The Future is Green

Expletives deleted

My new friends, Ryan Potvin and Matt Macko of Environmental Building Strategies in San Francisco have been getting some flack about an article entitled Top 100 ways to Continue Fucking the Future. that appeared in their excellent blog on January 5. The article was about their desire to write a book listing all the things we routinely do that have negative environmental impacts.

The flack was not about the concept or the content of the piece, but merely about the title's use of the dreaded F word. People, grow up, please.

The idea was to grab readers' attention with a provocative title, a subversive twist on the hundred or so books with titles like "101 Easy Ways to Go Green," or some such nonsense,  and then hold up a mirror wherein they'll catch the conscience of the king, so to speak. I often wonder what it will take to wake people up to the very real dangers bearing down on us. It a four-letter expletive helps, well then full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes, I say. When the book comes out I will be first in line to buy a copy so I hope they make good on their threat to actually write it.

Their blog is full of information and insight and I recommend checking it out. In their day job, Matt and Ryan are top-notch green building advisers with offices in San Francisco, LA and Aspen, CO. Anyone looking in their neck of the woods for green building advice, energy audits, project management, etc. should definitely look them up. All their contact information can be found on the Environmental Building Strategies web site along with all sorts of useful information. 

Cruising for Dystopian Burgers OR The Drive-in at the End of the Universe

My friend James Howard Kunstler is not impressed with recent efforts at improving automobile fuel efficiency. In his view, anything short of ending our dependence on cars for personal transportation is a doomed enterprise.

In a recent email he wrote, "Personally, I've been carrying on a low-grade war with some of the more high-toned Greenies. Much of the green program these days is about making people feel good.  People come up to me after my college blabs and brag that they just bought a Prius and I refuse to give them the brownie points they long for.  I tell them they're just part of the problem --thinking that car dependency by 'other means' is great for us. Then, of course, there's Amory Lovins and his hyper-car (beloved of the Aspen Enviro Institute). 

IMHO anything we do to try to prolong or extend car dependency is a tragic act of futility. Walkable communities is the key to being "green." And public transit that really works. If Mr. Obama's big stimulus initiative ends up being about highways, he will be making a tragic error."

He continues the argument this week in his blog, Clusterfuck Nation. (Jim doesn't mince words)

I've been skeptical of the "stimulus" as sketched out so far, aimed at refurbishing the infrastructure of Happy Motoring. To me, this is the epitome of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable -- since car-dependency is absolutely the last thing we need to shore up and promote. I haven't heard any talk so far about promoting walkable communities, or any meaningful plan to get serious about fixing passenger rail and integral public transit.

Has Mr. Obama's circle lost sight of the fact that we import more than two-thirds of the oil we use, even during the current price hiatus? Or have they forgotten how vulnerable this leaves us to the slightest geopolitical spasm in such stable oil-exporting nations as Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, Libya, Algeria, Columbia, Iran, and the Middle East states? And we're going to rescue ourselves by driving cars?

I know it is difficult for Americans at every level to imagine a different way-of-life, but we'd better start tuning up our imaginations, because endless motoring is not our destiny anymore. The message has not moved from the grassroots up, and so at this perilous stage the message had better come from the top down. Mr. Obama needs to go on TV and tell the American public that were done cruisin' for burgers.

Click here to read the entire post.

This is a good week, by the way, for fans of James Howard Kunstler. He is the central focus of Ben McGrath's piece, The Dystopians in the Jan. 26 issue of The New Yorker.  Definitely woth reading.

Irreversible climate change - don't expect a soft landing

There's an old joke that illustrates our apparent inability to comprehend the full implications of climate change.

A man is falling from the 80th story of a skyscraper. As he passes the 37th floor an office worker opens a window and shouts, "How are you doing?" The falling man replies, "So far, so good."

That about sums up the massive failure of collective imagination that is responsible for our painfully slow and timid response to the single greatest threat to our existence since the invention of the atomic bomb. The hard landing we face will be harder and sooner than almost anyone outside the scientific community imagines.

It is still possible to soften the blow, at least to some extent. But time is desperately short. According to a paper being published in today's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the damaging effects of climate change are essentially irreversible. Even if carbon emissions were to cease now, temperatures would remain elevated for at least a thousand years.

The paper’s lead author, Susan Solomon, a leader of the International Panel on Climate Change and one of the world's best known researchers on the subject, noted that global warming has been slowed by the ocean, because water absorbs a lot of energy. But that good effect will not only wane over time, the ocean will help keep the planet warmer by giving off its accumulated heat to the air.

