Green Building and Manufacturing
Hidden Costs of Energy
The energy you use to heat and cool your home, power your electric devices and appliances, and fuel your car may seem expensive enough already, but according to this new report from the National Research Council (NRC), there are plenty of health and environmental costs that aren't reflected in your energy bills. Quantifying mainly the health effects from the major air pollutants-sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone, and particulates-the NRC report estimated such ''external'' costs at $120 billion for the United States in 2005. More than half of that cost is attributed to the nation's 406 coal-fired power plants, with only 10% of those plants accounting for 43% of those damages. The other big offender is motor vehicles, which caused an estimated $56 billion in damages in 2005.
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North America Automobile Sector Bottom Of 'World Sustainability League'
ScienceDaily (Nov. 4, 2009) - North American car manufacturers have come bottom of the league in the largest ever international study of the global automobile sector's sustainability performance.
The study, entitled Sustainable Value in Automobile Manufacturing, looks at the sustainability performance of 17 leading car manufacturers worldwide between 1999 and 2007. It has been published by researchers from Queen's University Management School in Belfast, in partnership with researchers from the Euromed Management School Marseille, and the Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment (IZT) in Berlin.
The report details how Asian car manufacturers are outperforming their North American, and many of their European competitors, in using their environmental and social resources more efficiently.
It provides a full account of the societal impacts of car production, including issues such as the volume of greenhouse gas emissions from production facilities and the number of work accidents recorded by a company. It also looked at how efficiently car manufacturers used key natural resources compared with their industry peers and how much profit or loss was generated with these resources.
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How to boost fuel efficiency? Raise taxes, executives say
DETROIT (Reuters) - There's a simple way to get Americans to drive fuel-efficient cars, according to auto executives, but they are not going to like it -- sharply hike the gas tax.
While politically unpalatable, gasoline that costs at least $4 a gallon would have a far greater effect on American fuel usage than Washington's $25 billion loan program meant to spark investment in new technologies, executives told the Reuters Auto Summit in Detroit.
Consumer demand for fuel-efficient cars like Toyota Motor Corp's Prius and Ford Motor Co's Escape hybrid surged last summer as gasoline prices soared above $4 a gallon.
But with the pressure off -- the average U.S. retail gas price was $2.66 a gallon at the end of October, according to the benchmark Lundberg survey -- Americans are once again buying fuel-hungry sport utility vehicles and other large cars.
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BIM helps identify mistakes early on in construction at Woodstock, Ontario hospital
The use of building information modeling technology is becoming more commonplace but most using it are not putting enough information into the model, says the chair of the Canada BIM Council.
The ability to create a live database of a building's structure is BIM's main advantage, says Paul Loreto.
"You can be as definitive as right down to the brick coursing if you wanted to model it that way," he says, admitting it would be highly impractical.
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More Oversight Sought for Hydraulic Fracturing
Environmentalists are beefing up efforts to increase regulation of a controversial oil and gas drilling technique as interest grows in tapping vast natural gas fields across the country.
Environment America today released a report (pdf) calling for increased protection of drinking water as natural gas production grows. And earlier this week, environmental groups appealed a Pennsylvania decision that would allow a new wastewater treatment plant to dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of treated gas drilling wastewater into the Monongahela River each day.
At issue is the hydraulic fracturing drilling process, a decades-old technique that blasts a mix of water, chemicals and sand or plastic beads into compressed rock to open cracks and release trapped oil or gas. Hydraulic fracturing has been used for decades to improve production at aging wells and has recently been used to tap unconventional shale reservoirs like the Barnett in Texas, Marcellus in Appalachia and Haynesville in Louisiana.
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DOE Selects National Association of State Energy Officials to Convene Zero-Energy Commercial Buildings Consortium
The National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO) will convene the Zero-Energy Commercial Buildings Consortium in order to support the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Net-Zero Energy Commercial Building Initiative.
NASEO is comprised of senior officials from the energy offices of both the states and territories, in addition to affiliates from the private and public sectors, and will provide leadership for the Consortium.
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China Sets Its Sights on Green Cars; New business group backs climate-change bill
China Sets Its Sights on Green Cars
The parent of SAIC Motor, the biggest automaker in China, plans to invest 6 billion yuan to develop and manufacture clean-energy vehicles over the next couple of years, Xinhua, the official news agency, has reported.
Of the investment, which will be equivalent to about $880 million, one-third will go to research and development of green cars and the rest will be invested equally in green vehicle and component manufacturing, Xinhua quoted Hu Maoyuan, the SAIC chairman, as saying late on Tuesday.
SAIC, the Chinese partner of General Motors and Volkswagen, will introduce its self-developed hybrid Roewe sedans next year and electric cars by 2012, the state-run Shanghai Securities News reported Wednesday, quoting an unidentified company executive.
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The Green Building Market and Impact Report 2009
This second annual report, researched and written by Rob Watson, the "Founding Father of LEED," explores the impacts that LEED-certified buildings have already had on energy, water, waste and employee productivity -- and projects those impacts for the next 20 years.
Green building activity has sustained impressive growth during 2009, amid a brutal construction market that has decimated other segments of the construction marketplace, according to the 2009 Green Building Market & Impact Report published by GreenerBuildings.com, a website produced by Greener World Media.
