If you thought making substantive change by 2030 was a challenge, how about by 2014?

A new initiative launched last week and getting spread around the Internet today, 'fouryears.go' says "There is still time to act, but no time to waste." Started by Pachamama Alliance and Wieden+Kennedy--the ad agency behind Nike's 'just do it' (they're donating their services to do a major communications campaign for this)--it's about waking people up to urgency we face in these times and helping each member group meet its most ambitious goals toward a just, thriving, and sustainable world.

The video asks--"could we spend the next four years growing our cities?" and shows green roofs on everything; it asks, "in four years, could Manhattan look like this?" and shows the street filled with bikes.

It's nice to set aside the usual reality concerns and just watch the video and dream. Given how many solutions we really do already have at our fingertips, and how much substantive change really does depend on mustering collective will from a wider spectrum of society, maybe a kick in the pants from left field along with a major ad campaign can help. C'mon, stop and dream for a minute. Pass it on.

Ok, coffee break is over. Time to get back to hammering out the hard, pragmatic details of greening our buildings and neighborhoods step by messy step.

Here's a tool that tries to connect the best available science directly to the international climate change negotiations and commitments, and the politicians are using it!

Perhaps that, in itself, is progress.

"How Does It Work? In the run-up to COP-15, we are scanning UNFCCC submissions and news sources from around the world to collect a list of what we call 'current proposals' — possible scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions by UNFCCC parties. We share our compilation and use the C-ROADS-CP climate simulation to calculate the expected long-term impacts (in terms of GHG concentration, temperature increase, and sea level rise) if those proposals were to be fully implemented." For more info, see the Climate Interactive website.

The low energy use of the first Passivhaus in Bremen, Germany, is surprising, especially since the house has neither solar collectors, nor a PV array, nor a boiler.

Our always enlightening (and often entertaining) sister site, greenbuildingadvisor.com, has a pro/con pair of articles under the banner "Does Passivhaus Make Sense Over Here?"

Gold.

Start with John Straube's "con" article first: "Comparing Passivhaus Standard Homes to Other Low-Energy Homes." It handily describes the Passivhaus standard as it goes along, in case you're not familiar with it.

Then read the "pro" rebut, "In Defense of the Passive House Standard," by Marc Rosenbaum and David White (who I don't know, but am going to keep my eyes open for).

Passivhaus or not? Yes and no.

Over at GreenBuildingAdvisor, veteran journalist Richard Defendorf combined his abiding interests in green building and politics by taking a look at a Fox News Forum opinion piece from the policy director the conservative advocacy group (natch) Americans for Prosperity. It contained gems like this one:

"Most green jobs consist of hiring low-wage workers with caulking guns to weatherize buildings. We are trading away high-wage, high-value manufacturing jobs for these green caulking jobs. Any time you spend billions of dollars you will create some jobs, but the key question is, what the cost is when you divert resources from higher-value activities?"

Defendorf had the audacity to respond with thoughtfulness and logic. Take a couple minutes to read it: Stick 'Em Up, I've Got a Caulk Gun!

Architectural testing concern HTL will be at GlassBuild America shooting missiles at windows again. The demonstration/demolition follows the Miami-Dade large missile protocol by shooting 2x4s at impact-resistant and non-impact-resistant windows. A press release from HTL quotes NGA Industry Events Director Susan Jacob: "There is nothing quite like the drama of a 2x4 missile shot from an air cannon at glass windows." Wish I was going!

I checked HTL's website for some footage, but was left wanting. There's a link for client videos (and there's some top name clients in there), but they all seem to be password-protected. So it was off to YouTube to find this:

Another interesting short video — less than two minutes — was shot at last year's Glassbuild conference; a reporter from e-Glass Weekly played word-association with a few exhibitors. If this small sampling is any indication, the fenestration industry does not like the NFRC at all; was optimistic (as of last year) about commercial construction; and thinks green building and LEED are the future.

We recently learned that the Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI) is losing its Massachusetts state funding. This strikes particularly close to home for me as I worked briefly with TURI after grad school and was quite impressed with the caliber of their work (and yes, full disclosure, I still have friends there). TURI is one of a select few organizations nationally that successfully champions the needs of both industry and the environment — for 20 years now they've been finding that practical common ground where we can really move forward in widespread adoption of safer alternatives.

With our GreenSpec directory, editors at BuildingGreen constantly struggle to assess the use of a plethora of toxics in building products and manufacturing processes to determine what constitutes safe and healthy products and still gets the practical job done of building quality green buildings today. This requires the kind of pragmatic alternatives assessment that TURI excels at. The lessons I learned at TURI and their current research are a great help in my work here and it would be a huge loss to see their services cut.

