Cities take the lead on green building in US

For several years now, the good news in the U.S. has come from local governments that are choosing not to wait for federal legislation to take the necessary action. In a three-year nationwide survey, the American Institute of Architects found that 138 cities that are home to more than 50,000 inhabitants had developed green building programs. This represents more than 53 million Americans in total, or about 17 percent of the country! The West coast leads the trend, with 56 cities that have implemented green building programs, but the East coast is rapidly catching up, with a 76 percent increase in the number of such cities since 2007.

Elevator dispatch

The latest issue of Canadian Facilities Management and Design (October 2010, sadly unavailable online) has an interesting article on elevator dispatch technology. The idea is that when someone approaches the elevator bank, they enter in the floor they want to go to on a console rather than a simple up/down button. The console then tells them which elevator to get on. The dispatch system optimizes travel by grouping people who want to go to similar locations, reducing the number of trips and waiting time. Because the elevator system operates more effectively and efficiently it can save over 30% on energy and get people where they want to go in less time. Cool, eh.

World Habitat Day Oct. 4, 2010

Support Habitat for Humanity on Monday, October 4 - Designated by the UN as World Habitat Day:

Oct. 4, 2010, in recognition of World Habitat Day, Habitat for Humanity will raise awareness of the need for improved shelter and highlight Habitat’s priorities: the worldwide connection between human health and housing, and, in the United States, neighborhood revitalization. These themes echo the United Nations’ chosen theme for 2010 for events in the host city of Shanghai, China and the rest of the world: “Better City, Better Life.”

Management Plan Could End Brazilian Deforestation By 2020, Study Says

Worldchanging shares a hopeful message about the Amazon rainforest:

“Market forces and Brazil’s political will are converging in an unprecedented opportunity to end deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon with 80 percent of the forest still standing,” said Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center and lead author of the study. Since 2005, Brazil has reduced the rate of deforestation by 64 percent. According to the study, an investment of $6.5 to $18 billion in several areas from 2010 to 2020 can help Brazil end deforestation.

How Elon Musk Turned Tesla Into the Car Company of the Future

Wired has a nice article on the history of Tesla, the new electric car company that demonstrated what might be possible by making it’s dashing Roadster:

The auto industry began to take notice of the little startup with the big ideas. In January 2007, GM unveiled a prototype electric vehicle called the Chevrolet Volt. In an interview with Newsweek, Bob Lutz, then GM’s vice chair, said, “If some Silicon Valley startup can solve this equation, no one is going to tell me anymore that it’s unfeasible.” That same year, Daimler unveiled plans to develop an electric version of its Smart car. Suddenly, the major carmakers were moving into electrics so fast that Tesla risked being left behind by the wave it had generated.

Green energy upgrade protects Ontarians from rising nuclear costs

Choosing to scale up green energy to replace the retiring Pickering nuclear station is more affordable for Ontarians than buying expensive replacement reactors, says a report released today by Renewable is Doable, an alliance of organizations including the Pembina Institute, the Canadian Environmental Law Association and Greenpeace. Last summer, Ontario suspended its purchase of two new replacement reactors when their cost reportedly topped $26 billion — $20 billion more than expected in 2007.

NREL: Energy Saving A/C Conquers All Climates

An intriguing air-conditioning process that dries incoming hot, humid air using a desiccant and then cools the air using evaporative cooling is being refined by NREL:

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory has invented a new air conditioning process with the potential of using 50 percent to 90 percent less energy than today’s top-of-the-line units. It uses membranes, evaporative cooling and liquid desiccants in a way that has never been done before in the centuries-old science of removing heat from the air.

“The idea is to revolutionize cooling, while removing millions of metric tons of carbon from the air,” NREL mechanical engineer Eric Kozubal, co-inventor of the Desiccant-Enhanced eVaporative air conditioner (DEVap), said.

“We’d been working with membranes, evaporative coolers and desiccants. We saw an opportunity to combine them into a single device for a product with unique capabilities.”

Sylvania Intros Sleek Ultra Bright LED

It seems as though I’ve been waiting for LED bulbs to become a reality for most of my life, and it’s exciting to see them start to hit the market.  Can you image a lightbulb that only needs to be changed once every 10 years and uses 1/5 of the power of an incandescent bulb?

The Sylvania Ultra LED A-line 12-watt bulb is a second-generation retrofit product and has an estimated life of 25,000 hours.  The bulb has a color temperature of 2700k and a color rendering index of 90 …

The Osram Sylvania LED is dimmable, contains no mercury, and will be available for purchase late August 2010.  No word yet on pricing, but, according to Gadgetwise, the company says affordability is paramount.

The Crisis Comes Ashore

Al Gore writes powerfully on the perils of climate change in the New Republic in a wide-ranging and thoughtful response to the recent crisis in the Gulf of Mexico:

It is understandable that the administration will be focused on the immediate crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. But this is a consciousness-shifting event. It is one of those clarifying moments that brings a rare opportunity to take the longer view. Unless we change our present course soon, the future of human civilization will be in dire jeopardy. Just as we feel a sense of urgency in demanding that this ongoing oil spill be stopped, we should feel an even greater sense of urgency in demanding that the much larger and more dangerous ongoing emissions of global warming pollution must also be stopped to make the world safe from the climate crisis that is building all around us.

Professor sees red over ‘green building’ claims

Dan Harvey, a professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Toronto rips into contemporary building design:

We suffer from brain-dead building design. We’re building all-glass condominiums, all-glass office buildings. The office buildings are hermetically sealed – they have entire glazing sections facing west with no external shading devices. These buildings are uninhabitable without massive air-conditioning systems. … It’s really pointless to do anything else until you address this issue. I say you’ve got it all backwards. And the problem is, these buildings we’re stuck with for 50, 100, I don’t know how many years. I mean, even a coal power plant is only going to last 40 years. A brain-dead building – and that’s almost all we’re building – is going to last 100 years.

Environmental disaster looms as Gulf oil spill reaches shore

More on the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico from today’s Globe and Mail:

The oil slick could become the nation’s worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez in scope. It imperils hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world’s richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life.

“It is of grave concern,” David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press about the spill. “I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling.”

This is an excellent example of the kinds of externalized costs that make the true cost of energy production from oil staggeringly high.