But I want to adapt these ideas from the repair of the urban fabric to the original creation of a healthy suburban fabric. From further below:
After all, no matter how much one may love big cities – big cities have never been the be-all and end-all of settlement. Part of a healthy big city economy is a healthy network of relationships to a surrounding network of healthy smaller cities. And part of what makes them healthy is a healthy network of relationships to healthy small towns and villages. …
Being an EcoGeek is becoming ever more fashionable. And, increasingly, there are events where EcoGeek’s can gather in style.
Every two years, for two weeks, a village appears on the National Mall providing a window on possibilities for a sustainable future powered by the sun.
The Solar Decathlon is a biennial, ever-cool event, pitting colleges and universities across the nation in ten contests that “center on the ways we use energy in our daily lives.”
The Solar Decathlon is a competition in which teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar powered house.
The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon challenges 20 university-led teams from around the world in 10 contests to design, build, and operate the most attractive, energy-efficient, solar-powered house. Solar Decathlon houses must power all the home energy needs of a typical family using only the power of the sun. The winner of the competition is the team that best blends aesthetics and modern conveniences with maximum energy production and optimal efficiency.
To compete, the teams must design and build energy-efficient homes that are powered exclusively by the sun. The homes must be attractive and easy to live in. They must maintain a comfortable temperature, provide attractive and adequate lighting, power household appliances for cooking and cleaning, power home electronics, and provide hot water. These houses must also power an electric vehicle to meet household transportation needs.
Walking through the Solar Decathlon, it is hard not to have many “I want that” moments or think “I could live in this” (actually, I want to live in this). Wandering around, the “oohs” and “ahs” of attendees, at all ages, are constant. (My children, for example, definitely want to go back again, having been to the past two.) If you can, this is an Energy COOL must do event.
All too often, those engaged in examining options for “greening” a new or existing building are constrained in a stove-piped cost analysis which (in a very simplified fashion) goes something along these lines:
How much more will it cost to build?
And, how fast will energy and other operating cost (water usage/sewers, maintenance) savings pay for those additional costs?
This typical analytical structure is mistaken on multiple levels. For example, with a truly holistic systems-of-systems process “going green” can actually drove down the initial costs (or remain at levelized cost) because, for example, better insulated and sealed building envelopes enable smaller heating and cooling systems. Thus, the better insulation might increase capital costs while procuring a smaller HVAC system cuts them.
But, putting aside the quite legitimate question as to whether well-designed “greening” actually drives up costs, stove-piping analysis on operating cost savings to pay back increase upfront capital costs excludes what is likely to be the far more significant implications for things like productivity.
The study examines a wide-range of issues related to the difficulties of measuring office productivity, various (potential) impacts on productivity, and studies related to these issues. For this effort, they use sick days and a “self-reported productivity percentage change after moving into a new building” as their metrics. With this in mind, the research team surveyed 154 buildings with some 2000 tenants.
Across these buildings and tenants, they calculated an average salary/benefits of $106,644. And, when comparing “green” to non-green buildings, their work showed a reduction in sick leave of 2.88 days per year, on average, and a 4.88% productivity improvement. That translates, based on the salaries, to a value to the employer of $1,228.54 due to reduced sick leave and $5,204 due to productivity increases.
Healthier buildings reduce sick time and increase productivity. The steps required to provide a healthier building are not that much of a design and engineering challenge. Generally natural light, good ventilation, the absence of organic compounds provides happier, healthier workers. Appropriate temperature ranges or localized controls is also a big plus to workers and past research does support the notion of greater productivity from any or all of these improvements. Sick building syndrome should be a thing of the past, but it is not. Energy Star-labeled buildings need not also be healthier although generally they appear to be and more recently we are finding a surge in LEED buildings which tend to require better and safer environments. We now have some evidence that there is an economic pay-off to tenants who pay attention to space quality.
Okay, a “healthier” working environment is more productive but what is the cost of that productivity? Do the upfront costs outweigh those benefits?
What is increased productivity and reduced sick time worth in net present value terms? The early study by Greg Kats (2003) suggested NPV benefits in the range of $37 to $55 per square foot. For an owner-occupied building we can easily imagine NPVs equal to much more than these figures. For example, discounting $25 per year per square foot for 10 years at 10%, based on the sum of the two benefits shown above and rounded and assuming a 10-year differential for such benefits and a fairly conservative discount rate, we get a present value of $153.61 per square foot. It costs much less than this to building a better environment for workers, so the net present value certainly could reach $100 per square foot or more when an owner-occupant captures those benefits.
In other words, for an owner-occupied building, paying a $50+ premium for “green” on construction would provide a three-to-one payoff, in net present value terms over a 10 year period.
