Elemental

These are my links for June 27th from 09:35 to 09:35:

• FT.com / Reportage - High-speed trains will transform Europe - These trains are more than just amenities for spoiled travellers. Western Europe’s unique selling point has always been fast travel between cities. The region’s good luck is what the historian Norman Davies calls a “user-friendly climate”: it is mild and rainy. Because of that, the land is fertile, allowing hundreds of millions of people to inhabit a small area. That creates networks. For centuries now, the interconnected peoples of western Europe have exchanged ideas fast. The “Scientific Revolution” of the 16th and 17th centuries could happen in western Europe because its scientists were near each other, debating and networking.

admin News train, travel

These are my links for June 18th through June 21st:

• HAT Projects blog - Hana adds more to Charles' PQQ rant: "The big firms have clients - and particularly the weak public sector ones, who are bound by procurement guidelines - over the proverbial barrel. Not only is it then incredibly hard to promote less mainstream talent, but the big firms can then churn out standardised product that often doesn't really meet the brief, and their 'competitive' fees get boosted by the myriad services that weren't included in the original contract but that are actually essential, and chargeable by the hour. There is rarely an incentive for the consultancy to meet deadlines or budgets. That's not to say there aren't some good large firms, or good individuals within large firms, but the assumption that the service you get from a large firm is less risky than that you might get from a small one, is illogical."
• Net Benefits of Biomass Power Under Scrutiny - NYTimes.com - "Biomass proponents say it is a simple and proved renewable technology based on natural cycles. They acknowledge that burning wood and other organic matter releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just as coal does, but point out that trees and plants also absorb the gas. If done carefully, and without overharvesting, they say, the damage to the climate can be offset. But opponents say achieving that sort of balance is almost impossible, and carbon-absorbing forests will ultimately be destroyed to feed a voracious biomass industry fueled inappropriately by clean-energy subsidies. They also argue that, like any incinerating operation, biomass plants generate all sorts of other pollution, including particulate matter. State and federal regulators are now puzzling over these arguments."
• The Original Green By Steve Mouzon: A Must-Read If You Care About Sustainable Design : TreeHugger - "In the current world of green and sustainable design, so much weight is put on technology; the adding of solar power, high tech glass, qualifying for LEED. It is all about ADDING things. The lesson one learns from Mouzon, and from many heritage buildings, walkable communities and dense cities, is how well one can do with less, by taking stuff away, without any diminishment of comfort. Everyone is complaining lately about how much LEED costs and how poorly LEED buildings are performing, but they are complex things that have new and fancy equipment. But Mouzon points out old technologies are easy to maintain and adjust."
• Architect Frank Gehry talks LEED and the future of green building | Need to Know | PBS - More from Gehry on LEED. The role of government versus voluntary is discussed, but to no satisfactory conclusion. I'm sure he's wishing he never said anything to begin with. A throw away comment has caused a storm of attention on something he's obviously not that passionate one way or the other about.
• Unlocking the Potential of Empty Homes: Building Houses on Old Kent Road - "For years we’ve been told not to worry about the thousands of vacant flats and houses that are in regeneration schemes. “They’re all the process of development,” we were told. But they’re not now. The process and the development have both stopped. Somehow we have to find a way to turn these places back into homes."
• Fantastic Journal: A Short Post About Risk - "Vast amounts of time and effort go into answering these questions but it's a fruitless and largely pointless process. The PPQ limits the likelihood of any form of innovation as it is explicitly designed to stop practices getting jobs in areas where they aren't already working. They also disempower clients, removing from them any chance to exercise judgement or knowledge in selecting an architect. They denude any form of expertise and create a vast raft of bureaucracy and management bullsh*t in its place."
• A special report on water: For want of a drink | The Economist - Good high level article on global water supplies: "The problems caused by inexact terminology do not end here. Concepts like efficiency, productivity and saving attract woolly thinking. Chris Perry, an irrigation economist widely considered the high priest of water accounting, points out that “efficient” domestic systems involve virtually no escape of water through evaporation or irrecoverable seepage. “Efficient” irrigation, though, is often used to describe systems that result in 85% of the water disappearing in vapour. Similarly, water is not saved by merely using less of it for a purpose such as washing or irrigation; it is saved only if less is rendered irrecoverable."
• SOLUTIONS - Sustainability of Land Use and Transport in Outer Neighbourhoods - "The options represent generic Urban Patterns combined with appropriate transport policies. Currently outer-city areas (which includes suburbs, urban fringes, out-of-town developments and satellite settlements) have generally received less attention in spatial planning and urban design research. However, these areas are where most people live and where most new development is taking place. A unique feature of SOLUTIONS research is that it aims to understand the extent to which the sustainability of the design of cities at the Strategic Design scale and the Local Design (neighbourhood) scale are interdependent. This is achieved by carrying out the research within the frame work of strategic land use - transport computer models, and the development of equivalent 'Microsimulation' models at the local scale."
• ULI - Land Use and Driving - "Land Use and Driving summarizes the land use and climate change conclusions of three recent studies, Moving Cooler, Growing Cooler (both published by ULI) and Driving and the Built Environment, published by the Transportation Research Board at the National Academy of Sciences. On a national basis, the three studies show reductions in VMT and energy consumption of between 8 and 18 percent when compact development makes up 60 percent or more of all future development between now and 2050."

