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:
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.
' Climate Progress, the "indispensible blog" according to Tom Friedman, lays down the law on what is and isn't going to solve the climate change crisis.
Grist Magazine's online edition is presenting, and debunking, the top myths related to climate change and the policies needed to address it.
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).
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.
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, , 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.
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).
Arlington's Courthouse Square (image by Helgas Lobster Stew, CC 2.0 licensed)
I posted last week about my project, along with some other Menlo Park residents, to get some incentives for energy efficient buildings into the Menlo Park building code. I put out a tweet on Twitter the other day to see if any of my "tweeps" had suggestions for me. , of the , turned me on to the .
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.
Over the weekend I put up what I hope will be an important resource in the goal of achieving 100% zero-net energy homes in California by 2018 - a new website for the .
From the site:
SVPH is helping local municipalities to set challenging but practical goals for maximizing energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction in the local communities of the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California.
One of the Middle Class Task Force panels at the Philly meeting
If you're not reading the new whitehouse.gov blog, you're missing out.
This meeting in Philly last week from whitehouse.gov was great. Speakers included John Podesta, former Clinton staffer and now with the Center for American Progress; Van Jones from Green for All (based in the Bay Area), Fred Krupp from the Environmental Defense Fund, a bunch of cabinet and administration appointees, and representatives from labor like Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers of America.