Oh, remember about “stove-piping”? Green Building and Productivity (pdf) is focused on that productivity question. It is not addressing the utility bill savings (lower energy and water use, reduced sewer fees due to rainwater capture, etc), reduced maintenance costs (such as white roofs lasting longer), and other operating savings that energy efficient “green” buildings show compared to traditional, built-to-code buildings. In other words, the payoff ratios are even better — especially because well-designed “green” projects might not even cost more to build.
We have quite a long way to go before there is true full value analysis in the cost-benefit equation of infrastructure (and other) investment decisions. Even recognizing those limitations, getting building owners (and occupants) to realize that the “greening” value goes beyond energy savings will be quite important.
For a related discussion, see: Greening the School House. Quite simply, Greening Schools is perhaps one of the clearest ‘no brainer’ no regrets strategies that we should be pursuing aggressively. I cannot think of another opportunity to boost educational performance while cutting costs and improving the health of our children and communities while also helping turn the tide on Global Warming.
When it comes to the US Chamber of Commerce, Nike Just Can’t Seem to Do It.
What is it? Reconciling a Corporation’s affiliation with scientific understanding of climate change issues and its Corporate affiliations and memberships.
Duke, Alstom, PNM Resources, and Nike all agree that climate change is real, that it is driven by human activity (primarily burning of fossil fuels), and that action (framed by government policy) is necessary to create the conditions for avoiding catastrophic climate change.
The American Coalition for Clean-Coal Electricity (ACCCE) is a coal-industry front organization that has been fighting, hard, against meaningful US action on climate change. Duke Energy and Alstom were ACCCE members who chose to leave the organization due to fundamental differences between their understanding of science and ACCCE’s “negative” approach. As Alstom’s CEO put it,
We simply didn’t agree with their position, which was a negative position.
We’ve adopted the US CAP position, which we see as a positive position.
We couldn’t, could we, remain members of two organizations with such different messages?
At PNM Resources, we see climate change as the most pressing environmental and economic issue of our time. Given that view, and a natural limit on both company time and resources, we have decided that we can be most productive by working with organizations that share our view on the need for thoughtful, reasonable climate change legislation and want to push that agenda forward in Congress. These organizations include the Edison Electric Institute, the association of shareholder-owned electric companies, and the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a group of businesses and environmental organizations of which we are a founding member.
“Nike fundamentally disagrees with the US Chamber of Commerce’s position on climate change and is concerned and deeply disappointed with the US Chamber’s recently filed petition challenging the EPA’s administrative authority and action on this critically important issue.
Nike believes that climate change is an urgent issue affecting the world today and that businesses and their representative associations need to take an active role to invest in sustainable business practices and innovative solutions to address the issue. It is not a time for debate but instead a time for action and we believe the Chamber’s recent petition sets back important work currently being undertaken by EPA on this issue.
Nike helped to found BICEP, a coalition of businesses supporting congressional action to address strong U.S. climate and energy legislation. Nike has worked to address its own environmental footprint through the development of more sustainable products, energy efficiency programs and emission reductions.”
Despite Nike “fundamentally disagree[ing] with the US Chamber of Commerce’s position on climate change,” unlike Duke Energy, Alstom, PG&E, PNR Resources and others, Nike Just Can’t Do It.
One of the real pleasures for reality-based observers of the Obama Administration is the number of thoughtful members of the Administration members, who are not just worth listening to, but who can make seeing the world in different ways an interesting and enjoyable experience. Dr. John Holdren, the President’s Science Advisor, took his quite significant scientific expertise and turned to a path to figure out how to communicate science and the value of science to policy makers and the more general public. In his appearance at the Council on Competitiveness‘ National Energy Summit, as part of a panel on Spawning Technological Breakthroughs and Entrepreneurship, Holdren laid out the priority:
It needs emphasizing. The single most critical issue is to put a price on Greenhouse Gases that will incentivize action.
Why does this matter? What is the criticality? Well, Holdren talked about harvesting fruit in the context of seizing opportunities, even while creating new opportunities to seize, in our energy and climate challenges. In essence, there are three levels of fruit to be harvested:
Low-hanging fruit: valuable and cost-effective today, where we have the technology and capacities to act with clear benefits.
Mid-hanging fruit: these become valuable with a carbon price, increasing competitiveness.
High-hanging fruit: arenas where we don’t necessarily have the technology or can’t do this cost-effectively, but where a price signal and clear policy will incentivize research and development to solve the problem and bring solutions ‘into reach’.
A very simple image to lay out what we have in hand, what we could reach with a little assistance, and what sustained dedication to the problem will bring into reach in terms of energy efficiency, clean energy, new agricultural practices, and other paths to help seize opportunities in addressing the climate challenge. It is valuable because this is not static — new fruit will grow. As we move forward, new fruit will bud — at all three levels. This is a dynamic picture of how we can create a sustainable harvest of opportunities for sustainability in the years and decades ahead.
Below is a guest post by Clem Guttata from WVABlue, providing a window on the
Your lights are on,
but you’re not home,
your will is not your own
Might as well face it you’re addicted to coal.