This isn't a done deal. There is an effort afoot this week to get a supplemental budget appropriation that would allocate $1.2 million of the business fees collected from TURA filers to support the continued operation of TURI — back to the original financing model that pays for itself with the companies using toxics paying for the reduction program.

People living in Massachusetts can support the effort this week by contacting their representatives and asking them to sign onto the letter to Massachusetts House and Senate leadership requesting the appropriation. I did just that and was pleasantly surprised at the quick and positive response from my reps. Anyone from anywhere can comment on online articles about TURI and make it clear this self-funding program is too good to lose.

This kind of thing goes beyond Massachusetts and TURI. The battle to retain the high-quality, high-impact green jobs we already have, as well as remake our struggling economy into a thriving green one, is going on across the nation through skirmishes like this one — and it is in these local and state level debates where a few voices can sometimes make a surprising difference.

More information in BuildingGreen Suite: Funding Cut for Toxics Reduction.

The label says:

Bottled at Source — Hand Pump #1, Atal Ayub Nagar, Bhopal, Madya Pradesh, India.

And in tiny print:

Not suitable for human consumption.

The nutrition label says:

Total Fat 0g Cholesterol 0g Sodium 22mg Dichlormethane Carbon Tetrachloride Chloroform	0% 0% 1% -400% -200,000% -250%

The website says:

The unique qualities of our water come from 25 years of slow-leaching toxins at the site of the world's largest industrial accident.

The Yes Men's website says:

Twenty Bhopal activists, including Sathyu Sarangi of the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, showed up at Dow headquarters near London to find that the entire building had been vacated.

Read more...

Its website says:

Repower America is the bold clean energy plan to "repower" our country with 100% clean electricity within 10 years. By making buildings and homes more efficient, ramping up renewable energy generation, constructing a unified national smart grid, and transitioning to clean and affordable plug-in cars, we can address our country's economic and national security challenges — all while making huge strides to solve the climate crisis.

Is it possible? Yes, it is. Will we actually do it? I'm less certain about that.

John F. Kennedy famously said in 1962, "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade." And in seven years, we did. We implemented new technologies and knowledge at a tremendous pace to support a vision, and we pulled it off.

What motivated us? What was at the root of that amazing achievement? We were afraid of the Soviet Union conquering space, and then using space to conquer us. In the same speech, Kennedy said, "Only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war."

Repower America uses this line of reasoning in their pitch, citing "our country's economic and national security challenges" as primary motivators, and noting that it can help solve "the climate crisis" to boot. Should nationalism be a motivator for renewable energy? We don't collectively seem to be afraid of the hellish potential of climate change (yet) to take unified, swift, and sweeping action... and it's not as if they're promoting jingoism, right? And it is unavoidably political after all, isn't it?

Read more...

On Friday, May 19, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal published a damning story based on the leaked minutes of a private strategy meeting of food-packaging executives and chemical industry lobbyists that took place in Washington DC the previous day. The story's authors spoke with the chairman of the North American Metal Packaging Alliance (NAMPA), John Rost, who verified the talking points, but indicated that the summary wasn't complete. "'It was a five-hour meeting,' he said."

On Saturday, NAMPA responded by distributing a press release claiming that the leaked minutes were "blatantly inaccurate and fabricated."

On Sunday, the Washington Post released its own story on the leaked minutes. They spoke with Kathleen M. Roberts, a lobbyist for NAMPA with Bergeson and Campbell. She happens to have been the meeting's organizer, and she also verified that the information in the summary was accurate.

This looks pretty bad for NAMPA.

So here's what happened.

Read more...

The Obamas put in the first food garden (organic, natch) on the White House grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden during World War II. We dig that.

Skeptics may scoff that's it just symbolic, but I don't think so. According the The New York Times, the garden will have "55 varieties of vegetables, from a wish list of the kitchen staff. Cristeta Comerford, the White House's executive chef, said she was eager to plan menus around the garden, and Bill Yosses, the pastry chef, said he was looking forward to berry season."

And 1100 square feet can produce a lot of produce — the Old Farmer's Almanac says that "A good-sized beginner vegetable garden is 10 x 16 feet [160 square feet]. A plot this size can feed a family of four for one summer, with a little extra."

It's not likely, however, that the first family or their handlers are going to (publicly, anyway) spice up the reasons behind this good move with the hard arguments of filmmaker Robert Kenner in his high-impact new movie, Food, Inc.: