From Grist:
Several regions in the United States, Iceland, and New Zealand have made significant progress in rebuilding stocks devastated by decades of overfishing through careful management strategies.
But the study, published in the journal Science, found that 63 percent of assessed fish stocks worldwide require rebuilding to reverse the collapse of vulnerable species.
This story on energy efficiency opportunities in the US has been bouncing all over the internet:
A McKinsey report on energy efficiency in the United States, released today (see related post), cites $1.2 trillion in potential savings by 2020 if the country first invests $520 billion in efficiency improvements like better insulation for buildings.
The big question is, what policies can help us to get there? The report cites several "success stories." Potentially, some could serve as models for other programs or policies.
(Via Green Inc.)
Sustainable Architecture and Building Magazine has a nice overview of different types of insulation in their recent issue:
Most housing experts will say that the least expensive and essential first step to build green is by increasing thermal resistance [R value] of the walls and roof - the building envelope - of the house.
The Urban Hens Project is meant to develop a sustainable, closed-loop model for establishing chickens in urban settings. Hens provide eggs, they eat kitchen and garden scraps, and if you're really hard core, they'll become a fine little dinner. Check out these modern, Quonset hut-inspired chicken coops.
I love the idea of urban agriculture, but I can also imagine the potential for neighourhood relations to be strained by the crowing of someone's rooster at the crack of dawn. Aha... Treehugger notes that most urban bylaws only allow hens as roosters are considered too noisy.
See also the 'iPod of the chicken coop': the Omlet Eglu.
(Via Jetson Green.)
From Green Inc.:
A new report on energy efficiency from the consulting firm McKinsey found that the United States could save $1.2 trillion through 2020, by investing $520 billion in improvements like sealing leaky building ducts and replacing inefficient household appliances with new, energy-saving models.
Britain's Labour government places big bet on low-carbon future:
Ministers mainly plan to achieve this seven-and-a-half-fold expansion in just 12 years by increasing the proportion of electricity generated by renewables to 30 percent, from its present 5.5 percent—another huge transformation. Most of this will come from thousands of new wind turbines, both onshore and increasingly offshore.
"Feed-in tariffs" will take effect next April to provide money to householders who generate their own electricity, largely from rooftop photovoltaic panels, and a year later there will be a similar incentive for those that produce renewable heat as from solar water heaters or ground source heat pumps.
The government also plans to reduce emissions from homes through a "house by house, street by street transformation" on energy efficiency and by providing smart meters, which enable families to monitor their energy consumption, to every home in the country.
(Via Grist.)
Congratulations to the US Green Building Council:
According to a press release issued yesterday, the juggernaut USGBC just announced the Platinum certification of its new Washington D.C. headquarters in the Foggy Bottom district. It's the first project to obtain certification under the latest version of LEED, and the two-level, 75,000 square foot space triples the size of the USGBC's previous Platinum location.
You should follow this link for some gorgeous pictures of the new headquarters, which among other things, used beautifully finished salvaged gumwood from the bottom of the Tennessee river
(Via Jetson Green.)
Thinhouse has a nice overview of strategies to reduce household energy consumption through landscaping:
Carefully positioned trees can save up to 25 percent of a household’s energy consumption for heating and cooling, which is major, given that heating and cooling are the two biggest energy hogs in the home.
Vandana Shiva, a champion of organic, biodiverse agriculture in India, on agricultural policy in India:
Through organic farming, agroforestry, and forest regeneration, we would not only turn our soil and our vegetation into a major carbon sink ... we would directly address the poverty problem too. When you seriously address climate change, you do the very things that reduce poverty and hunger: for example, using scarce resources to produce more food.
By intensifying biodiversity, you intensify biological output per acre, which means your productivity is going up, your hunger is being addressed, but more than hunger, your employment issues are being addressed. We need a biological and ecological renewal of India. India is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. We need to create enough work for all the hands in this country.
