Down To Earth Building Bee (Vancouver, BC, Canada) had a shake test on a half-scale model of a cob structure done at the UBC Earthquake Engineering Research Facility. It happened a while ago, but they just posted video:

The model was of a circular structure with a shed roof, described as "about 6 ft diameter and 5 ft high"... not representative of houses in the developed world, but a start for more research. There was a small window on the rear, which is easy to miss in the video. (Fenestrations normally weaken a structure, so they're important to include.) There also doesn't appear to be a stemwall — highly recommended for cob buildings, and another likely point of seismic catastrophe.

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Wal-Mart in BuildingGreen Suite:

• Wal-Mart: Every Day Low... Impact?
• Higher Expectations
• Wal-Mart Introduces Second Generation of High-Efficiency Stores
• more

The following is from the good folks at Architecture 2030. Yes, it's simple. Even simplistic. But the point, I think, is just to start. If you're sympatico, just put on some blue for Earth Day. Easy. And then, as long as you're started, make that phone call.

BYOBlue / Earth Day 2008, April 19-22

Want to stop global warming? Wear BLUE for Earth Day 2008! Join millions of people around the world who will be wearing BLUE to signify their vote for NO COAL.

Earth Day 2008 is going to be historic! Architecture 2030, along with numerous other groups around the nation, is calling on everyone to wear BLUE during Earth Day 2008 to signify their vote for No Coal. Events will be happening around the world from April 19th through April 22nd, so...

If you're attending the Earth Day event on the National Mall in Washington, DC on April 20th, wear BLUE.

If you're attending another Earth Day event, wear BLUE.

No matter what you're doing for Earth Day 2008, wear BLUE.

A BLUE shirt, top, sweater or jacket...whatever. Just wear BLUE.

Then, on April 22, as a culminating action, pick up the phone, call Congress at 202-224-3121 and ask for an immediate 'Moratorium on Coal' — a halt to the construction of any new coal-fired power plants. Through this Call for Climate event, Earth Day hopes to generate over a million phone calls to Congress. Visit Earth Day's website to learn more about this critical event.

Your BLUE vote will count. Fifty-nine coal plants were canceled in 2007. That's over a third of the 151 planned. That happened before millions of people joined together to say No Coal.

BYOBlue for Earth Day 2008. Be the vote that tips the balance.

Architecture 2030
BYOBlue
Earth Day events 2008

There are a growing number of green-product retailers, both online and in storefronts. We list some of those with a specialty focus in GreenSpec, but there are so many more popping up all the time. I visited one last weekend that's quite something — Home Green Home, in Ithaca, NY. While most green retailers are either boutique shops with small, unique items, or building supply outlets offering wall finishes, insulation, and sustainable-construction hard goods, Home Green Home has taken a more encompassing approach. "We try to cover every room in the house, including the garage and the patio," founder Joe Nolan said. The range of merchandise displayed in the large, spotless retail space extends from natural paints to locally-made quality furniture to nontoxic cleaning products to organic mattresses. Deliberate care is taken to offer the most deeply green options.

The seed for Home Green Home took root after Joe and Michelle Nolan built their beautiful, code-approved, timber-framed, straw-bale-insulated house a few years ago using local, salvaged, and earth-friendly materials and finishes. People were interested... came in droves to check it out... and were inspired and motivated by the possibilities they saw. A vision formed to provide the benefit of the all the research the Nolans poured into their own choices and actions, making it easier for others to implement the same sorts of green changes in their lives now.

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The braking mechanism on a large wind turbine failed in high winds (the second such occurrence in Denmark last week), leading to the spectacular failure in this video clip. There has been a rash of reported breakdowns in the last two months of turbines manufactured by Vestas, which has a 28% market share and 33,500 units deployed worldwide, according to its website.

In a story in The Copenhagen Post, the manufacturer of the 10-year-old windmill cites poor maintenance, but vows to investigate all problems.

There are a couple big-picture links I want to put right out front. You can come back to them later, but I want you to be aware of them in case they're not already on your radar.

• Energy Information Administration — Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government
• 2007 Buildings Energy Data Book

OK.

The Energy Star people have been putting out occasional interview-style podcasts on topics like the energy use of computers (including servers and data centers) and imaging equipment. But the first three, in late 2006, were about consumer electronics — and those are the ones that have really stuck with me. Though rooted in the residential sector, the takeaway is broad. The following long bullets are taken from those podcasts, which are also available transcribed.