admin News biomass, cars, compact, development, driving, Gehry, LEED, PQQ, Procurement, regeneration, transport, urban, water

These are my links for June 8th from 11:16 to 16:27:

• American Society of Landscape Architects - Content Details - Incredible list of resources: "Economic Models focuses on economic sustainability, which involves the development of a healthy economy that supports and sustains people and the environment over the long-term. In a market-driven economy, cost is a deciding factor in determining whether a project moves forward. To be sustainable, projects must not only provide environmental and social benefits, but also provide economic value. Ecosytem service models can also be used to quantify the inherent economic value of services nature already provides for free.<br />
  <br />
  The toolkit is arranged from macro- to micro-scales, beginning with sustainable regional planning, and moving to sustainable cities & communities planning, sustainable neighborhood planning, and, then finally, site-specific tools related to sustainable landscapes and green buildings."
• et - Full Story - Scariest taxi ride of my life was in Cairo. This is an ambitious scheme - to be lauded: "In a city where an efficient metro system is regularly disregarded because of its social stigma, as are the more chaotic microbus and bus services, and where cycling in rush hour traffic is tantamount to suicide, the concept of Downtown Cairo without cars is unfathomable to many residents. Environmentalists are excited about the project, which they say will serve as a poignant reminder of the negative impact cars have on the environment."
• Biomass: Boon or Bugaboo? - Good article summarising some critcisms of biomass. US bias.
• Does high density development make travel more sustainable? | Sustainable Cities | CABE - ? "Concentrating growth in urban centres damages economic growth and quality of life…. Because travel takes longer it costs more. People travel shorter distances and the economy suffers.<br />
  By contrast, in lower density places where travel is easy, people have better access to a wider selection of jobs, homes, shops and services. Businesses have a larger market area for their goods – there’s more competition, lower prices and greater prosperity.<br />
  If we want to build successful, prosperous places, we have to let people live where they want. We should stop forcing people into flats built on brownfield land – in places where people don’t actually want to live and where there is little economic growth. Take…the south of England for example – employment is growing in the west and south whereas new homes are being built to the east in places such as the Thames Gateway. Instead, we should promote low density, dispersed development where there is a quick, efficient flow of goods and people."

admin News biomass, Cairo, debate, economic, renewables, toolkit, transport

These are my links for June 3rd through June 7th:

• UNEP DTIE SCP Branch: Resource Panel - Quite: "Population and economic growth will hence lead to higher impacts, unless patterns of production and consumption can be changed."
• Protocols for Performance Measurement Offered by Leading Building Groups - "A new book from three leading building industry associations provides a standardized set of protocols over a range of accuracies and costs that can be applied consistently to the assessment of building performance. Published by ASHRAE and developed in collaboration with the Chartered Institution of Building Service Engineers (CIBSE) and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), Performance Measurement Protocols for Commercial Buildings identifies what to measure, how to measure it and how often it is to be measured for inclusion in buildings’ operation and maintenance plan."
• House 2.0: Grant Shapps to define Zero Carbon. Really? - "But I fear he has inherited a poisoned chalice and hasn't quite grasped its nature. The reason its taken four years of "dithering" is that anyone with half a brain can see that there is not and never can be such a thing as zero carbon housing (at least as long as we continue to burn carbon to power our society), and that the Code for Sustainable Homes was based on a conceit. It was spin of the highest order, based on dodgy carbon accounting and masses of offsetting, so that a housebuilding programme could somehow be branded as "green". About as green as the third runway at Heathrow."
• Blogs and Comments - Comments - Other Comments - Get down off your Dark Mountain: you’re making matters worse - The Ecologist - Solitaire of Futerra (in the bright green camp) takes on the doom-mongers of Dark Mountain (very much the same kind of thinking as Dave Pollard amongst others).

