Articles by David Roberts

Green Building 101

Yesterday, Inhabitat started a weekly series for the summer called Green Building 101. The series is focused mainly on LEED-H, the (developing) green standards for homes. It also mentions LEED-ND, the (developing) green standards for neighborhoods, which I'm super jazzed about. The series will walk through the basics of building or renovating a home for maximum eco-friendliness. Should be cool.

Check out the first installment, about choosing an eco-friendly site.

New initiatives from Whole Foods

I wrote a post a little while back about the exchange going on between food writer Michael Pollan and Whole Foods Market honcho John Mackey. The subject has been some claims about Whole Foods' relationship to "industrial organic" made in Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. Read that previous post for background.

Mackey has written another detailed letter to Pollan. It's interesting throughout, but the big news comes at the end, when Mackey announces a series of new initiatives the company is undertaking. They will be attempting to build up a system of animal-compassionate small farms, buying more local food, setting up a loan program for small farmers, opening their parking lots for local farmers to sell directly to consumers (!), and increasing consumer education on the subject of local food. Pretty radical stuff.

I haven't seen this picked up in the mainstream media yet, but I expect it will be.

Here's the relevant part of the letter:

Gore on The Daily Show

I just got done watching last night's Al Gore interview on The Daily Show. (It's not online yet, unless you seek out the torrent.) He acquitted himself very well, much better than I expected.

There was some nice repartee. Stewart asked if Gore took some satisfaction in seeing that slide where Florida gets flooded. Gore said, "hey, I think I won Florida."

Also, Gore specifically dinged Bush's recent line that we need to get "beyond the debate," which of course I was happy to see. He said a doctor wouldn't look at your symptoms and say, well, let's not worry about what's causing them, let's just give you an aspirin and send you home. True dat.

But mainly, Gore effectively got across the point that the evidence is overwhelming and that it's time to put politics aside and just solve the damn problem. The audience loved him.

Update [2006-6-29 15:41:14 by David Roberts]: Here's the video.

Let there be (more efficient) light

Big savings possible:

A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth.

That is the conclusion of a study from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which it says is the first global survey of lighting uses and costs.

The carbon dioxide emissions saved by such a switch would, it concludes, dwarf cuts so far achieved by adopting wind and solar power.