sustainability

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Structural Problems In The Economy, and How Britain Can Go Renewable

May 8, 2009 in analysis, business benefits, economy by nils | Add your comment

lasso

Roundup Time! (image by williac, CC 2.0 licensed)

Some more roundup links. These pages have been hanging around in my browser for weeks, waiting for me to blog about them. As with the links I posted earlier this week, I consider these “go to” articles and sites – continuously interesting and relevant.

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Climate Change and Sustainability Thoughts From Around The Web

April 8, 2009 in analysis, energy efficiency, green building, policy by nils | Add your comment

Zeus

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.

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What Is Sustainability? And What Is it Not?

April 2, 2009 in analysis by nils | Add your comment

nuages_n&bl_Lune

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 Top 10 Myths about Sustainability, 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.

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Sustainability and Energy Online Communities

February 23, 2009 in green networking by nils | 3 comments

Glass buildings

Glass Buildings In Helsinki (where I'm going this week, image by gadl, CC 2.0 licensed)

I have been discovering and joining a few interesting online communities focused on energy and sustainability issues. While it’s hard to keep up on everything that’s going on, they seem like a good source of like-minded folks with whom to discuss your ideas.

  • One of these is the Energy Collective. One of their features is that they aggregate selected posts from a number of blogs in the green energy space. The posts selected are usually meaty, and there are typically quite a few comments on each post through the Energy Collective.
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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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The Power Of Small Changes

February 2, 2009 in agriculture, analysis, green building by nils | 2 comments

Kale

We get a lot of kale in our CSA box of veggies (image by terren in Virginia, CC 2.0 license)

There’s a perception that green is more expensive and less convenient, and, truth to say, that’s sometimes true. It is more expensive to buy your groceries at Whole Foods. And putting solar panels on your roof doesn’t really save you money for many years, if at all, (although it’s still less than buying a new car).

But on the other hand, we know that there are lots of green things you can do that actually save money – replacing your incandescent lights with compact fluorescents is one familiar example. And if you’re building a house, putting in lots more insulation than is required by code can save a huge amount of both money and energy, while making your home more comfortable.

Sometimes it’s small changes that can flip this perception. I have a recent example from my own life that brought this home to me (so to speak):

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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Want Obama To Take Action On Energy? Vote At Change.Org

January 12, 2009 in economy, policy by nils | Add your comment

Idea

Idea! (photo by brunkfordbraun, CC 2.0 license)

Keeping The Lights On (this blog) just endorsed, and I voted for, an “Idea For Change In America” at change.org, Obama’s community website. The idea is “Develop & Implement a National Strategy for Sustainability.”

Ideas for Change in America is a nationwide competition to identify the best ideas for change in America. The top 10 ideas will be presented to the Obama administration just before inauguration day and form the basis of a nationwide advocacy campaign to turn each idea into actual policy.

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Biofuels Are Sustainable and Economical, Say German Researchers

December 15, 2008 in energy efficiency by nils | Add your comment

Ablaze

Blaze (image by Nicholas T, CC 2.0 license)

Oh Snap! Now some German scientists have (in effect) taken a swing at Stanford professor Mark Z. Jacobson, who concluded in a recent paper that biofuels are a bad policy direction (see summary post here).

In their paper Sustainable global energy supply based on lignocellulosic biomass from afforestation of degraded areas, Prof. Jürgen O. Metzger from Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany and Prof. Aloys Huettermann from the University of Goettingen in Germany say that growing and using biofuels for all the earth’s energy needs is not only possible without jeopardizing the global food supply, but also economically feasible.

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Amory Lovins On Declining Gas Prices

November 14, 2008 in business benefits, energy efficiency, jobs, policy by nils | Add your comment

There's a lot of energy to be saved in all sectors

There is lots of opportunity to reduce energy intensity throughout the U.S. economy

In “a few policies to hedge against crashing oil prices,” the latest post on the Rocky Mountain Institute’s “Environmental Lovin’s” blog, Amory Lovins himself provides some suggestions on how to keep making progress on energy independence despite the recent dip in oil prices. Of course, efficiency is the star of the show:

We now have techniques to save half our oil and gas, and three-quarters of our electricity, at about an eighth of their price. Energy efficiency remains one of the highest-return and lowest-risk investments in the entire economy.

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