April 13, 2009
Amory Lovins – thought you’d like to be reminded…
What I can’t believe is how far we’ve come since this speech… Think about it.
January 30, 2009
Kentucky is battered! – Alternatives we need YOU!
So I flipped on CNN this morning early as I usually do and was shocked that I hadn’t heard about the ice storm back there. Apparently Kentucky and Arkansas are badly hit by a winter storm that has left droves of power outages in its wake. Here is an article for you if your still behind the times (as I was as of this morning). Below is an excerpt from the article:
Many Kentucky hotels offering discounted “power outage rates” reported being fully booked with people escaping frosty neighborhoods. Those who hunkered down in their homes face long lines to buy generators, firewood, groceries — even bottled water because power outages crippled local pumping stations.
Truckloads of ready-to-eat meals, water and generators from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were expected to arrive Friday at a staging area in Fort Campbell, Ky., said Mary Hudak, a spokeswoman for FEMA’s southeast region.
In Paducah, Amber Fiers and her neighbor Miranda Brittan tried a half-dozen filling stations before finding one where they could buy kerosene. The two were in a line that swelled to 50 or more at the 13th Street Station, which began pumping kerosene after its owner set up a generator.
So here’s my thing – this guy gets on the TV and goes “WE NEED FUEL – WE NEED GAS!!!”
In the background is footage of lines of cars wrapping around the block and hillbillys screaming “we’ve been here for like two hours!”
When will this society realize that its reliance on fossil fuels is completely unsustainable. Its like building a massive structure and leaning it on an earthquake fault.
I mean you have to be kidding me – people are freezing over there and starving because we can’t and haven’t come up with smarter – and yes I do mean smarter – ways of producing energy.
And to boot even if we did have a completely open grid with solar power plants everywhere and electricity powering our every move, we still have the issues of transmission lines.
My advice to you is get off the grid or stock up on coal, oil and kerosene – in the meantime, have fun with the price fluctuations, embargoes, middle eastern conflicts, and land pillage. We need a better solution and I’m glad that Obama is considering rerouting NASA to focus on climate change – who the hell wants to live on Mars anyway.
January 12, 2009
Green Building what? Green Building Who?
What do we mean by green building?
Buildings of the world consume:
• 40% of the world’s energy & materials
• 25% of the wood harvested
• 17% of our water
The average American house uses:
• 13,127 board feet of lumber
• 6,212 square feet of sheathing
• 2,000 square feet of flooring
In the U.S., buildings account for:
• 36% of total electricity consumption
• 62% of electricity use
• 30% of greenhouse gas emissions
• 37% of ozone depletion potential
The kicker — Americans spend 90% of our time indoors.
This is not a sustainable lifestyle. We can not function as a society this way. In order to survive and allow our kids the ability to survive, we must refocus our attention. This way of life is literally killing us.
The environmental impact we see is the direct result of our habits. We have habitually built unsustainably and raped our resources. And the stuff we’ve seen in documentaries such as Inconvenient Truth is a direct result of the building industry. Let me repeat that and make sure to read this slowly – Architects, builders, contractors and engineers are the direct cause of our climate crisis.
Now I realize that is a bold statement – but shoving polluted air into a building and specifying highly toxic carpeting and using violently dangerous paints, coatings and adhesives is no ones fault but our own. “The rise in energy costs, shortage of building materials and growing consumer demands are driving this market to seek out better and more efficient ways to build our buildings. In addition, new legislation, stricter building codes, and rising health costs are forcing builders to build green whether they want to or not.”
At the same time these are the people who can empower the change we need to see. Architects, engineers, and construciton professionals can affect great change to our environment and have the ability to “tip” us into a sustainable society.
“Green building (also known as “sustainable,” “ecological,” and “eco-designed”) is a way of looking at buildings in terms of reducing energy use, conserving water, improving indoor air quality, and reducing dependence on our natural resources.”
Doesn’t that sound nice – living in a nicer, cleaner, more healthy environment? Or does choking on forced air from archaic HVAC systems sound fun? I’ll let you decide…
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