Appalachia suffers from a resource curse. Coal mining wealth is illusory–the benefits have long been obvious to those dependent on Big Coal for a living even if the costs (largely hidden) were high. Yet, the costs are no longer as hidden and the benefits no longer so great.
Climate change legislation is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for our political leadership to take bold action to help diversify the Appalachian economy. So far, that leadership is lacking. Join me today in calling for Appalachian state officials, Congressional representatives and senators to to chart a new course. Let’s all kick the habit of the dirty black rock.
Institutional Agency: As a “business”, an institution, Georgetown University is tackling its own energy use. According to DeGioia, GU has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 16 percent over the past three years and will cut total emissions by at least 50% by2020. “This requires significant rethinking of processes and practices” within the institution(s). While technology plays a major part, behavior is a critical component — such as a strengthened recycling program. Now, opportunities are not necessarily immediately obvious. DeGioia pointed out that some 70% of GU’s progress is expected via one area: improving the efficiency of its power plant, notably for water chilling. But, opportunities also can be created — over the long term. GU’s largest academic building was constructed nearly 30 years ago — designed for incorporating solar panels (solar pv) when that would become a sensible option.
University Community: When dealing with these challenges, a (perhaps) unique element is that this involves all elements of the University community. This is not just scientists, but there are legal, social, and other elements. Thus, turning the University community to incorporate energy and climate challenges/opportunities means breaking through and crossing stove-pipes, toward a whole of university approach. (See note below.)
Preparing students: What, after all, are educational institutions about other than preparing their students for the future? Thus, the question before DeGioia: Is GU shaping students to help solve energy and climate challenges and seize the opportunities that these challenges create?
An interesting triology, certainly not unique to Georgetown, but a well-laid out discussion for the Council’s business audience.
GLOBAL WARMING HYSTERIA: THE NEW FACE OF THE “PRO-DEATH” AGENDA – CABINET ROOM
Why did the President’s science advisor support coerced abortions to protect the planet?
Why are top abortion funders underwriting efforts to co-opt evangelicals on global warming?
If “people are the problem,” what’s the final solution?
Cap and trade is about more than saving the planet. It’s the biggest tax hike in American history. It threatens to concentrate massive amounts of power into the hands of central government and international bureaucrats. And its ascendancy marks the rise of a new, more subtle challenge to the culture of life.
Ultimately, climate change hysteria rests on an unbiblical view of God, mankind, and the environment. Come and hear how the Cornwall Alliance is pushing back–producing ground-breaking studies on Biblical environmentalism, educating pastors and churches across the country, and activating thousands of Christians to rally against the hype through the WeGetIt.org Campaign. Learn why policies to fight alleged man-made global warming will instead cause hundreds of millions of premature deaths throughout this century, and how human liberty, responsibility, and flourishing are the key to a healthier environment.
The scientific analysis of climate change and the changes that we are seeing (that are ever-better documented) represent “an unbiblical view of God, mandkind, and the environent”? If someone had said, absent this description, “Biblical Environmentalism”, I would have thought it soemthing to do with stewardship.)
Clearly, those who discuss stewardship and the mandate to take care of the Earth are, according to Beisner, a-religious, unChristian people.
An ‘unbiblical view of God’ likely alludes to the view most famously expressed by Rep John Shimkus (IL – R) that climate is controlled by God and therefore, unlike every other phenomena on earth, divinely exempt from being affected by human activity (How do we know this? Because the fringe right says so, that’s how!). In an astonishing lucky break for the energy industry, free will and thermodynamics are miraculously thwarted when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.
In a rather sympathetic discussion, Ambrose highlights that these “Values Voters” are being deceived by truthiness from fossil-foolish interests leading to this:
The Values Voters organizers are either unaware, or simply don’t care, that many conservatives, including George Bush, have now stated they accept that climate change is occurring and that some of it might be due to human activity. It’s textbook right-wing denial, married with a heaping helping of hypocrisy to frame climate change as part of a ‘pro-death agenda’ that will cause ‘hundreds of millions of premature deaths’ while implying that it’s the climate scientists who are blinded with hysteria.
The New York City Panel on Climate Change, led by an elite team of NASA scientists and climate experts from Columbia, CUNY and Rutgers, has concluded that unless carbon emissions are drastically reduced all over the world, New York faces dangerous increases in temperature (up to 7.5 degrees), extreme weather (hurricanes and intense storms) and sea level rise (as much as 4.5 feet).
According to the panel’s report, if all nations don’t drastically cut their carbon emissions, then Gotham will suffer
The people’s choice award in the Re-Burbia “Rethinking Suburbia” design competition was the entry titled Urban Sprawl Repair Kit: Repairing The Urban Fabric.
there are events where EcoGeek’s can gather in style.
US Chamber of Commerce’s position on climate change,” unlike Duke Energy, Alstom, PG&E, PNR Resources and others, Nike Just Can’t Do It.