Solomon's paper concludes that if CO2 is allowed to peak at 450-600 parts per million, [as it is expected to do by mid-century] the results would include persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall that are comparable to the 1930s North American Dust Bowl in zones including southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern North America, southern Africa and western Australia.

What should we make of that information? Should we conclude that it is too late to do anything, throw up our hands and say, "We give up?"

On the contrary. All the more reason to act decisively, and soon. When we know that the effects our actions cannot be undone, we need to be especially careful about what we do. 

Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research summed it up like this: "The policy relevance is clear: We need to act sooner ... because by the time the public and policymakers really realize the changes are here it is far too late to do anything about it. In fact, as the authors point out, it is already too late for some effects."

Yes, the Obama administration is starting to take some significant steps. But it is still too little and too slow. Gentle readers, do not be sheep. Speak up. Act up. Write letters. Make phone calls. Demand action before the hard pavement of reality breaks our fall.

What part of "catastrophic climate change" don't you understand?

I wanted to share two comments I received recently. The first in response to my post of January 14 in which I suggested that the proposed $500 tax credit would be better spent insulating 20 million homes rather than the 2 million that Obama has proposed.

". . . insulating the two million homes, and two million homes only, for now, may not be enough considering the facts, but we need to start with some number, and take it from there. Being realistic in the current economy is the sparkle that will ignite it's engine."

How about being realistic about global warming? I know, it's hard to stay terrified for long stretches of time, so we tend to forget exactly how serious the threat is. This is a mistake.

The second, and more alarming of the two was in response to my January 15 post in which I expressed hope that President Obama turns out to be green enough to make some progress on the impending climate catastrophe.

"I just hope he doesn't try to force down our throat a bunch of economic nonsense like what Gore was trying to do . . . carbon credits, Kyoto Protocol, etc . . . green is good, but not if it completely cripples our economy or serves to unduly transfer justly earned wealth to those who did not earn it." 

Has no one been paying attention? Have you read the 2007 report by the UN's  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The report stated that climate change is a serious, real and present danger, with a 90% certainty that global warming is caused by human activity. (The IPCC recently revised its conclusion to say that evidence of anthropomorphic climate change is unequivocal.) Ninety-eight percent of the world's scientists concur. Many of them think the results are grossly understated.

We should be scared. We should be very scared.

One of the predictions in that report was that global warming would cause the continued shrinking of polar ice sheets. Recent data indicates that the ice is shrinking 100 times faster than the report predicted.

Remember the 2003 heat wave that killed 35,000 people in Europe? Temperatures in July and August were consistently over 100 degrees F. This was considered, at the time, to be a once-in-a-hundred-year event. According to current climate models, by 2050 it will be a once-in-two-year event and that by 2070, 100 degrees will be considered an unusually cool summer day in Europe.

We do not have time to go slow. If we don't take radical measures to slash our frenzied consumption of fossil fuels - including setting a stiff price on CO2 emissions - the consequences could be disastrous and irreversible. Countries that have taxed carbon and invested in renewable energy on a large scale have not seen their economies crippled. On the contrary, their economies have been strengthened. (I'll provide details in a future posting.)

Inaction, or insufficiently bold action, is what will cripple our economy, cause widespread disruption of the food chain, and put at risk the planet's continued ability to sustain life as we know it. 

Are we scared yet?

How much orange juice does it take to melt Antarctica?

Two articles in yesterday's New York Times help illustrate the extent to which that everything is connected. One, How Green is My Orange? describes Pepsico's efforts to determine the carbon footprint of its products. The short answer is that a half-gallon carton of  Tropicana orange juice is responsible for 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. 

What are we to make of this information? In a perfect world, all products would be labeled with carbon footprint information, enabling us to choose products with the least environmental impact. But the factors that go into these calculations are so complex that it is extremely difficult to come up with a reliable number. At best, carbon footprinting could serve as a general guide, though with plenty of room for interpretation.

An article in the New Yorker last year, entitled Big Foot described the carbon footprinting campaign at Tesco, Britain's largest supermarket chain. Some of their findings were surprisingly counter-intuitive. The article explains, for example,  that

The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity. . . That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO₂.

Similarly, if you live in New York it is greener to drink French wine than California wine. The reason? California wine travels across the US in trucks. This produces much more CO2 emissions than shipping wine across the Atlantic by boat.

