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The “Go House”

Oh, the Greening of modular construction. Why not? Champion presents the “Go House”:

The GO House will be unveiled at the 2010 International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas on January 19th – 22nd in the IBS Outdoor Village near the Main Entrance, #P2. It is Genesis first-ever, nationally produced modular home built to green standards and it is available to customers via the GO House website. It is sold through approved local builders. The Go House website, www.thegohouse.com, lets customers configure their home online by selecting a base floor plan, then customizing their plan by choosing first floor additions, second-story options, and garage designs to create a truly customized home.

Truly. But as the Times greenblog notes, all four of the models on display at the builders’ show, sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders, were “greener” prefab structures. Greener than thou, maybe; but I guess their point is, you can do it. Or, they can do it – ‘they’ being the prefab mass producers. Maybe this means green is at the beginning of showing effects upon the bell curve of home building and the impact will not just be from the high-end but, with incentives, it begins simultaneously at the low(er) end as well. And they meet somewhere and thus forms the fat part of the bell.

I had been thinking that it would be architecture like this which would the operational idea for green building going forward:

Contemporary-Residential-Architecture

But I’m an elitist, of course. And really, if green building is going to catch on and work, we’re going to have start seeing it everywhere, which means it will have to go modular, and probably mobile. And though they might not have the LEEDiest materials or be outfit with solar panels, it sounds like it’s already happening. See you in O-town at next year’s convention.

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Leverage

I thought it was something I had already mentioned, but this kinda makes sense: harnessing consumer power to help communities buy solar power. One Block Off the Grid, or 1BOG.

1bog

Cool logo. Check it out.

h/t Times Green blog.

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This Is Not A Plan

This is hope, which everyone seems to agree, is not a plan. So what is hope?

Well, that depends on whether Your Hope is just hoping something happens, or hoping what you are doing will work. Which, again, neither plans, but they do part ways, fundamentally. There’s a difference, one from the other, in tone and tenor.

Research into building a quantum computer, for example. Not much of a plan; hopeful, maybe. Breakthroughs in encryption excites the NSA some people. But I think it is the off-shoot consequences of trying to hit balls into this cup from 90 yards out, day after month after year, that will be the real dividends of this kind of research. Of this kind of hope.

In its way, the same goes for hydrogen storage and electricity storage from wind, sun and wave. In these cases, we’re not hitting around the mark so much as increasing the volume of balls being chipped at the hole.

So, Bill Gates doesn’t care for efficiency, or cap-and-trade, for that matter. Fine. It’s a questionable signal to send, but fine. In a $ green culture, the billionaires get listened to the most. Sigh. You might as well have listened to Warhol about painting. That wasn’t was he was ever talking about – but I’ll save that for another time.

But Gates’ views are no more or less likely to be compromised by conflicted interests than anyone else’s. Just something to keep in mind. Especially of late, when hope is such an easy target for relentless pummeling. Go ahead, take that away and replace it with the best of the best laid plans ever devised.

What would we have?

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‘Eco-Bling’

This might be overstating things.

LONDON—Installing wind turbines and solar panels in people’s homes is “eco-bling” that will not help meet Britain’s targets on cutting carbon emissions, engineers warned Wednesday.

In a new report by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), Professor Doug King said it was better to adapt buildings to make them more energy efficient than try to offset energy use with “on-site renewable energy generation.”

The leader of Britain’s main opposition Conservative party, David Cameron, is among those who have installed wind turbines, fixing one onto the roof of his home in the plush west London district of Notting Hill.

“Eco-bling is a term I coined to describe unnecessary renewable energy visibly attached to the outside of poorly designed buildings,” King told the Daily Mail newspaper ahead of the report’s publication.

If we want to talk about little or nothing, there are a lot of places to start – and not all of them small bore. Energy efficiency, gas tax hiking, rail infrastructure. But individuals buying the means to capture wind energy for use on inefficient buildings… eh, I have trouble getting worked up about that. And here’s why.

