Buildings

San Francisco commits $150 million to green homes

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Monday night I was having drinks in downtown San Francisco with some seriously smart people—top-level IBM scientists and strategists involved in Big Blue’s Smarter Planet initiative. Given the room’s collective interest in creating smart electrical grids, smart water systems, advanced electric car batteries and other green technologies, the talk naturally turned to how to create sustainable cities.

Infrastructure: Priorities and painful decisions

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When cheap energy reigned, we built acres of infrastructure throughout the United States, without giving too much thought to the energy, materials, and money that we would need to maintain and operate these constructions. The crumbling of this legacy of infrastructure is one of the many day-to-day living problems that we face over the next fifty to a hundred years.

Entropy revisited

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One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we’ve been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth’s ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we’re literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn’t something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.

Review: Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller by Jeff Rubin

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Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil…And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.

Solutions & sustainability – Jan 29

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-Oil Is Too Important To Burn In Cars
-Beyond rhetoric
-three paths to a low-car city
-Saving Sub-Sahara Africa a Drip at a Time
-How Can Haiti Be Sustainable?
-Straw Homes That Would Have Foiled the Wolf

Growing Good People Through Work, Study, and Community

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Just outside Asheville, North Carolina, bordered by the Craggy Mountains and located in the Swannanoa Valley on the banks of the Swannanoa River, Warren Wilson College students are busy moving the cows to their next pasture and cutting locally harvested lumber at the on-campus sawmill…

Peak Moment 160: A Young Couple Find Freedom in Simple Living

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Rather than follow the customary American dream, Tammy and Logan sold their home and car, and moved to a bikeable/walkable neighborhood in Sacramento, California. After reading Derrick Jensen’s writings, this couple used Your Money or Your Life as a means to get out of debt and, they feel, regain their lives and their future. While they recount the psychological challenges of facing a future of declining resources, the catalyst that continues to move them forward is a dream of living in an affordable tiny house within a supportive community).

Resilient Cities for Transition Times #1

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Hot from combined gatherings of Peak Oil, Climate, and new planning experts in Vancouver, October, this episode of Radio Eco-shock features California green guru Warren Karlenzig on post carbon cities and former Shell Exec now anti-corporate activist Anita Burke. This is the first of a series of speakers from “Gaining Ground/Resilient Cities, Urban Strategies for Transition Times” conference in Vancouver October 20-22nd, 2009.