Green Building and Manufacturing Articles
By (Buy) the Numbers
The US Chamber of Commerce spent $91.7 million on lobbying in 2008, and $65.2 million in 2009, and from 2005 through 2009, the Chamber spent a combined excess of $322.8 million on lobbying. It had more than 150 lobbyists from 25 different firms working on its behalf in 2009.
The Chamber has developed a hardline stance against action on climate change, a policy which may have breached its internal rules, as it was not passed by a board vote. In September and October 2009, several companies quit the Chamber due to the Chamber's stance on environmental impact reform, including Exelon Corp, PG&E Corp, PNM Resources, Apple Inc, and Mohawk Fine Papers. Nike, Inc has decided to resign from their board of directors position but to continue their membership.
Harvesting Energy From Nature's Motions
ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2009) - By taking advantage of the vagaries of the natural world, Duke University engineers have developed a novel approach that they believe can more efficiently harvest electricity from the motions of everyday life.
Energy harvesting is the process of converting one form of energy, such as motion, into another form of energy, in this case electricity. Strategies range from the development of massive wind farms to produce large amounts of electricity to using the vibrations of walking to power small electronic devices.
Although motion is an abundant source of energy, only limited success has been achieved because the devices used only perform well over a narrow band of frequencies. These so-called "linear" devices can work well, for example, if the character of the motion is fairly constant, such as the cadence of a person walking. However, as researchers point out, the pace of someone walking, as with all environmental sources, changes over time and can vary widely.
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Cost of extra year's climate inaction $500 billion: IEA
LONDON (Reuters) - The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday.
At United Nations climate talks in Barcelona last week negotiators from developed countries said the world would need an extra six to 12 months to agree a legally binding, global deal to cut carbon emissions beyond a planned December deadline.
The IEA, energy adviser to 28 industrialized countries, said the world must act urgently to put greenhouse gases on a track to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius.
Every year's delay beyond 2010 would add another $500 billion to the extra investment of $10,500 billion needed from 2010-2030 to curb carbon emissions, for example to improve energy efficiency and boost low-carbon renewable energy.
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Can't teach an old car company new tricks - not even when it's under new management
Despite promises to fast-track development of three electric car models using federal loan dollars to prevent its bankruptcy, Chrysler announced yesterday that it will instead disband the engineering team responsible for the projects.
For decades Chrysler has relied on selling gas hogs like trucks and minivans to turn a profit. As the producer of five out of the top 10 most polluting, inefficient passenger vehicles in America, Chrysler has not surprisingly seen its sales plummet by half in the last few years of volatile gas prices. So the plans to become a leader in the electric vehicles market introduced under pre-bailout CEO Bob Nardelli seemed like a welcome change of direction for this old industrial giant.
However, Chrysler's new CEO Sergio Marchionne, who took leadership of the company after the government-brokered merger with Fiat, is himself personally skeptical of electric vehicles, stating that E.V.'s will only account for one to two percent of overall production by 2015 – a mere 60,000 vehicles.
The announcement that Chrysler's electric vehicle program, ENVI, would be scrapped came amidst optimistic projections in the company's brand new 5-year plan. "Some of you have [assumed] that we are losing money," said Marchionne, "this is not true." The 5-year plan promises repayment of the $12.5 billion bailout money by 2015, resting these projections on questionable assumptions that the company would double its sales by 2014, and grow revenue by 20% each year for the next five years. "Today is the first day of the new Chrysler."
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BIM sure to bring creative disruption
Once in a generation, perhaps, a new technology comes along that enables rapid innovation and change. Sometimes, too, such change leads to a whole new batch of companies that pursue the changes aggressively, while their older, larger competitors are still trying to figure out what happened.
I've a hunch that Building Information Modeling-BIM-is one such technology. And I suspect that it is going to cause problems for some firms that have, perhaps, become too comfortable in their own markets.
Transformative technology has led to major disruption in the past, and there may still be a few construction veterans around who remember at least the tail end of one big one: the evolution of mechanical excavators.
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