While it is no simple task to compare the relative carbon footprints of the products we buy, we still need to find ways to reduce our personal, national, and global carbon footprints - a lot, and fast.

The second NYT article that caught my eye cited new evidence that even Antarctica is warming. Contrary to earlier reports that, while some parts of that icy continent were warming, others were getting colder, (which climate-change deniers have been fond of repeating, over and over) new research based on much more detailed measurements indicate that the entire continent is definitely warming.  This is leading to the breaking up of enormous ice shelves and the accelerating sliding of glaciers.

Orange juice is certainly far from our most carbon intensive consumable, but we should remember that virtually everything we do, everything we buy, everything we consume affects the size of our carbon footprint. I don't plan ever to visit Antarctica, but I like knowing that it is still there - something I'll think about next time I drink a glass of orange juice.

Our first green president?

I just published my first post as a guest blogger at CT Green Scene. It asks the question, Is Obama green enough. I think he just might be. At least I sure hope so. It will kill me if he isn't. You can read the post here.

He looks good in green, doesn't he?

Please don't send me $500

Last week I was surprised to discover that I disagree with Barack Obama about something: Two things, actually. The first was his promise to insulate two million homes. I'm all for insulating homes, but two million is not nearly enough. 

There are more than 100 million homes in the US and the vast majority of them are not insulated as well as they should be. Tens of millions of homes in this country have virtually no effective insulation. And it's not just the aging middle-class homes, the ones that make up the majority of our housing stock. I have observed energy audits of multi-million dollar homes built within the last 20 years that have serious deficiencies in the way they are insulated. 

Homes are responsible for 21% of greenhouse gas emissions. If we're going to get serious about addressing climate change we need to invest in making large numbers of homes -- at least ten times as many as Obama promised -- more energy efficient.

Which brings me to the other thing I disagree with – this nonsense about a $500 per person tax rebate. Please, just say no. If the government sends me a check for $500 I'll probably just fritter it away on something silly, like my electric bill, as I did with the $600 that Dubya sent me recently. "Do you feel stimulated?" my wife asked when we opened the envelope. No, actually, I didn't.

Now, if the treasury were to send me more, say two or three thousand, then I might go buy something big, like a giant flat-screen TV -- you know, those multi-purpose devices that create jobs in China, jack up your electric bill, increase your GHG emissions, and make you even more sedentary by making all the garbage on TV look extra seductive. Of course, I could forgive all that if The Sopranos were to come back. But I digress.

Instead, that same stimulus money could pay for insulating twenty to thirty million homes. That would create jobs in this country, and reduce our annual GHG emissions by more than 250 million tons - the equivalent of taking 200 million cars off the road.

At the same time, the resulting energy cost savings would pay back the outlay for all that insulation in two to three years. If we figure an average cost of $2,000 to insulate a home (a high estimate), the homeowners could save $500 to $1,000 per year, every year, from now on (and more as energy costs rise). So instead of a one-time gift of $500 per person or $1,000 per couple, how about making an investment that will provide each household dividend of $1,000, every year?

This New Old Green House

This New Old Green House is the title of the cover story I wrote for the January issue of Period Homes magazine. It tells the story of how I turned green, and of an award-winning high-performance green home I built in Westport, Connecticut.

You can read the story on my web site  or download a PDF of it here: Download Period Homes article - Jan. 2009

Biomimicry - self-cleaning paint, color without pigment, solar cells that mimic photosynthesis

On the last day of Green-Build 2008, in Boston last month, I attended a remarkable talk by Janine Benyus, author of the book, "Biomimicry." What fascinates Benyus is the ways nature accomplishes things that can only be duplicated by complicated industrial processes. Her web site, www.asknature.org provides numerous examples of how mimicking nature can solve various problems more simply and easily, and with a lot less effort, expense, and environmental harm. According to Benyus,

"Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf.  The core idea is that Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with: energy, food production, climate control, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, packaging, and a whole lot more."

Examples of practical applications of biomimicry include self-cleaning paints that mimic the way water rolls off a lotus leaf, solar cells that mimic photosynthesis, and fabrics that are colored by mimicking the way a butterfly's wing refracts light. Many more examples can be seen at www.asknature.org, which over and over again asks the question, "How would nature solve . . . ?" Some of the answers are truly amazing.

The talk Benyus gave (see below) at the 2007 TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design - always worth a look) is fascinating and beautiful to look at. Carve 18 minutes out of your day and enjoy. It will be time well spent.