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November 22, 2006
Cost of Green -- Part MCMVII
I seem to be one of few (if any) green building professionals advocating a different way of framing the "cost of green" discussion.
I'm back from Greenbuild 2006, where one speaker after another compared the cost of a green building with a conventional building by expressing the cost of the one building against the average cost of how many? conventional buildings. Often, the green building is a few dollars higher per square foot than the average of conventional buildings. That number is then adopted as "this year's" green building premium.
The CEO of the Enterprise Foundation did it in the opening plenary, observing that Green Communities houses cost 3% or 4% more than conventional houses.
Maybe it's part of the progressives' fairness doctrine: we feel the need to fully disclose the down side as we present the up side. But what, exactly, are we disclosing? I suggest the comparison would be far more valid if we express the cost of a green building - say in $ per square foot - and place it in the range of conventional buildings.
Posted by aquacura.com at 07:33 AM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2006
Carl Hiaasen
Carl Hiaasen http://www.carlhiaasen.com/ is a novelist and columnist for The Miami Herald. His novels are populated by charaters who are hard to describe. But the casts work well. A Hiaasen novel is hard to put down.
Hiaasen seems to appreciate the irony of a captive exotic animal killing the bad guys. In Stormy Weather, an African lion eats a mobster (as the mobster is preparing to crucify his second victim...you have to read the story). And at the end of Sick Puppy, I'm not going to tell, because it's too good. So read it.
Hiaasen has a serious message to convey: the miserable mess that humankind has made of Florida. But you could name just about any state or place.
Take comfort. Nature wins.
I'm working on Strip Tease now.
Posted by aquacura.com at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)
Greenbuild closing plenary address
The closing address was made by Jeffrey Sachs, the director of Columbia University's Earth Institute http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/. He was a principal author of the UN's Millenium Project.
Sachs drew the Greenbuild attendees into the mission of eradicating extreme poverty, pointing out the relative simplicity of this mission (given some fairly modest investment by the rich world) and the importance of sustainable development to solidify the poverty program.
One of the most obvious contribution of sustainable development in the rich and developing world is that it will go a long way toward slowing - and eventually stopping - climate change. Climate change threatens the rich world, as well as the developing world. Coastal cities will be threatened by rising sea level, agriculture will be upset, etc. But Sachs feels that, as usual, the heaviest burden will fall on those living in extreme poverty.
Failure of meager crops and desertification are forces that will force those barely hanging on over the edge into starvation.
I have only one quibble with an excellent and inspiring speech. I believe Sachs offered too much hope for technology to get us out of the mess we're in. Of course, technological solutions - solar power, etc - will be of paramount importance to living more sustainably. But he missed an opportunity to drive home the message that most everyone in the world, and particularly in the rich world, and particularly in the US must change life choices to reduce resource consumption. Maybe I missed it, or maybe he considered it to be implicit, but it needs to be said, repeatedly.
We are not going to slow, and eventually arrest, climate change unless we consume less.
Posted by aquacura.com at 08:08 PM | Comments (0)
2006 Greenbuild conference
I spent last week in Denver, attending the Greenbuild conference. The opening plenary address was delivered by Bill McDonough http://www.mcdonough.com/full.htm. It set the tone for the conference.
McDonough offered a rejoinder to the question we hear often: "So if you don't want to burn fossil fuel, how do you feel about nuclear power?" His response: he is all for nuclear power, produced by fusion. The reactor is at a good distance from where we live. 93 million miles distant.
McDonough wants us to resist the concept of waste; to use all waste products as food for another process. Or change the process to avoid creating the waste.
This is where we need to go if we are to avoid exhausting the earth's resources. McDonough tells us that we are not going to succeed simply by finding energy to replace the fossil-derived energy we use today. We must decrease our energy use, and our resource use in general.
One of the session speakers used globes to define the world's and the US's consumption. He suggested that the world has an ecofootprint of about 3 globes (the world's population consumes resources at about 3x the sustainable rate). A pretty daunting picture. But he suggests the US consumes at a 5-globe rate.
That fits my general impression: we Americans have to reduce our consumption by something like 5 or 10-fold.
Posted by aquacura.com at 07:53 PM | Comments (0)