According to report author Rob Watson, floor area registered and certified by the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED green building rating system in 2009 is estimated to grow by over 40% compared to last year's totals, for a cumulative total of over 7 billion square feet worldwide since the standard was launched in 2000.
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U.S. Infrastructure Needs More Than a Stimulus
The U.S. Government has allotted more than $20 billion of the $26.6 billion available for highway, road and bridge projects as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. While these funds have prompted a short-term focus on infrastructure projects, the funding represents just 3.3 percent of the total $787 billion stimulus package enacted by the White House in February. This small amount will do little to address the dire need for expansion and repair of our National Highway System (NHS).
Our nation needs a much larger, long-term investment in highway infrastructure. By 2020, economists expect more than a 26 percent increase in overall freight tonnage. Our nation's ability to efficiently move this freight will have a tremendous effect on our economy. Inefficiencies currently plague our transportation system. Last year alone, Americans wasted $87 billion in the form of 2.8 billion gallons of fuel and 4.2 billion hours because of traffic congestion. This cost will only go up as the economy rebounds and freight traffic increases.
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"Let's Learn About Coal": Industry front group distributes coloring book on the "advantages" of coal
Friends of Coal (FOC) is a front group created by the West Virginia Coal Association. Its mission is to "inform and educate West Virginia citizens about the coal industry" and "provide a united voice" for the industry. To make dirty coal seem appealing, FOC has sponsored or initiated license plates, football games, basketball practices, plane jumps, fishing events, and scholarships.
FOC is now selling coal to children. ThinkProgress obtained the "Let's Learn About Coal" coloring book, which asks children to unscramble statements about the "advantages" of coal, such as "Than coal other cheaper is fuels" ("Coal is cheaper than other fuels"). Kids also learn that coal is "important" and "provides jobs for lots of people!"
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Fossil fuel subsidies "bringing us closer to irreversible climate change"
The Green Economy Coalition is urging G20 finance ministers to rapidly put an end to fossil fuel subsidies. In a letter to the ministers, the coalition argues that these subsidies are contributing directly to climate change and making it difficult for the world to transition to a greener economy.
"These subsidies are a massive diversion of public funds that could be better spend in other ways," says Mark Halle, executive director of IISD-Europe, a member of the coalition. "Subsidies create false impressions about the relative cost of lower-carbon energy alternatives and this is brining us closer to irreversible climate change."
The Green Economy Coalition estimates that an end to fossil fuel subsidies would bring about a reduction of global carbon dioxide emission by 10 percent-the equivalent of Russia and Japan's combined total.
"The current annual fossil fuel subsidy bill of hundreds of billions of dollars would be better spent on health, education, renewable energy or other actions that would accelerate the transition to a green economy," the coalition writes.
They add that the problem isn't just subsidies for consumers, but those given out to large fossil fuel corporations.
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HolidayLEDs.com Begins 2009 Christmas Light Recycling Program.
HolidayLEDs.com, an e-commerce company specializing in LED Christmas lights based in Jackson, Michigan, has announced the opening of its 2009 Christmas light recycling program. Participants in the program can send in their old incandescent Christmas lights for recycling and receive a coupon for 15% off energy efficient LED Christmas lights from HolidayLEDs.com.
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Boat Tail Reduces Truck Fuel Consumption By 7.5 Percent
ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2009) - A boat tail, a tapering protrusion mounted on the rear of a truck, leads to fuel savings of 7.5 percent. This is due to dramatically-improved aerodynamics, as shown by road tests conducted by the Dutch PART (Platform for Aerodynamic Road Transport) public-private partnership platform.
Public highways
A boat tail is a tapering protrusion about two metres in length mounted on the rear of a truck. The boat tail had already proved itself during wind tunnel experiments and computer simulations, both conducted at TU Delft, in theory and using small-scale models. Now an articulated lorry fitted with a boat tail has also undergone extensive testing on public highways.
Emissions
An articulated lorry was driven for a period of one year with a boat tail (of varying length) and one year without a boat tail. The improved aerodynamics, depending on the length of the boat tail, resulted in reduced fuel consumption (and emissions!) of up to 7.5 percent. The optimum boat tail length proved to be two metres.
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Veteran Journalist Predicts Industrial Crash, Says Sustainable Living Could Save Us
Brace for Impact ROMNEY, WEST VIRGINIA, November 16, 2009 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- A new book from nationally recognized author Thomas A. Lewis offers a fresh and startling perspective on the problems afflicting modern industrial society, and on the increasingly urgent need for sustainable living. In Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age by Sustainable Living, Lewis argues that industry's relentless, decades-long search for economies of scale has caused equally enormous concentrations of risks, which now threaten the continued existence of every industrial-scale enterprise supplying essential human needs.
Brace for Impact catalogs the mounting failures of industrial agriculture, from the destruction wrought by the way agribusiness grows crops, to the horrors -- and dangers -- of the way it raises animals. With chapters on water (dwindling supplies and worsening pollution), imminent oil shortages (peak oil, in fact, may already have arrived) and rampant problems in the electrical grid (for which the solution is not a "smart" grid, but no grid at all), the book offers an exhaustive review of the rising threats to our supplies of food, water and energy. Then, after examining the political and financial institutions that refuse to recognize the dangers, let alone move to counter them, Brace for Impact faces the inevitable conclusion: industrial society is about to crash, and cannot be saved.
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