Archive for the ‘Global Warming’

 

The Big Picture

Posted by Stefan on 16th May 2007

 

Architecture & Design Backgrounder

Source: GreenBiz.com

Buildings produce roughly a third of carbon dioxide emissions and other emissions that harm air quality. Additionally, buildings generate waste during construction and operation; can have poor indoor air quality, affecting worker health; and often don’t consider the impact made on the community through increased transportation, sprawl, and cultural and historical impact. By integrating natural resource, human health, and community concerns into building design and construction, architects and designers can create buildings that are cleaner, healthier for occupants and the environment, and which deplete fewer resources.

The Big Picture

Architecture & Design Backgrounder

Source: GreenBiz.com

Buildings produce roughly a third of carbon dioxide emissions and other emissions that harm air quality. Additionally, buildings generate waste during construction and operation; can have poor indoor air quality, affecting worker health; and often don’t consider the impact made on the community through increased transportation, sprawl, and cultural and historical impact. By integrating natural resource, human health, and community concerns into building design and construction, architects and designers can create buildings that are cleaner, healthier for occupants and the environment, and which deplete fewer resources.

Energy Use Backgrounder

Energy Use Backgrounder

Source: GreenBiz.com

The Big Picture

Energy prices and atmospheric temperatures are rising—putting energy efficiency on everyone’s front burner as a smart environmental and business practice. Reducing energy consumption—particularly from nonrenewable sources—will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and operating, manufacturing, and consumption costs.

Ask the Green Architect: Getting Started in Green Building

Ask the Green Architect: Getting Started in Green Building

Eric Corey Freed03/23/07

Eric Corey Freed is principal of organicARCHITECT and teaches Sustainable Design at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and University of California Berkeley. He is on the boards of Architects, Designers & Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), Green Home Guide and West Coast Green. This article has been excerpted from his upcoming book, “Green Building for Dummies” to be released in August 2007.

Building ‘green’ reaches a new level

By John Ritter, USA TODAY

PORTLAND, Ore. — Michelle Walsh looks out a wall of windows in her airy new condo high above the Willamette River. Across hills and forests loom snow-capped Mount Hood and, when it’s clear, Mount St. Helens. Below? Construction chaos all around.

Walsh revels in it. She and her husband, Edward, proudly wear “urban pioneer” buttons the builder handed out to early move-ins at the nation’s first large-scale redevelopment to go 100% “green.”

Green Building Timeline

• Pre-20th Century – structures were designed and built by builder-architects who had an ability to understand the entire building from design through construction and lifetime operations. They incorporated enduring passive design and simple mechanical systems to heat, cool and light buildings. Architects in the 21st Century will look back upon these ideas to relearn the basics of climatic design.

• 1930s – new building technologies began to transform urban landscape. Advent of air conditioning, low-wattage fluorescent lighting, structural steel, and reflective glass made possible enclosed glass and steel structures that could be heated and cooled with massive HVAC systems, thanks to availability of cheap fossil fuels. These technologies began a sadly regressive movement in architecture in which architects began to ignore climate issues and their effect on buildings and occupants. Increasing complexity in the industry also brought about specialization in professionals, leading to the loss of the generalists, the builder-architects.  This specialization led to an increasing lack of communication between the professionals and therefore of lack of whole systems thinking in designing the various parts of the building. This problem will only begin to be addressed by the start of the 21st Century through the integrated design process.

Green Building Revolution

The green building movement is starting to make serious progress, reports E – The Environmental Magazine in its January/February 2007 cover story (now posted at http://www.emagazine.com). Eco-friendly construction is on the rise, from single-family houses and planned communities to schools, hospitals and other large built environments.

Water Fuel Cell

The water fuel cell, named by American Stanley Meyer, is a device claimed to convert water into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen (water electrolysis – 2H2O → 2H2 + O2), using less energy than that present in the elements’ bond itself. The water fuel cell could reportedly produce several times more energy than it consumes. In practice, an engine would be connected to a cell and, through the combustion process, convert the hydrogen back into water (2H2 + O2 → 2H2O). At least one car prototype reportedly powered by a water fuel cell has been assembled.[1]

Heal the Ozone Layer

The thin Ozone layer is made of Oxygen3, it now has major holes in it. The holes are as large as countries. The holes let the harmful UV rays to hit the earth. More sun burns and more skin cancer, let alone knowing what it is doing to the plants and animals. They used to blame the ozone braking up on perfluorocarbons (spray paint, freon, and other products) but now they finally admit it is the SMOG that is causing all the trouble. The Oil Corp.s spend millions on disinformation people and lobbists who asy no SMOG is good for the planet. We will all die eventually by greenhouse gasses and global warming as the ice caps are melting at an alarming rate.. We need to get rid of SMOG and need more oxygen. Burning the rain forest does not help, paving paradise with parking lots, and development, cement and asphalt not planting green plants, lawns, gardens are needed more. We need a Green Revolution.

Prototype car runs 100 miles on four ounces of water as fuel

While his unique electrolysis process – working simply with water and electricity – was originally designed to work in welding factories as a replacement for acetylene torches, a whole new application has come to light from Denny Klein, who recently filed a patent on his solution. He has converted his 1994 Ford Escort to run either as a water-gas hybrid, or on water alone.

Global Warming: Who Loses—and Who Wins?

Coastal cities inundated, farming regions parched, ocean currents disrupted, tropical diseases spreading, glaciers melting—an artificial greenhouse effect could generate countless tribulations.

If Earth’s climate changes meaningfully—and the National Academy of Sciences, previously skeptical, said in 2005 that signs of climate change have become significant—there could be broad-based disruption of the global economy unparalleled by any event other than World War II.

Green building

Green building is the practice of increasing the efficiency with which buildings and their sites use and harvest energy, water, and materials, and reducing building impacts on human health and the environment, through better siting, design, construction, operation, maintenance, and removal — the complete building life cycle.

Green building is also sometimes known as sustainable building or environmental building, although there are slight differences in the definitions. The practice of green building can lead to benefits including reduced operating costs by increasing productivity and using less energy and water, improved public and occupant health due to improved indoor air quality, and reduced environmental impacts by, for example, lessening storm water runoff and the heat island effect.

Fueling Our Future

Climate warming is accelerating as energy use soars. Nuclear power won’t close the gap. We need to learn to live with coal. Here’s one elaborate engineering solution.
by Jonathan Shaw

Only one Earth : We can do this good work together

The bounty of the earth is not inexhaustible. The oceans do not contain an infinite number of fish. Much of what is once destroyed by overexploitation or greed is gone forever. Earth sustains life and is our nurturing resource.  Today we abuse Earth’s resources. We feed on portions that belong to unborn generations. Our children’s children risk entering this world already bearing the debt of their forefathers. http://www.iht.com/articles/2002/08/28/edpers_ed3_.php