February 2012
- The GBA Glossary
- Snippets – Waste Not Want Not
- Snippets – Trade-Offs
- Tour a Tiny House in Portland
- Microgrids – The Future of Electricity
- Worldwide Parking Rate Survey
Tag Archives: climate change
Snippets
Weather extremes are damaging parts of the U.S. infrastructure [NY Times]
The United States ranks 9th out of 12 of the world’s largest economies on energy efficiency but feels the least guilty [BuildingGreen.com]
Demolition began at the West Branch of the Berkeley Public Library – when completed, it will be a zero net energy building [Berkeleyside]
The Feds say the PACE retrofit program is still too risky [BuildingGreen.com]
Photo: A blooming artichoke in Berkeley, CA, by Anna LaRue
Land Surface Temperatures Over Time
This video shows the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature groups’s land surface temperature data from 1800 to 2009, illustrating overall global warming since the industrial revolution.
Click the image below to watch it on The Guardian website or click here (there may be an ad first).
More information on the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group can be found on their website, here. Team members include Art Rosenfeld.
A Year Ago on Zero Resource – July 2011
July 2011
- Pecha Kucha Rundown: Denser, Part 2
- Pecha Kucha Rundown: Denser, Part 3
- PG&E Smart Grid Plan
- Scott Shell on Designing ZNE Buildings
- Video – Liter of Light
July 2010
- Problems for PACE Programs?
- Stimulus Money for Energy Efficiency
- Global Warming’s Six Americas
- Advanced Framing
- AC Transit Cuts, Part 3
- Finding California Incentives and Rebates
- PACE Programs Here, and Gone
- Finding Local Stimulus Projects
- Bioplastics, Part 2
- San Jose Might Sell Its Water System
- Greenwashing
- Visualizing the US Power Grid
- They Don’t Have Water Meters?!
- Resilience vs. Sustainability
- NRDC Report on Climate Change, Water and Risk
- As Climate Bill Falters, California is Crucial
- Reactions to the Stalled US Climate Bill
A Year Ago on Zero Resource – May 2011
Snippets – Waste Not Want Not
1Today, I want to share a few not-quite-so-recent stories related to waste that have been on my mind lately.
Via the New York Times, a food industry alliance is planning a three-year initiative to reduce the tremendous amount of food that Americans still throw in the garbage even as they grow somewhat more conscientious about recycling paper and yard trimmings. … A substantial portion of food is thrown away while still fully edible because of cosmetic blemishes or overstocking. … According to the most recent available statistics, more than 30 million tons of food was dumped in landfills in 2009, making food by far the most abundant material there by weight, the federal Environmental Protection Agency says.
From NPR comes a story about how all that wasted food contributes to climate change. A company called CleanMetrics gathered USDA’s estimates of food loss from retail and consumers for 2009. And when the company’s founder, Kumar Venkat, fed the data into his software he found that food waste is responsible for 135 million tons of greenhouse gases every year, or about 1.5 percent of all emissions ,,, ”If you compare beef to tomatoes, beef has a much higher footprint,” says Venkat. “So if you’re going to reduce waste, you need to prioritize.”
Via Bloomberg, a story about Bank of America selecting some its most decrepit, derelict homes in Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago and paying up to $7,500 to local agencies toward demolition costs. “There is way too much supply,” said Gus Frangos, president of the Cleveland-based Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp., which works with lenders, government officials and homeowners to salvage vacant homes. “The best thing we can do to stabilize the market is to get the garbage off.”
From the New York Times - Across western North Dakota, hundreds of fires burn as companies rushing to extract oil from the Bakken shale field treat the gas as waste and simply burn it. … Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day. The flared gas also spews at least two million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, as much as 384,000 cars or a medium-size coal-fired power plant would emit.
And again from NPR, some insight into why cleaned wastewater stays dirty in our minds. … ”It’s a very broad feature of human thinking,” Nemeroff explains. “Everywhere we look, you can see contagion thinking.” … The conclusion? ”It is quite difficult to get the cognitive sewage out of the water, even after the real sewage is gone,” Nemeroff says.
Climate Change Hits Home
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(Image credit: flickr user heidi.nutters, via SPUR)
A recent report by SPUR entitled “Climate change hits home” addresses how we should plan to adapt to climate change in the Bay Area. The report includes a number of strategies to help local communities to be more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Some of the key impacts discussed in the report include:
- Higher average temperatures,
- Increased number of heat waves,
- Water uncertainty: droughts, extreme storms, flooding,
- An increased risk of wildfire, and
- Sea level rise.
The SPUR task force responsible for the report then considered how these impacts would affect various areas of planning in the Bay Area and proposed strategies to adapt to them.
The goal of the report is to get local agencies to begin to talk to one another to coordinate responses to climate change. Many of the adaptation strategies proposed in the report will also help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – a real “win-win” overall.
A copy of the report is available for download from the SPUR website.
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Finding Data – WRI EarthTrends Delivered
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Image from: WRI EarthTrends
World Resources Institute has a useful and interesting service called EarthTrends Delivered. By signing up for this free service you can explore dozens of data charts and maps online and receive email digests of new data as it is produced by WRI in any of the following:
-Greenhouse Gas Emission Sources and Trends
-U.S. Climate Policy
-Energy and Electricity
-Adapting to Climate Change Impacts
Upon signing up you also get a dashboard to manage your subscriptions, save data, and share data via facebook, email or tweet.
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Peter Calthorpe – Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change
2Last week I saw Peter Calthorpe speak about his new book, Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.
A highly influential planner, designer and urban thinker, Calthorpe has spent decades advancing holistic approaches to the built environment, most famously as a champion of New Urbanism.
His latest book lays out the case that urbanism, i.e., creating more dense and livable cities, is the only real defense against climate change. If climate change is hastened by runaway carbon emissions, and carbon emissions are linked to the energy intensity of daily life, then it follows that altering the built environment and transportation patterns are key to its mitigation.
This may not be news to anyone, but Calthorpe’s book is about skillfully unpacking this data for a non-technical audience and showing how sprawl is not just a little more carbon intensive than denser urban development, but more intensive by orders of magnitude. Read it for a study of “the big picture”.
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