Gristmill

The Now House

I have a long-standing love affair with modern modular homes, particularly those built with eco-friendly materials and techniques (which is most of them, these days).  I also have a long-standing love affair with the "digital home" movement, wherein everything is wired to everything else and everything is online and the refrigerator knows when it's out of milk and all that.  So I am all agog at the unveiling of the Now House, a modern, modular, sustainable, digital-to-the-hilt exhibition home built using a system designed by Clever Homes, packed with products chosen by CNET Digital Living, and presented by the non-profit Affordable Green Development Corporation (what?  no website?).  

Me want.

The stylish modern, high-tech home is designed from safe advanced green and sustainable materials in a highly integrated manner. It also features the best digital accoutrements, including an intelligent digital network, extensive security monitoring and a consumer electronics system comprised of the "Editor's Choice" award selections provided by CNET Digital Living.

"The NowHouse was conceived to give consumers and builders alike a fully functional example of the advances that have taken place in home construction," said Scott Redmond, project director. "This innovative structure was built using a proprietary panelized construction system featuring patent-pending technologies, construction tools, and processes in over 300,000 square feet of robotic factories which are online and ready to build as of today, at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional home building."

The NowHouse project brings the "best-of-breed" architects, agencies, engineers, state-of-the-art products, technologies and systems together with the public to solve the missing link in modern digitally integrated green, sustainable, efficient systems- built, value-based homes for the progressive world.

Drool.

The Now House has been built in an SBC Park Parking lot in San Francisco, Calif., and is open to the public through December 20.  If you live in that neck of the woods, you should check it out.

For all those remaining undecideds …

Judd Legum and The Nation have pithily summarized nine of Bush's most egregious environmental offenses (as well as 91 non-environmental ones):

It’s gettin’ hot in herre

The New York Times editorial page took the Bushies to task yesterday for ignoring and distorting science on climate change, echoing accusations made by NASA's top-dog climatologist, Jim Hansen.

Speaking in Iowa last week, Hansen castigated the Bush administration for its failure to face up to facts and act, and he "said that he had been instructed by Sean O'Keefe, administrator of [NASA], not to discuss publicly the human contribution to global warming," the Times writes. The editorial continues:

[T]his administration has a depressing history of discouraging robust discourse on climate change. ...

The net result is that while most of the industrialized world has ratified the Kyoto agreement, and committed itself in general terms to mandatory cuts of carbon emissions, America is saddled with a passive strategy of further research and voluntary reductions.

Dr. Hansen said he knew he was risking his credibility and possibly his job by criticizing Mr. Bush in the final days of the campaign, but had decided -- properly so, in our view -- that the risks of silence were greater.

Find more background here.

Frog findings jump into public eye in Minnesota

There's been a flurry of activity in the Minnesota press about atrazine, frogs, and skullduggery. As reported initially by Tom Meersman of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, a well-known UC Berkeley biologist, Dr. Tyrone Hayes, was first invited, and then disinvited, to give the keynote speech at a conference organized by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Emails obtained by the Star-Tribune between Hayes and a member of the Pollution Control Agency staff indicate that pressure was brought by the state Department of Agriculture to block the talk.  Hayes has demonstrated that when tadpoles are exposed to atrazine at levels widely found in Minnesota drinking water, they grow up hermaphroditic, something no self-respecting frog -- or at least one interested in reproducing successfully -- would want to be.

How is environment going to play on Tuesday?

In mid-October, three headlines from around the country on the same day gave a clue. While the Chicago Tribune reported that the environment wasn't figuring at the national level, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Detroit Free Press reported that in New Mexico and Michigan, environmental issues could tip the balance. Similar coverage has come from Nevada, Maine, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. While Maine doesn't appear to be in play, the other states all are, for a total of 42 electoral votes.

At least in this electoral cycle, all environmental politics are local, but they may add up to significant national impact.