I was working construction a few years ago… okay, up until about ten years ago. But anyway, I worked on an historic renovation project that took years, literally; we learned a lot, used some interesting materials, had a good time and eventually completed the house – all very reminiscent of my writing at the time. Near the end of the project, there were installed some PV-cell solar panels on the roof, three or four massive panels that were enough to power a small freezer in which you could, I think, fit an already-frozen pizza. And maybe some popsicles.

It was silly, in its way, and not unlike some those gigantic satellite dishes scattered and rusting in yards across America. We/they just didn’t have the technology right yet. And now, we/they know much more about satellite TV technology and we have tiny dishes that fit under your cornice and pick up 582 channels. Those albatrosses were the precursors to something better, more effective, cheaper and more useful.

(Unlike the highly pretentious display windmills at issue, the big PV panels I mentioned were on the back of the house. No one could have seen them from the street; they were an honest attempt at renewable energy.) There will always be a penalty for ostentatious displays of hipness, youth, technical prowess and especially green-ness. Let that penalty be money and let it flow downhill to fund research for the Direct TVs of wind power. Then we can laugh about those rusting windmills in the backyards of houses and how those hippies yuppies protested too much anyway.

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Heuristic no. 65437929

Lester Brown has a new book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, and he writes about it on Grist:

Each year, the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine rank 60 “failing states,” countries which on some level fail to provide personal security or basic services, such as education, health care, food, and physical infrastructure, to their people.  The countries are evaluated using the Failed States Index, a ten-point scale for each of twelve political, social, economic, and military indicators (i.e., a state that is failing completely receives a score of 120).  

Failing states have much in common.  Seventeen of the top twenty have high population growth rates (several close to 3 percent per year or twenty-fold per century); these countries have seen enough development to reduce mortality but not fertility.  In fact, birth rates in five of these seventeen states exceed six children per woman.  Soaring population growth puts strain on educational facilities, as well as food and water supplies.  It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that almost half of the top twenty failing states depend on food from the U.N. World Food Programme or that in fourteen of them, at least 40 percent of the population is under fifteen.

As breeding grounds for conflict, terrorism, drugs, and infectious disease, failing states represent a threat to global order and stability.  In 2004, only seven countries had scores of 100 or greater.  In just four years, the number of states in this category doubled. 

Another concern addressed in Plan B 4.0 is how the growing consumption of the earth’s resources is clearly unsustainable.  Examining commodity consumption in merely two countries, the United States and China, makes this point.

China now consumes more grain than the United States.  It consumes almost twice as much meat, roughly three times as much coal, and nearly four times as much steel.  But what would happen if China’s 1.3 billion people were to consume commodities at the same rate as the United States’ 300 million?

For this exercise, we look at how an 8 percent annual economic growth rate in China (a conservative projection) would put per capita income in China at U.S. levels by 2024.  

At that point, if each person in China were to consume paper at the current American rate, China would need more paper than is produced worldwide today (there go the world’s forests).  China would require over half of the current world grain supply. China would also need 90 million barrels of oil per day; however, the world currently produces less than 86 million and is unlikely to produce much more than that in the future. 

These projections serve not to blame China for its consumption but rather to illustrate that the western economic model—with meat-rich diets, fossil-fuel powered utilities, and automobile-dependent transportation—will not work on a global scale because there are simply not enough resources.  Plan B puts us on a path toward a new kind of global economy, one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything.

Now you know.

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Butter and Jam

Guinean students, with no electricity at home, study under street lights in the Conakry airport parking lot in June, 2007. Any girls? (Rebecca Blackwell/The Associated Press)
Guinean students, with no electricity at home, study under street lights in the Conakry airport parking lot in June, 2007. (Rebecca Blackwell/The Associated Press)

Knowing how much energy you use on an hour/daily/weekly basis would be one thing. As it is, we’re greatly ignorant of even this, and the idea that if we began unpacking what exactly is a kWh and what it takes to produce one, maybe, just maybe we could re-construct that perception – who knows, maybe even based on how fast a little whirl-y-gig on top your house would have to spin just wash your clothes or grind your coffee beans. Maybe we would decide a little whirl-y-gig just wouldn’t do the trick and other measures would be more effective, in tandem with using less or developing ways to use sunlight or building different kinds of houses or… you get the idea. While it may be hard to retro-fit our world – we should consider trying to retro-fit our habits based on everything required to support them. That would actually be much more difficult, though probably only at first.