Poverty and climate change have the same solution.
(Via Worldchanging.)
Grist has an interesting piece on the potential impact of proposed changes to building codes across the US:
No matter what else is compromised or changed in the climate bill as it works its way through the Senate, Section 201 must not be changed or weakened. Why? Because all other energy- and emissions-reduction approaches pale in comparison to what Section 201 will accomplish. Without it, we simply cannot meet the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets called for in the bill. We won’t even come close.
Section 201 covers building energy code--that’s right, building energy codes--that will transform the entire built environment in the U.S. by 2050. That’s because Section 201 affects all new buildings and major renovations, and by 2050 more than three-quarters of the built environment in the U.S. will be either new or renovated.
The impact would be dramatic:
The codes also achieve more than six times the emissions reductions of 100 nuclear power plants. The codes accomplish all of this at a fraction of the cost.
Shawn Frayne, the president and founder of Humdinger Wind Energy, has a very interesting idea for generating small and medium scale wind power without turbines. The Windbelt flutters and vibrates in the wind, pulling on linear generators which generate electricity for applications ranging from remote telecom towers to cell phones and wireless sensors. One small-scale application they are targeting is the replacement of batteries in widely distributed wireless sensors in buildings with small micro generators that are only about 4 inches long and can generate power at wind speeds as low as 6 mph. They are also working on a new project called the Windcell Panel which consists of 20 windbelts in a single frame generating up to 100 W at a low cost of 4 cents per kWh with 20 km/h average winds for small-scale residential power. Shawn's goal is have a set of devices that can be widely deployed throughout the world at very low cost.
I enjoyed this Worldchanging interview with Emily Cummins, an accomplished inventor of sustainable technology, including a refrigerator that works without electricity:
Emily Cummins: My sustainable refrigerator operates without using any electricity. Instead, it keeps its contents cool and dry by harnessing the evaporation method of keeping cool – in fact, it works in exactly the same way as humans cool down by sweating!
The fridge, for me, is important in two ways. Firstly, it’s a genuine working model which people in Africa are now using after I gave away the design there for free. Secondly, it makes a statement to people in the UK and US – it proves we don’t need to rely on electricity as much as we do.
Seoul rediscovers an ancient waterway and inspires other cities to do the same:
Today, after a $384 million recovery project, the stream, called Cheonggyecheon, is liberated from its dank sheath and burbles between reedy banks. Picnickers cool their bare feet in its filtered water, and carp swim in its tranquil pools.
The restoration of the Cheonggyecheon is part of an expanding environmental effort in cities around the world to "daylight" rivers and streams by peeling back pavement that was built to bolster commerce and serve automobile traffic decades ago.
From Jetson Green
The Omega Center for Sustainable Living (OCSL), which officially opens on July 16, 2009, is at the bleeding edge of green building. It's located on the 195-acre campus of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, an education and retreat center. Not only is it on track to achieve LEED Platinum, it may be the first building in America to meet the requirements of the Living Building Challenge.
The ambitious Living Building Challenge requires buildings to have net zero energy and water use (among other stringent criteria) which must be verified with measurements over at least one year of occupancy post-construction. The Omega Center also treats all of its wastewater via a Living Machine:
Living Machines use a combination of plants, bacteria, algae, snails, and fungi to treat and recycle wastewater. Wastewater flows through a system of aerobic and anaerobic tanks located under ground, inside the greenhouse, and outside through the four "cells," which are man-made wetlands. The OCSL handles all of the wastewater generated by the Institute’s 23,000 annual visitors and has a daily capacity of 52,000 gallons.
The New York Times has an interesting article on the potential impact (over 10% of US greenhouse gas emissions) of improvements in residential building codes:
"If you build a building well, it’s an asset for 100 years; conversely, if you build a shoddy building, it can be a 100-year liability," said Hal Harvey, chief executive of ClimateWorks, a group seeking to tackle global warming. "Energy building codes are the single biggest opportunity to save the environment while saving the consumer money."
