to do the right thing.
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Avoiding The Cliff Ahead

January 29, 2009 in accelerating change, analysis, consumption, economy, energy efficiency, energy generation, energy storage, green building, opinion, policy, profits by nils | 1 comment

Uluwatu Temple, Bali (HDR)

A cliff in Bali (image by seanmcgrath, CC 2.0 licensed)

My green building and blogging colleague Barry Katz just had a post about James Howard Kunstler on his The Future Is Green Blog. Kunstler is one of the “dystopians” featured in a  New Yorker article last week. Kunstler is not sanguine about what the future is going to look like for us and our descendants. He thinks that not only is global warming likely to cause a disaster, but so is the current, or an upcoming, financial meltdown. Barry writes:

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Ten Energy Predictions For The Next Decade

January 5, 2009 in accelerating change, carbon mitigation, economy, energy efficiency, energy generation, energy storage, green building, integrative design, opinion, solar electricity, transportation by nils | Add your comment

Snow on the San Gabriel Mountains (photo by Jerry Thompson1)

Snow on the San Gabriel Mountains (photo by Jerry Thompson1, CC 2.0 license)

On December 30 of last year (six days ago), my wife and I were in Pasadena, CA visiting the Greene and Greene exhibit at the Huntington Library. It was one of those glorious and rare smog-free days in the LA basin. The air sparkled, you could see for miles in every direction, and mountain range after mountain range was visible – all the way out to the snow-covered San Gabriels. Nowadays, the air is only ever this clear around the Christmas holiday, when the freeway traffic is substantially reduced and a lot of factories shut down for the week. It got me thinking about how the future – say ten to twenty years hence – may be unrecognizable in both dramatic and mundane ways. For example, smog-free days may no longer be rare in LA, once the economy has shifted off fossil fuels. (I suspect the traffic will remain, unfortunately!)

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Old Failures And New Rules For The Auto Industry

December 8, 2008 in analysis, economy, opinion, transportation by nils | Add your comment

The best pieces I’ve read on the auto industry bailout/failure/bankruptcy are Bob Sutton’s giant flame, “Thoughts About Why GM Executives Are Clueless And Their Destructive ‘No We Can’t’ Mindset” and Umair Haque’s “Detroit’s 6 Mistakes and How Not to Make Them.”

While neither of these articles are about green energy or hybrid cars or sustainability per se, they both get at some of the big issues that industry and finance worldwide have to overcome for the the world to change as it must.

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Trains? No, Planes and Automobiles (At Least In The U.S.)

December 2, 2008 in opinion, transportation by nils | 1 comment

A Pretty Dutch Train

A pretty antique Dutch train (Photo by Gen Gibson)

Over on Will Blog for Food, John agitates for a much extended use of trains in the U.S. to partially address our current dependence on cars.

As an example, I spent three weeks in Holland a few years ago. I could get anywhere in the country by rail and back to Amsterdam the same day. But here’s the kicker: I never had to wait more than 5 minutes for a train to Amsterdam from any where in the country. Even in former communist countries like the Czech Republic you can get anywhere by rail and/or bus.

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Climate Change In Extremistan

November 12, 2008 in analysis, investing, opinion by nils | 1 comment

The Black Swan (book)

Taleb's The Black Swan. Image via Wikipedia

In his Edge Magazine essay Life Is Not A Casino, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the trader and author (of The Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness) discusses why he no longer thinks that using statistics and probability to make decisions is wise. The problem, he says, is that:

When it comes to low odds, decision making no longer depends on the probability alone. It is the pair, probability times payoff (or a series of payoffs), the expectation, that matters. On occasion, the potential payoff can be so vast that it dwarfs the probability—and these are usually real-world situations in which probability is not computable.

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