• "Consumer electronics is probably the fastest growing category of electricity growth in the home. And in a home that has a lot of the latest devices, it could easily represent 15 to 20 percent of a home's electricity use."
• "If you go back about 25 years, about 5 percent of the energy used by your home was consumer electronics. And that has almost tripled to current rates of about 13, 14 percent. We're estimating right now we'd probably be somewhere closer to 20 percent of the home energy bill in 2015 being related to consumer electronics devices."
• "The typical American owns 25 consumer electronics products and spends more than $1,200 a year buying them, according to the Consumer Electronics Association."

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Some smart people on the greenbuilding email list (along with just about everyone else on the internet) have been discussing the Nano — at $2,500, the world's cheapest car — which is being introduced by Tata Motors in India, which apparently has visions of marketing it internationally.

You can read the whole thread in the archives. Here are some excerpts, omitting bunches of good stuff solely for the sake of brevity, and in a couple cases taken slightly out of context. The writer's name links to the original post.

"Here is a $2500, 50MPG car that seats five (presumably five people who haven't been binging on twinkies). Environmentalists are howling, yet we are also lauding the Prius, which gets the same mileage and costs ten times as much." — Lawrence Lile

"Now everyone in India can afford a car. Don't get me wrong, the line between cultural imperialism and environmental conscientiousness can be close sometimes. But it's like [if] you took a big country with lots of cars, and then subsidized oil — it would drive up emissions vastly. Oh that's right, that's the US." — Keith Winston

"You have nailed the environmental argument against these cars on the head. This article seems to indicate that the Tata will be cleaner than the average Indian car, but still won't meet US standards, which says a lot about the average Indian car." — Lawrence Lile

"Until we in the US demonstrate a low carbon lifestyle we have no moral standing to criticize others for emulating our long-standing material and energy profligacy." — Reuben Deumling

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We wish all of you a happy, life-changing year ahead, and thank you for all the good, important work you do and choices you make.

We had our annual holiday party for staff and their guests on Wednesday evening; it's something we look forward to every year. If there was enough room, we'd have you all over. That's part of the reason we've developed this LIVE section of our website — so we can catch up with each other, have lively discussions, and bask in such good company.

Here are some photos from our party. (Click the pictures for a larger version.)

In the hallway — good people, good food, twinkly lights.

Each of us on staff brings in a dish or two: hearty foods and delectable desserts.

Lots of talk and laughter.

In our new conference room, a slideshow of Alex's recent photos from Sweden running in the background was the source of much interest and discussion.

It's a kid-friendly party, too, with an activity room that generally winds up spilling over into the whole place. This high-stakes poker game happened in a corner of the library.

[Clicking an image in this post will load a larger version of the image. A slideshow of the images in this post, and more, is also available. Previous posts in the "Notes from Sweden" series include #1: How They Get Around.]

It's enough to make architects go weak at the knees. I'm not an architect, but wandering around Malmo's Western Harbor (Vaestra Hamnen), I can imagine my architect friends going bananas about these buildings — many of which were designed and built through an architectural competition that attracted many top architects.

Overlooking the area is the remarkable 190-meter (630-foot) Turning Torso building designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. I'm usually not so taken by architectural statement buildings, but one could literally spend hours gazing up at this twisting spire with its exposed exoskeleton on one side. Its appearance changes dramatically as one wanders around the building and views it from different angles.

Santiago Calatrava's 190-meter Turning Torso building in Malmo, Sweden

Turning Torso building — looking up

The Turning Torso seen behind some modern homes in the Western Harbor area

Another view of the Turning Torso

But even more exciting to me is the sustainability overlay for the entire Western Harbor region.

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[Clicking an image in this post will load a larger version of the image. A slideshow of the images in this post is also available.]

Despite the light drizzle and the fading light of Sweden's mid-afternoon dusk when I arrived in Lund, it was immediately clear that the prevalent form of transportation here is bicycling. Bicycles are everywhere. Hundreds are parked at the train station, where I arrived from Copenhagen. For every person I saw in a private automobile, there were probably 20 on bicycles.

It's such a pleasant contrast to the U.S. and our car-dependent cities and towns. Of course, I suppose it helps that this part of southern Sweden is quite flat. The region has some of the best farmland in the country.

Many of the cobblestone-paved streets have designated bicycle lanes and sidewalks, demarked by different paving patterns. There are also separate bicycle/walking pathways, usually with marked bike lanes for travel in both directions, with walkways on one side — or both. These pathways, at least in the Lund University campus, have their own roadway underpasses, signage, intersections, and even traffic lights in some places. One can bike all the way to Malmo, maybe 25 kilometers away, on paved bicycle pathways — and I get the sense that there are good pathways connecting most towns and cities here.

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