Where to go with this?  Every day, 7 days a week, 365/6 days a year, newspapers are covering stories around the country about how environment is affecting people's health. Little stories, big stories. Local. National. Human interest. Scientific revelations. Corporate misbehavior. Scandalous coverup. Bureaucratic shenanigans.

Stories about times and places where the steps needed -- and eminently feasible -- to protect people's health just aren't being taken. And also, examples (albeit fewer) of when the right thing was done, problems were eliminated or avoided.

These stories aren't about far-off places (although there are those, too ...). They're about what your family is breathing and your neighbors are drinking. The nasty ingredients in cosmetics that aren't disclosed. The unintended consequences of making consumer goods out of plastics that contain biologically-active molecules, turning on genes when they should be shut off, or preventing them from making proteins you need to resist disease.

About how all this is making people sick ... or worse.

So here we are, at the end of an electoral cycle in which in at least a few places, environmental issues, particularly related to health, may have affected the results.

It's the end of this one. Wednesday begins the next.  If the hints we have now prove true, then the stage is set for environmental health to emerge as a much bigger issue in 2008.

[For more coverage of this cycle, go here.]

Declaration of dependence

Factcheck.org, the website the vice president tried to make famous, has this to say about the two presidential candidates' energy plans:  "Kerry and Bush Mislead Voters With Promises of Energy Independence."

The website, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, writes:

Kerry focuses on conservation efforts, but most agree his plan is little more than an outline. Bush supports expanded drilling in Alaska to increase domestic oil supply, but the US has only about 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. At current rates of consumption that would only last 4.5 years.

Factcheck.org seems to hang its hat on a Rocky Mountain Institute study that found that the U.S. could end its reliance on foreign oil by 2040 -- "but that would require a ten-year investment of $180 billion, and such steps as taxing gas-guzzling vehicles and providing government subsidies for low-income buyers of fuel-efficient autos. Neither candidate is proposing anything close to that."

In many ways, the conclusions of Factcheck.org match those reached by New Yorker author John Cassidy in his recent piece "Pump Dreams; Is Energy Independence An Impossible Goal?"

Pete Myers

What a great deal!  The American Chemistry Council, a large trade association of companies manufacturing chemicals, has entered into a partnership with the US EPA to measure how much of pesticides and other chemicals get into kids up to age 3 when homes are sprayed regularly.  

Participating parents get $970 over two years, if they consent to "routine spraying," although apparently "routine" includes "homes with potentially high pesticide use." EPA's fact sheet says they're only going to work with households that already use pesticides.  Let's hope the money doesn't lure some families in economic trouble into taking risks they wouldn't have.  

The press coverage (Chemical and Engineering News, The Washington Post) doesn't note if there is separate compensation for health care costs.  

Any university-based study would require informed consent by participants. Perhaps toddlers in Florida have already taken short courses in pesticide toxicity.

ACC is putting $2.1M into the funding pool, EPA another $6.9M. With all the recent furor over conflicts of interest at NIH, you'd think that the EPA would want to keep the fox out of the chicken coop.

Making the green with green

The World Resources Institute (WRI) teamed up a  while back with nine corporations based in the northeastern U.S. to form Climate Northeast, a kind of proof-in-the-pudding demonstration that corporate policies to meliorate global warming don't have to cost big -- in fact, they can be profitable.  You can download the case studies (PDF) from their site.

"We are undertaking these projects because they make business sense," said Randolph Price, vice president for environment, health and safety, Consolidated Edison Company of New York. "We hope our experiences will be useful for other businesses interested in getting started with greenhouse-gas management programs."

Some examples, from the press release:

Green building products

Those of you interested in eco-friendly building may want to check out the GreenSpec Directory, which "includes information on more than 1,750 green building products carefully screened by the editors of Environmental Building News, organized according to the 16-division CSI MasterFormat(tm) system." If you don't know what the 16-division CSI MasterFormat(tm) system is, well dude, get with it!  You can find it over on BuildingGreen.com -- like all their stuff, it's got no advertising or sponsorships, so it should be the straight scoop.