What about Sustainability? Isn’t it the same as Green?
Sustainability is a component of Green building, but sustainability suggest that we strike a balance with the natural environment to continue as we are, when what we need is an about face. We need to reverse our course, change our impact, improve the world. Finding sustainable solutions to the problems we face is a critical component in determining whether a system or product belongs in the Green conversation. Sustainability is really a component of Resource Efficiency as we perform a life cycle analysis study (some software does exist) on the structure and its systems. It is then that we ask, “Is this sustainable?”.
Why isn’t Energy at the top of your list? Isn’t this all about Energy?
When we talk about the need for balance within our approach to building it is not just nice sounding rhetoric. There is a very real need to have a much better understanding and consideration of all the components that come together to create the structure and its relationship with the land and the community in which it sits. Building with blinders on has been a big part of the problem over the last 60 years. We focused on energy once before and created the “super-insulated home” and the “passive solar home”, and an energy code that proved to be highly flawed and helped create the “sick homes” of the 90’s.
In a lecture I attended on the relationship between Green building and the codes, David Eisenberg suggested that looking at the building process through the eyes of the code was like looking through a microscope. When you make decisions based only on what you see through the microscope and ignore the impact on the world around it you fail in your task of building and design homes that are safe for their occupants. The same is true when we fail to recognize that energy consumption is only one fifth (perhaps even less) of Green.
Energy is the one thing we can live without. We did it 80 years ago, and plenty of people live without it today. I have a client who reminds me that his mother still lives without electricity or indoor plumbing and wouldn’t have it any other way. The “energy crisis” may be one of the contributing factors to the Green tipping point, but it is the easiest of all the issues to solve.
I would be willing to go as far as to say that there is no energy crisis. There is only a consumption crisis. The vast majority of us are unwilling to change our behavior and more importantly, don’t believe that we should. Utilities spend millions of dollars working to help us reduce our consumption in order to maximize existing plants and supply systems without incurring the costs of adding plants or re-building the grid.
Perhaps the most repulsive rhetoric coming from our world’s political leaders is the drive toward bio-fuel subsidies, but I’ll save that soapbox for another day.
You are EXACTLY right. There IS a consumption crisis.
After arriving back from Jamaica, I have decided to line dry my laundry this summer. (I am expecting big kudos from you for my small effort)
what about biofuels made from algae? I know of two projects that grow algae with pollution, and it has 500 times the per-acre output of soybean oil.
Ethanol is a waste, I’m sure we can all agree to that…
I think it is great that you are going to line-dry this summer. Would you believe that many cities actually have ordinances banning the use of laundry lines! (I’ll bet you are glad you don’t live in Eden Prairie now.)
Bio-fuels made from algae would be one of the exceptions in the whole bio-fuel debate. In fact there is some great work being done already with algae at the University of MN at Morris where they have a series of alternative energy sources powering their campus. They have an incredible amount of data that they have captured already, and even more coming on line as they tweak and adjust their systems. I believe that they are already far beyond their initial calculations for an ROI time frame.
The other fuel that is readily available is methane. Initial predictions had us entering the Methane age prior to entering the hydrogen age, but now it appears we are doing our best to leap-frog it. However, as long as we continue our beef consumption habits there is a steady stream (no pun intended) of fuel that could be tapped and at the same time help reduce green house gas emissions.