Latest Articles
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Notes from the road
Just as the whole Karl Rove v. Sheryl Crow thing was blowing up in the news, I was arriving in Washington, D.C. to cover … Sheryl Crow. Taking on climate change. You can read about Crow’s big arrival over on my blog, but a few quick thoughts on the Rove encounter before I head for […]
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Tracey Smith, advocate for simple living, answers questions
Tracy Smith. What work do you do? I’m a writer and broadcaster on downshifting and sustainable living, and I also put together an awareness campaign called National Downshifting Week, which is this week. NDW is a grassroots awareness campaign, designed to encourage participants to “Slow Down and Green Up”! There’s a great quote I often […]
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Who’s the biggest fattest liberal?
Over at National Review, Deroy Murdock is eager to assure his fellow right-wingers that Rudolph Giuliani is no liberal! What’s his evidence? Why, when he was mayor Giuliani doused the city with toxic insecticide! He built dirty power plants in poor parts of town! He privatized the management of Central Park! No liberal would ever […]
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Is it green to recycle ideas?
Is it me, or does this sound an awwwful lot like this?
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A quick partial overview of green building techniques
(Part of the No Sweat Solutions series.)
What follows is a table with a (very) incomplete list of means of reducing material intensity in building. These means alone could reduce the impact of constructing buildings by about 75 percent or more, and thus greenhouse-gas emissions from construction and destruction of buildings by about half.
Since we have green builders on this site, I invite additions to the list, especially if you can cite sources for impact reduction. I also invite comments on whether any of these are not as green as they appear at first blush.
Note that operations account for a great deal more of the impact of building than construction. So these are green only to the extent they do not compromise operating efficiency.
Table below the fold.
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Can we live with skyscraper farms?
I find ideas like this stimulating, if only because it shows some creativity: skyscraper farms.
Basically, the idea is to build multi-story enclosed greenhouses near the cities where most food is consumed, thus reducing the acreage required to grow the crops and the energy needed to transport them. Some of the work done by Columbia University suggests the "vertical farm" could produce at least twice as much energy as it consumes from burning the biomass wastes.
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Umbra on bicycle tires
Dear Umbra, Is there such a thing as recycled bicycle tires? I have looked and even asked a friend’s husband who wrenches in a local shop. He was not aware of any. I think because people ride their bike they automatically assume they are Earth-“friendlier” than others. But I go through two sets of tires […]
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Green polls reveal lazy bastards
Joel Makower has a fascinating roundup of recent green poll results. He concludes: So, what do we know that we didn’t know pre-Earth Day? Not much. It’s business as usual: Americans want clean, affordable, and care-free solutions to climate change and every other environmental challenge. But don’t ask most of them to change their habits, […]
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Plans to boost energy efficiency start getting traction in Congress
What’s not to love about energy efficiency? It’s the paradigmatic win-win scenario — save money, protect the climate and broader environment, and reduce reliance on unsavory sources of energy, all in one fell swoop. As efficiency guru Amory Lovins puts it [PDF], “Using energy more efficiently offers an economic bonanza — not because of the […]