Of course, more stringent codes require more stringent inspections:
Peering behind a bathtub in a newly built house, an inspector, John Umphress, spotted a big gap in the wall insulation. "Somebody took a lunch break!" he complained to the builder, who sheepishly agreed to patch the hole.
With the fix, the house, already a model of energy efficiency, will use even less energy and save its residents money -- for decades.
Via Ars Technica:
The authors produced a heat map of wind power capacity, which shows Greenland, the Amazon basin, and Central Africa whited out due to their ice cover or extensive forestation. The Great Plains of the US, the Russian steppe, and the tundra on the east side of Hudson Bay all have lots of potential, and the Patagonian grasslands positively glow. Divided up by nation, Russia comes out way ahead at over 118 PWh (Petawatt hours), with Australia in second at 86; Canada, the US, and Argentina round out the top five. Those same nations dominate the offshore potential as well, which adds another five to 25 PWh to their totals.
For the US, the total that could be generated within its territory is more than 23 times its current electricity consumption.
While I was in Montreal for the annual summit of the Canadian Green Building Council, I was able to try out the new Bixi bicycle rental system. In the mornings I hopped onto a bike at a Bixi stand near my hotel, biked through town, and parked at the Palais de Congres where the summit was held. At the end of the day I could grab another bike from the Bixi stand and bike right back to the hotel. Trips under 30 minutes are free, so it didn't cost me a cent.
Check out this write-up on the Bixi from Worldchanging Canada:
If you care about cities, sustainable infrastructure, solar energy, life-logging and product-service systems, the Bixi is worth learning about. It is billed as a fourth generation bike sharing system: portable, solar-powered and wireless.
From the Toronto Star:
The project is expected to boost capacity on the rail line by eliminating bottlenecks and reducing delay-causing conflicts between passenger and freight trains.
Sections of new third line track will be added to the existing line at multiple locations between Oshawa, Ont., and Brockville, Ont.
A fourth track will be built at Via's busy Belleville, Ont., station.
This investment could go a long way to making train travel more attractive along the Toronto-Montreal corridor. I've been on many a train that has sat waiting for up to half an hour for a freight train to go by.
This example of using the waste heat from a data centre to warm nearby building is a good illustration of the potential to be realized by linking energy flows across several buildings:
Any laptop user will know that even the most casual of Twittering with a computer resting on your knees can get uncomfortably hot -- so imagine the vast amount of heat that a massive IT data centre kicks out. Now telecommunications company Telehouse Europe is planning to capture that and pipe it to nearby homes and businesses.
(Via Worldchanging.)
The 100K House project has started building a passive house in Philadelphia, and they are doing a bang-up job of sharing the construction details. Their first article on their passive house goes into detail on the laying of the foundation, with thermal bridging eliminated by encapsulating the concrete slab with rigid XPS insulation:
Our Passive House consultants from PHIUS (Passive House Institute of the US) gave us the following basic design rules for our foundation and slab insulation:
- Under slab insulation of R-50 (10″ of XPS Rigid insulation)
- Outer foundation wall insulation of R-10 (2″ of XPS Rigid insulation)
- Separation of the floating slab from all foundation walls with a minimum of 1″ (R-5) of rigid XPS Insulation
In their second article on passive house construction they discuss under slab air-sealing:
We get asked a lot what the biggest difference is between the 100K House project and the Passive Project. The answer is always the same. Air Sealing.
On a Passive House, we have to hit a very strict target on our blower door test of 0.6 Air Changes per Hour at 50 Pascals of pressure. This is no easy task. Every single seam must be caulked, or preferably taped, to hit this target. That all starts with the foundation. We’ll review a couple of the key details for the foundation air sealing below.
Air-sealing under the foundation seems a bit extreme to me, but maybe they have some concerns about cracking.
