links Archives - Barrier Busting

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

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.

Honestly, the most interesting article I’ve read on the economic crisis, because it suggests the problem is structural and provides a prescription for addressing it. (From the New York Times a few weeks ago.)

Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.
Another take on the same idea as Soddy’s (above), expressed with a bit more verve by Joe Romm of Climate Progress.

Yes, homo “sapiens” sapiens have constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations.
Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air, by David JC McKay, is a detailed investigation, with numbers but without hard math, of how Britain can replace all its energy use with renewables. Very thorough, well-researched, and easy to read. The whole book is available on the web as PDF and HTML – you can also buy it from the site.

“For anyone with influence on energy policy, whether in government, business or a campaign group, this book should be compulsory reading.” Tony Juniper Former Executive Director, Friends of the Earth

Let me if you have a chance to read any of these pages or sites. I’d love to hear what you think.

Roundup: This Week’s Classics

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:

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Bjorn Lomborg (of The Skeptical Environmentalist fame) argues that emissions reduction goals like the Kyoto Protocol are never going to work. Instead, we have to replace our dirty energy sources altogether with non-polluting sources. (Of course, increasing energy efficiency is a cheap way to replace half our energy usage.)

Fortunately, there is a better option: to make low-carbon alternatives like solar and wind energy competitive with old carbon sources.

Lomborg set of a firestorm of controversy when he argued in 2001 that although global warming was important, we would be much better off as a planet investing in other areas of human suffering, such as finding a cure for AIDS and wiping out malaria. He now has a more recent book about climate change specifically: Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (Vintage)
Green Building Advisor’s Peter Yost describes the goals of the Thousand Home Challenge put up by Linda Wigington of Affordable Comfort.

Encourage all manner of organizations to undertake deep energy retrofits, document the way in which 1,000 of these projects from all over the country achieve 70%+ total household energy savings, and develop the tools needed to make it possible to do thousands more
In “Forgotten Pioneers of Energy Efficiency” on Green Building Advisor’s “Musings of an Energy Nerd” blog, Martin Holladay describes the Saskatchewan Conservation House, built in 1977, the shining – and forgotten – example that would later influence Dr. Feist in Darmstadt to develop the PassivHaus.

The nearly airtight building had triple-glazed windows, R-40 wall insulation, R-60 roof insulation, and one of the world’s first heat-recovery ventilators.
Treehugger reports on Professor Eberhard Jochem, recently awarded the first Bayer Climate Prize. Eberhard, of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI), has shown through his experiments and theories that improving energy efficiency 80 percent in the industrialized nations is not only possible, but profitable.

More than almost any other researcher, Professor Jochem has worked out and proven that improving energy efficiency is the central lever for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the various areas of our industrialized society.

Thermal Bridges, Passive Houses in the UK, and Spray Foam

On the fence — 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.

Do you know what thermal bridging is? I didn’t until a few weeks ago. Here’s a good overview from the Green Building Advisor website.

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.

What’s the UK doing about energy efficient building, you ask? They have a zero net energy homes initiative, where all new homes in the UK are supposed to be zero net energy by 2016. Probably not going to happen on schedule, according to an article from NewStart magazine, described on the Barefoot & Gilles site. (H/T to Sue Butcher for the link, via Twitter.)

Flaws in the government’s zero-carbon vision have forced ministers back to the drawing board. Is there a realistic way forward?

The Foam Man waxes eloquent about spray foam insulation:

One wall design that is sure to become more popular utilizes 2×4 studs, 2″ foam board as a thermal break, 7/16 OSB or other structural sheeting using 3.5″ screws for fasteners. Then the 2×4 stud cavities are sprayed with 2″ of closed cell foam. The total wall thickness ends up to be 6-9/16″, standard for window and door jambs. The R-Value of this quiet and comfortable energy wall is 24!

There are still questions about the GHG impact of making and spraying the foam, although The Foam Man also points out that all insulation techniques involve tradeoffs, and some spray foams have a high quantity of soy-based content, which lessens their footprint vs. petrochemical-based foams.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.