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:
The "Hammer Man" kinetic sculpture at the Frankfurt Conference Center
On Thursday 23 April (tomorrow as I write this) I will be giving a brief talk about passive houses and my recent visit to the 13th International Passive House Conference in Frankfurt last week. The talk will be in San Francisco at the Prana Restaurant on Howard St., starting at 7pm.
[I] will provide a report on the 13th International Passive House Conference... This is the premier conference on passive homes, homes so energy-efficient that they don't require a furnace or air conditioner to keep their occupants comfortable.
Menlo Park City Council Chambers Sign
I went to the Menlo Park City Council meeting last night to provide an in-person comment on their draft. The draft has been circulating for comments for a few months and last night was the presentation of the comments from council staff to the council. As you may recall, my friend architect Matt Harris and I provided a comment on the CAP.
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.
Commercial Buildings Need To Be Green, Too
The National Real Estate Investor recently that local governments are starting to mandate. Of course, LEED led the list, along with the new ANSI National Green Building Standard, GBI 01-200XP from the , expected this summer, and "" a commercial building green standard under development by a consortium including ASHRAE and the (creator of the LEED standards).
Clouds (original name: Nuages - image by luc.viatour, CC 2.0 licensed)
In their special issue on Earth 3.0, Scientific American explores the concept of "sustainability" and the myths surrounding it as we face an uncertain future. In , they observe:
When a word becomes so popular you begin hearing it everywhere ... it means one of two things. Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliché, or it has real conceptual heft. "Green" (or, even worse, "going green") falls squarely into the first category. But "sustainable," which at first conjures up a similarly vague sense of environmental virtue, actually belongs in the second.
What if the White House were a Passive House?
David White, an architectural energy technical consultant at Transsolar, sent a letter to President Obama recommending the Passive House as a new energy efficiency standard:
I'd like to draw your attention to one approach to energy efficient building, which is called Passive House ... the most stringent residential energy efficiency standard in the world.
White goes on to describe the Passive House approach in more detail, and ends with this call for a subsidy and/or mandate.