admin News consumption, environment, green, Housing, metrics, unep, zero_carbon

These are my links for May 26th through May 27th:

• Some Transition Thoughts on the Energy Bits of the Queen’s Speech » Transition Culture - I'm not a particular fan of the Transition Towns movement (something too insular and regressive about it to sit comfortably with my world view, each to their own and all that), but Rob writes some excellent pieces. This article is well worth a read - he knows his energy policies well and makes some good points about funding, FiT's and CCS.
• Blogs and Comments - Comments - Dan Box - The Government has found a backhanded way to subsidise nuclear power - The Ecologist - Why Huhne's compromise on nuclear could be a good thing (IMO) although Box is obviously not happy: "The way it works is this: European companies currently pay for each tonne of carbon they emit by buying permits, the price of which is determined by the market itself. A floor price will most likely drive this price up…, making pollution more expensive. It will also encourage investors to put money into non-polluting companies by making the market in which they operate more predictable.<br />
  …Driving up the cost of producing polluting energy from coal- or gas-fired power plants, doesn’t just favour renewables. It also makes the costs of nuclear production far more competitive, even without subsidy."
• Guest blog: Goodbye HIPs, Hello EPCs | National Energy Services - "From today, if you intend to sell your house you no longer need to have a HIP in place, but you do need an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). To comply with the new law, you need to have instructed a Domestic Energy Assessor to prepare one, and either to have paid for it, or given a clear undertaking to pay, before marketing.<br />
  If you are selling through an agent, he or she must be satisfied that an EPC has been commissioned before starting to market your home. Both parties must make reasonable efforts to secure an EPC within 28 days, and all of the new duties carry fixed penalties where somebody fails to comply."
• Footprint » Embodied carbon is the next hot topic - "Carbon profiling methodology is clearly explained and applied to a case study of Arup Associates’ Ropemaker Place, a 20-storey BREEAM Excellent office block in the City completed in May 2009. This research, commissioned by British Land’s Sarah Cary who was also on the panel, shows that embodies carbon makes up more than half of Ropemaker’s carbon emissions.<br />
  The next challenge is creating statutory incentives for reducing embodied carbon. Simon Cox of ProLogis described a recent project where planners were willing to reduce the renewables requirement in light of a sustainability strategy which had addressed embodied carbon. Guy Battle of dcarbon8 (and now Deloitte) remarked that the day will come Part L incorporates embodied carbon. Simon Sturgis noted that BREEAM awards less points for retaining a concrete frame than for putting bat boxes on a building."
• Solar energy reduces electricity bills by a third - Modern Building Services - "The installation of solar photo-voltaic panels on affordable homes in Huddersfield has proved even more energy efficient than Kirklees Neighbourhood Housing and supplier Photon Energy expected.<br />
  Not only have the residents benefited from the production of solar electricity on site, but they have also become more economical in their use of electricity.<br />
  The panels have been installed on 30 all-electric bungalows and flats for older people at Fernside Estate in the Almondbury area of Huddersfield."
• The climate-change greenhouse in a datacentre - "When you're building a datacentre, the biggest problem you've got is often getting rid of the heat generated by so many computers running in such a small area. Some data centres just pump it out into the outside world. Others use the excess energy to heat local homes. But TelecityGroup's newest datacentre, Condorcet - which opened in Paris earlier in the year, uses its heat to conduct research into climate change.<br />
  The building's exterior is comprised of a massive arboretum - a greenhouse, which is maintained at the climatic conditions expected to be prevailing in France in 2050. The French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) operates a research centre there, growing plants from around the world to investigate which will be viable to grow when climate change's effects are starting to be felt in the country."

admin News adaptation, carbon, CCS, centre, data, DEA, embodied, EPC, FiT, Huddersfield, kirklees, nuclear, PV, renewables, TT