Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Nature’s success (despite us) inspires green-building mimics
Dylan Rivera, The Oregonian
If you think plants and animals have a lot to teach us, consider their next field: real estate development.
A small but growing number of architects, building engineers and scientists who design building products are looking to animals and plants for inspiration to address the challenge of being kind to the Earth while retooling the manmade environment.
Wild creatures have been adapting to their natural worlds longer than us and may have answers to the riddle of building shelter while conserving resources. And avoiding pollution. And slowing down the burning of coal and oil for electricity and so many modern comforts.
An Oregon State University chemist studied mussels clinging to rocks at a Newport-area beach and found a naturally occurring chemical model for a new adhesive to replace the formaldehyde that commonly emits toxic fumes in kitchen cabinets.
Farther afield, in Zimbabwe, where searing summers boost sky-high air-conditioning costs, architects looked to termites. They found that the tall dirt termite mounds we see only on the Discovery channel may well be situated in 100-plus-degree environments but have interior tunnels, top to bottom, averaging 87 degrees Fahrenheit.
That would be called passive air conditioning, in which hot air is naturally expelled, trapping cool air within
(30 April 2009)
New Post Carbon fellows: McKibben, Farley, Karlenzig, Martenson
Newsletter, Post Carbon Institute
Contents
1. New Fellows
2. Post Carbon Commentaries and Articles
3. Transition United States
4. Energy Bulletin
5. Global Public Media
6. Events
As part of our new direction, we’re adding more experts to our team and producing new reports and books to help people make sense of the global transition. We’re pleased to welcome the following colleagues as our newest Post Carbon Fellows:
Bill McKibben, author and activist. Bill is author of twelve books, most recently Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007). He is co-founder and Director of 350.org, an international campaign building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis.
Joshua Farley, ecological economist. With economist Herman Daly, Joshua co-authored the foundation textbook Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (2003). He is a fellow of the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics.
Warren Karlenzig, urban sustainability expert. Warren has developed sustainability plans and metrics with nations, states, major cities, and corporations. He is President of Common Current and author of the highly-regarded city rankings book How Green is Your City? (2007).
Chris Martenson, finance expert and educator. Chris is creator of The Crash Course, a virally-popular 20-chapter online video course that educates viewers on our broken economic system, the crisis of population demographics, and Peak Oil.
(29 April 2009)
What does living ‘green’ look like?
Fran Smith, Redbook via Seattle Post-Intelligencer
… In a recent national survey of more than 1,000 people, 60 percent rated themselves as “extremely” or “highly” concerned about global warming and its implications for the future, which is a researcher’s way of capturing that knot-in-the-gut sense that something weird is happening and that gnawing fear that we’re handing our kids or their kids an environmental mess. The survey, by MindClick, a market research firm in Los Angeles, found that women, in particular, are looking for ways to adopt earth-friendly habits.
But where do we start? What do we have to do to make a difference?
These three women wrestled with the same questions and found answers. They began with simple steps — switching to energy-saving compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs), toting reusable shopping bags, recycling — but they soon went down paths they never imagined. Each woman’s journey was different, but they all discovered this: You don’t have to be a purist to make important, even inspiring, lifestyle changes. And going green can have surprisingly sweet rewards.
(29 April 2009)
Addicted to the daily grind
Jonathan Guthrie, Financial Times
It took a member of the insouciant Bloomsbury set to suggest, during a depression that had left millions unemployed, that salaried work was a social evil. In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that rising productivity and living standards would, in a century, allow people in developed countries to toil for just 15 hours a week. They would cultivate “the arts of life” the rest of the time.
The current downturn is giving many Britons a taste of what Keynes was talking about. Voluntary schemes that reduce working hours in return for pay cuts are spreading from their redoubt in manufacturing into professional services
… Could the shorter hours forced on some workers by recession become a positive choice, easing progress towards the elevated lifestyle envisaged by Keynes? After all, one school of thought associates purposeful leisure with nobility and humdrum work with brutality. This began with the Ancient Greeks and continued with the snobbish Bloomsburys. The work ethic is arguably the invention of thin-lipped Calvinists. As the poet and grumpy old man Philip Larkin once rhetorically asked: “Why should I let the toad Work squat on my life?”
The answer is that without the toad Work squatting on one’s life, one feels curiously exposed. …
Keynes, according to Professor Alan Manning of the London School of Economics, “underestimated the appeal of materialism”. In part, this was because he failed to anticipate the ingenuity of business in supplying unnecessary but desirable new products and services, from video games to spa treatments. Had the great thinker ever had the chance to battle fellow Bloomsburyite Virginia Woolf at Wii Frisbee, he might have been more bullish about acquisitiveness. Financial competition is the other element. People work hard in order to be better off than their peers, or if that fails, to keep pace with them.
(30 April 2009)
As one has who has left the corporate world, let me say it is VERY EASY to find meaning and happiness outside of work. Unless you are obsessed with work or shopping, life is much better off the fast lane. -BA
At Peak Energy, Big Gav opines:
An article on renewed interest in the four day working week and other schemes to reduce the amount of time we spend at work… The author seems pessimistic about the ability of many people to enjoy more leisure time – but he has probably been working too hard to fully appreciate the virtues of sloth…