Trying to understand how much energy you use on an hourly/daily/weekly basis in terms of how much people elsewhere in the world use at all, per the photo above, is a route to a wholly different transformation. Really, it has little to do with the first. We would have a hard enough time justifying our energy use in the first instance; there is very little chance we could do so at in the second. Alas this is the issue, and this is one of the reasons why there are climate change denialists.

So should we (the haves) pay more for our energy than those who haveless? This anecdote from Copenhagen paints a nice picture of our unwillingness:

That was the only talk about poverty for the night. But that’s not the discouraging part. This is: One of the moderators, CNBC anchor Louisa Bojeson, asked the crowd to raise their hands if they were willing to pay 10 percent more for their home’s electricity if it came from a carbon-free source. Two thirds of them, give or take, raised a hand. Would they pay 20 percent more? Fewer than half kept a hand raised. Would they pay 50 percent more? All but a minority, perhaps ten percent, dropped their hands.

These are the royalty of our age—well-compensated, well-heeled corporate leaders, the owners of at least some of the private jets that landed in Copenhagen last week. Home electricity bills, even for mansions, constitute a minuscule portion of their salaries. If they’re not willing to voluntarily pay more for the common good…

There are a number of conclusions you might draw. Maybe the business leaders were defending the right of consumers to choose the lowest price in a free market. Maybe they don’t like raising their hands. Maybe this shows clean-energy choices must be economically appealing—green has to be cheaper than brown if it’s going to catch on. Maybe it means leadership must come from politicians, or social movements. It wasn’t an encouraging moment.

Though perhaps a revealing one.

photo from Revkin’s blog.

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Zwischenzug

A San Francisco couple challenges the Waxman-Markey climate change bill wending it’s way through congress. Yawn.

A San Francisco couple who are both lawyers for the EPA challenges the Waxman-Markey climate change bill wending it’s way through congress. Scandal.

Check out the video in question. After the scary music, they offer disclaimers about not representing the government or speaking for the president. And I can’t tell from a straight-up amateur video that these people are any more overzealous or weird than the editorial page editor of the Washington Post Kaplan Test Prep Daily. They work at the EPA, and have for many years. They have strong opinions about cap-and-trade – they think it won’t spur the urgent technological innovations and investments needed to usher in the mammoth energy transition necessary to drastically reduce carbon emissions.

At some level, I don’t care how amateurish their videos might be – which also means that at some level, I do.  But I’m sympathetic to the argument that the bill, which gives away emission permits, doesn’t do enough. The EPA has every right to make sure their employees aren’t misrepresenting official policy – precisely because what their employees say carries more weight. That being the case, I’m interested in what they think. Most of what we hear about the climate bill is how much passing it will damage the economy. You can imagine that a couple of climate change deniers who were EPA lawyers would be feted as dissidents and we, treated to a new round of cable cause celebre. Harnessing the power of n, where n is anything other than coal or petroleum, will necessarily revolutionize much what we see and do. How are we possibly going to accomplish it? Let’s argue about that for a while.

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Innovative Deception

via Yglesias, the folks who makeup the political opposition to the climate bill have been working nights and weekends, but luckily they’re not coming up with much:

Seven months after first trying to re-brand congressional climate change legislation as an “energy tax,” Senate Republicans were back at it today with a new report and op-ed that attempts to expose the climate bill as a “$3.6 trillion gas tax.”

Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Kit Bond (R-MO) gathered outside the Capitol today, flanked by aides wearing black stickers imprinted with the slogan “CAP & TRADE = GAS TAX,” to promote a new report [PDF] that presents their “gas tax” assertions.

