Are suburban corporate campuses falling out of fashion? NRDC staff blog predicts an increase in smart growth. Lonely Planet surveyed travelers to find a list of the top 20 walking cities. Grist readers nominated 10 additional cities that didn’t make the original Lonely Planet list. A study commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations finds that roughly one third of the food produced for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted.
Thermal Imaging of a House in Cambodia (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
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Grist recently ran a piece on lessons learned by by shadowing a home energy inspector. The author highlighted a number major lessons, including:
You can read the entire article, including the explanations of the lessons learned, on the Grist website here.
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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) has a fairly new website called Driving Demand for Home Energy Improvements.
The website lists a number of reports and case studies about how to improve demand for home energy improvements, and findings from utility and government retrofit programs.
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Dan Kammen, who leads the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at UC Berkeley, was just appointed by the World Bank to be its first Clean-Energy Czar.
The New York Times Green Inc. blog posted an interview with him today:
Q – One of the chief criticisms of the World Bank is that, even as it has increased funding for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in developing countries to $3.3 billion annually, it continues to provide significant funding for carbon-intensive projects like coal-fired power plants. Do you see a need for the bank to maintain financing for those projects?
A – This is really at the heart of the tension between traditional development — meaning more energy, more access, irrespective of environmental damage — and the emerging environmental mandate that we’ve got to cut our greenhouse gas emissions so dramatically. So you get cases like the very controversial $3.5 billion investment in coal in South Africa, and at the same time, how to build the emerging economies around solar, biofuels, wind, etc.
You can read the entire interview on the New York Times website.
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UPDATE: There is also an interview with Dan Kammen posted on Grist:
Q – The climate bill process fell apart in Congress this year and it seems like the U.N. process isn’t headed for a big treaty either. How can things actually get done?
A – There’s no simple answer to that. When we look back at the Montreal Protocol and CFCs, people thought that process looked impossible until a few companies and countries realized that cleaning circuit boards without CFCs might actually save them money and be more effective. A couple successes turned a story that looked like it was going to be a failure into one that we all look back now and say, “Oh, that was easy by comparison.”
I’m not sure exactly how many successes we need to tip the balance so that a big treaty is possible, but no group is better positioned than the World Bank to facilitate them.
You can read the entire interview at Grist.org.
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