Most of the opportunities that garden variety Americans have to make a sustainable change in their life are small in the grand scheme of the country as a whole, let alone the world and its biosphere. As an architect, designing a LEED Platinum building, or fifty of them for that matter, is still a drop in the bucket for level of change that we need to the built environment of this country. Each individual person or building is a long way from getting everyone on board, but the goal doesn’t have to be 100% participation. The few that extend themselves to push the envelope now build the image of interest that allows for larger standards to change with sweeping effects over broader areas. Continue Reading…
Archives For Political
In our short-term, quick-fix, credit-swiping culture we have no shortage of proposed non-solutions that search for short cuts to stem the possibility of irrevocable damage caused by climate change. Noteworthy participants are the well-known faces of clean coal, carbon sequestration or launching waste into space. But when it comes to handing out the gold star for the top of the class, geoengineering stands head and shoulders above the rest as a scientific Hail Mary Pass with an endless sea of unknown consequences. After a dubious amount of review from a number of different sources, geoengineering and all funding towards its research should be pulled off the table with focus returned to things that can actually work without multitudes of latent risk. Continue Reading…
Most of the time, when we think of things being built the majority of hours it takes to complete a project revolves around construction. It is rare that an architect will spend more hours drawing a project than a contractor will take to build it. For residential solar installations, the growth in demand is being met by a regulatory system not fully prepared for the expanding market. As a result, a large portion of the cost for new PVs pays for people sitting at a desk rather than throwing up panels.
Once again we have arrived at a familiar place of rising oil prices and once again we can see the momentum building behind the line of oil companies as the discomfort for high gas prices sets in. Only days ago the House of Representatives passed a bill to expand offshore drilling and expedite new permits with proposed legislation right behind it to open access to new reserves in ANWR and the Outer Continental Shelf. These familiar conversations also have familiar anticipated repercussions that all point to new drilling wells having no affect on short term pricing and the expanding of drilling outside of current federal areas having miniscule long term affect on price and supply. Continue Reading…
In virtually every industry and profession we can point to occurrences of codes and regulations that create needless amounts of red tape, adding unnecessary time to the schedule and taking away valuable resources from the budget. By most businesses, regulation is seen as a hindrance that opposes free market capitalism and, as such, should be minimized. But a complete lack of regulation, even in a fundamentally good pursuit like sustainability, can not only produce a series of liabilities but specifically those that undermine the very goals that sustainability is trying to accomplish.
I recently wrote an article describing geothermal heating and cooling, making no secret of my strong support for the technology and its implementation. On the mainstream of residential construction, geothermal is still rather new so many municipalities are still trying to catch up to the learning curve of the repercussions of installing new wells without hindering the expansion of the budding industry. In doing some research on geothermal for a project in Rhode Island, I came across a surprising interface of regulatory oversight and sustainability that underscores the conversations that they need to continue to have.
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There are times when sustainability takes the back seat in political address, earning only brief glimpses amidst purportedly grander plans for our country’s direction. Tonight was no such occasion. President Obama made sustainability a fixture in his State of the Union address to the country, touching on numerous points as priorities for how we should utilize sustainable goals to strengthen the economy and improve our quality of life. Though some of the mentioned goals were admittedly very tenacious, it is encouraging to see that the White House is willing to put sustainability center stage. Continue Reading…
Last week the Environmental Protection Agency got an ear full of backlash from politicians and jobs proponents after it revoked a water permit for a mountain top mining site for Arch Coal Inc. Such criticism has become more commonplace as the agency takes on a seemingly new role that more directly challenges the practices of companies and municipalities. It may seem like the current EPA administration is abusing the federal weight of its office, but the fact is that it simply has a staff that is living up to the mission that the office was created for. Continue Reading…
The government has the opportunity to serve as the testing ground for innovative policy changes in order to gather data and provide a working example that can be used as leverage to convince an undecided public. Apparently, most executives in federal agencies support sustainable initiatives but also say that the agencies themselves have found little success in implementing them.
Our country’s effort to support renewable energy is still in its early stages of development and ripe for adjustment. The maturing of the renewable industry can positively affect job growth, technological innovation and increased efficiency, but there are a number of ways we can be doing those things, even within the umbrella of sustainability (smart grids, alternative transit infrastructure, electric cars, building systems,etc.) The real goal of governmental support for renewables should be getting more clean megawatts attached to the grid. If that is the goal, then we should be retooling our system of incentives to make that goal a reality rather than dilute its effectiveness due to a lack of focus.
Pointing fingers is always easier than taking an introspective glance on how one contributes to a given problem, but it is something we all need to do more of, especially when it comes to sustainability. Throwing the spotlight on large offenses of environmental degradation is part of the discussion and pressing for their solutions is equally valuable, but there should be more conversations happening on a smaller scale that assess what we consider to be the mundane aspects of our daily lives. Despite growing verbal support for sustainability in polling numbers and cocktail conversations, Americans have countless ways to alter their own actions knowing full well that we control the marketplace for an economy that hangs on consumer spending. Continue Reading…