There’s plenty of reasons at the link why this re-branding is lame, wrong and just might work (hey, there’s  slogan!). But holy Chateau D’ what If, batman, what if that proposition was granted? That even though the numbers don’t support it, what if the climate bill was construed as a gas tax ( you know, the gas tax that’s actually needed)? Now, Bailey, Hutchinson et al are doing it simply on the basis of knowing that Amur’cans will reject any tax out of hand, especially a gas tax. But, and this is where we could really use the guile of Edmond Dantes, the only way we’re going slip the chains of present usage and wastage is if the price of energy – and the cost of wasting it – goes up. Land use and urban planning will follow, not lead, this curve. So their ploy might be doubly-ingenious, and may be we protest too much by rejecting it out of hand. Look at the arc of the health care bill; can the lies permeate and end up producing a stronger bill?

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New Bronze Aging

There was a funny quote by a Saudi prince/oil official in an article I read a few months ago, something along the lines of, “the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.” The implication for the fossil fuel age being, of course, that instead of completely running out, we will graduate to an improved energy source. Whatever your feelings on that, it’s a good line.

But before we move along, as we do, such as the case may be, the House of Saud has a master plan to help themselves alongeven as their repositories are abandoned:

Saudi Arabia is trying to enlist other oil-producing countries to support a provocative idea: if wealthy countries reduce their oil consumption to combat global warming, they should pay compensation to oil producers.

The chief Saudi negotiator, Mohammad al-Sabban, described the position as a “make or break” provision for the Saudis, as nations stake out their stance before the global climate summit scheduled for the end of the year.

Can they take a hard line on that? Whatever your feelings, it must noted that the Saudis are working much harder to prepare for an uncertain future than we are, even taking preposterous hard lines in upcoming negotiations that will will wean us off of their product. It’s a question of need, of course, except that we need to get creative like this, as well. But instead, we largely continue to dissemble about what we will, should or might be willing to do, like it’s a waiting game and we only need to last through to the next iteration of… some variant of what we’re already doing. People aren’t even that interested in the upcoming talks in Copenhagen, talks that could create new sets of goals for emissions reductions that could have very significant effects on economies the world over, that could (but not like magic) reset the developed world on a path toward transition and incentivize the developing world to follow along. But most of the moral high ground will likely be compromised away with  easier to reach, lower impact targets that everyone can agree on – more stones to decorate the third place age recital.

Meanwhile, even David Byrne bikes.

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Concealment of Losses

Because it requires such hearty fortitude, reading Kunstler doesn’t seem to be for everybody. Which, of course, says more about everybody than it does about him. His noteworthy digressions on suburbia and the long, slow car wreck (sorry) that is the American economy are entertaining in that gallows humor sort of way, but enlightening for purposes of seeing into the green, as well. We are all pu**ies in the way in which we need the worst of our worst to be elided from us with dense statistics, acronyms and otherwise artificial routes to happiness, whether they come in the form of adjustable rate mortgages or doctor-prescribed pills. Even honest grappling with this situation would at least put us on the sidewalk to lifestyle changes that would begin to improve some of the worsts (planetary, transportation, communications). But, no; we must continually place ourselves at the mercy of the corporate fantasists who promise us Sweet Baby All in exchange for keeping things humming along, even if, as JHK fears, we’re humming right along into a buzz saw.

For example, take Kunstler’s Happy Motoring non-metaphor. This new battery technology – why is it problematic?

As a part of IBM’s 2-year-old Big Green Innovations program, the Battery 500 Project aims to boost the range of rechargeable batteries for all-electric cars from less than 100 miles today to as far as 500 miles. The consortium’s efforts are being led by the Almaden Lab in collaboration with several U.S. universities and the Department of Energy’s national labs.

“Batteries technology has improved, but is still far inferior to gasoline in terms of how much energy they hold,” said Spike Narayan, a key IBM researcher. “The energy density—which is the amount of energy a lithium-ion battery stores per unit weight—is really not enough to produce a family-sized sedan with a 300- to 500-mile range.”

Being able to continue rely on automobiles similarly to the way we do now… is that really a green innovation? There are four big reasons why plug-ins won’t be better than petrol-fueled cars, but lowly number five is the inference that plug-ins will largely allow most of what we now see/do to stay the same. This is the major plug-in FAIL.

Exhibit Dos: Download the new Visa Black Card commercial to your hairbrush, here.