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£25 congestion charge will hit 30,000 of worst polluting vehicles, says mayor
Matthew Taylor, The Guardian
Drivers of high powered sports cars and 4x4s will be hit by a new £25 charge every time they enter central London under plans to reduce congestion and cut pollution across the capital.
The London mayor, Ken Livingstone, said around 30,000 of the worst polluting vehicles would face a threefold price rise from October, while the most environmentally friendly cars would be able to enter the congestion zone free of charge.
“The CO2 charge will encourage people to switch to cleaner vehicles or public transport and ensure that those who choose to carry on driving the most polluting vehicles help pay for the environmental damage they cause,” said Livingstone. “This is the ‘polluter pays’ principle. At the same time, the 100% discount for the lowest CO2 emitting vehicles will give drivers an incentive to use the least polluting cars available.”
(13 February 2008)
Related from the Guardian:
Q&A: £25 congestion charge
Limbo-dancing under the charge
Porsche could sue over £25 a day congestion charge.
Red Ken turns green
KunstlerCast: Drugstores (Audio and transcript)
James Howard Kunstler via Global Public Media
In this new weekly audio feature called “The KunstlerCast,” author James Howard Kunstler and interviewer Duncan Crary explore the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl, with oil depletion as its backdrop. The first program takes a critical look at the American drugstore.
The KunstlerCast features James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and other books. Duncan Crary, host/producer, speaks with Kunstler weekly about the failure of suburbia and the inevitable end of this living arrangement with no future.
(19 February 2008)
L.A. ready to enact tighter green building standards
Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles, known for its choking smog and fuel-burning gridlock, is poised to adopt one of the toughest green building ordinances in the nation.
Two City Council committees voted Friday to require that all major commercial and residential developments slash projected energy and water use and reduce the overall environmental footprint, placing the city on the cutting edge of an international movement to address the global warming effects of buildings.
Under the ordinance, privately built projects over 50,000 square feet — of which there are roughly 200 constructed annually — must meet a “standard of sustainability” by incorporating a checklist of green practices into their building plans.
The checklist includes a choice of such items as low-flow toilets, paints with low emissions, use of recycled materials, efficient irrigation, solar panels and use of natural light.
(16 February 2008)
Where there’s a will, there’s power
Carl Etnier, Barre/Montpelier Times Argus
… At the conference, I was struck by the contrast between all the work I’d put in to cobble together a middle-of-the-day trip to Burlington without using my own car and the theme of the workshop I attended, on “passive survivability.” A building shows passive survivability if it remains livable even when electricity, heating fuel or water are unavailable for extended periods. Alex Wilson, executive editor of the Brattleboro-based Environmental Building News, presented a talk in which he said that the technology exists today to design and build passively survivable buildings in climates from the Northeast to New Orleans.
The 1998 ice storm that hit Vermont and Quebec showed how many houses in our region are utterly dependent on continuous access to electricity during the winter. In Quebec, electrical outages lasted for weeks after the storm, and 600,000 people were driven from their homes by the cold, Wilson said. The homes were heated by gas, which was abundant, but the boilers, furnaces, and fans wouldn’t run without electricity. Wilson said that with a heating system that uses DC electricity, the homes could have been kept livable by bringing in car batteries and/or solar photovoltaic panels.
Designing the heating system to use DC instead of AC electricity is a relatively simple tweak that can keep homes comfortable during long winter electricity outages. They still need heating fuel, however, and Wilson spoke of “the risk that in the not-too-distant future, we may actually see shortages of fossil fuels.” He pointed out, “Many experts believe world oil production has peaked already, and if it hasn’t, it will peak within the next five to 10 years.”
Building or retrofitting homes to stay livable in the winter during fuel shortages requires significant changes from standard building practices, but no new technologies.
“The good news,” according to Wilson, “is that we know how to do it. People in this room, people who have been involved with renewable energy or energy conservation for 10 or 15 or 20 years, know how to design buildings that rely on passive solar heating, that are very energy efficient, and can maintain (comfortable living) conditions. We have the tools we need to do it; what we need is the motivation.”
As an example, Wilson described the home of New Hampshire energy engineer Marc Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum can walk away from his home for two weeks in the winter, and the temperature won’t drop below 55 degrees. He burns no fossil fuel to maintain that temperature; the building is super-insulated and designed to be kept that warm just with the sun.
For higher levels of passive survivability, technology includes tight building envelopes that keep warm air inside, well-insulated walls and ceilings, triple-glazed windows with heat-retaining coatings, and wood heat as a back up (or the primary fuel). The buildings also need ways to keep a water supply during power outages, such as rainwater collection, solar-powered pumps, or even hand pumps.
Wilson looks for longer-term survivability at the community scale. Compact, smart, walkable (and bikeable) communities are more survivable in the face of fuel shortages. Good soils for crop production on each building site or nearby enhance food security. Distributed generation of electricity (solar panels on every building) can help prevent electrical outages and electricity shortages.
Architects and engineers started thinking a lot about passive survivability in the United States after hurricane Katrina’s devastation. Wilson and others who went to Louisiana for post-Katrina design charrettes noticed that the 100-year-old buildings that made it through the storm were more livable than many of the more recently constructed ones. He described watching TV footage of “people being evacuated to the Superdome, and then people being evacuated from the Superdome because it was 105 degrees.” Yet older buildings, designed before air conditioning, stayed comfortable when the electricity was out. They were designed with wide overhangs, wraparound porches and natural ventilation.
Asked what he thinks is needed to produce a lot more passively survivable buildings, Wilson answered that building codes need to require it. All the technology and knowledge exist; what’s needed is the will to ensure they will be used.
After Katrina, new building codes are being drafted in New Orleans that incorporate the term and concepts of passive survivability. Wilson fears that it may take a crisis in our region to provoke similar changes.
As long as James Douglas is the governor of Vermont, Wilson may be right that change won’t come without a crisis. Douglas has repeatedly brushed off the need to strengthen the building code in Vermont, because some people at a Habitat for Humanity project one time showed him that new buildings are not as wasteful of energy as they used to be. Douglas has sought to decrease Efficiency Vermont’s budget, and he has vetoed a modest all-fuels efficiency utility.
Vermonters overwhelmingly support energy efficiency and local, renewable sources of power, according to the Department of Public Service’s recent public engagement process. With his veto of last year’s efficiency and energy affordability legislation so repudiated by voters, it will be interesting to see how Douglas responds to the new bills being prepared in the Legislature. Five years have shown that Douglas won’t lead on this issue, but will he get out of the way?
Buildings can be designed and built for passive survivability. For that matter, transportation systems can be designed and built that don’t require access to a 5,000 watt radio transmitter to find a ride from Waterbury to Burlington in the middle of the day. As Alex Wilson says, we have the technology to do it, we just need the political will.
Carl Etnier, director of Peak Oil Awareness, blogs at vtcommons.org/blog and hosts radio shows on WGDR, 91.1 FM Plainfield and WDEV 96.1 FM/550 AM, Waterbury. He can be reached at EnergyMattersVermont(at)yahoo.com. Organizers of the Better Buildings by Design expect that presentations from the conference will be posted in March at www.efficiencyvermont.com/pages/Business/BuildingEfficiently/BetterBuildingByDesignConferen/
(17 February 2008)
UPDATE (Feb 21): Corrected name of publication.
