America's buildings are no small contributor to our environmental difficulties and energy use... but they're far from the biggest part of the problem. The enemy is us — the choices we make individually and as a society. America's building envelopes are getting better and tighter, our heating and cooling systems are getting more efficient, but every year we keep using more energy. And our carbon emissions keep going up, not down. Part of the equation, certainly, is that the U.S. builds more buildings and is home to more people all the time. But per-person energy use and emissions aren't just staying the same, they're increasing. The LIVE post Plug Loads and Small Electronics addresses just one small piece of the puzzle, but the example is cross-applicable. An article in the current Orion Magazine, The Gospel of Consumption, takes a look at salient lifestyle trends over the last 80 years or so, with a dual emphasis on workplace issues and consumerism. (Excerpts below.) Yes, life is different than it was 80 years ago. It's different than it was ten years ago, or even five. We have more options now, greater convenience, better health care... we've made great advances. And there's no reason to turn our backs on the good things we enjoy today, and to continue to have even more. But have we abandoned some things that contribute to a greater happiness index and quality of life? [More]

In a few days I'll be leaving for the fifth annual Natural Building Colloquium East in Bath, NY. I go every year. So does David Eisenberg and a bunch of other people that I really like.
Is it anything like them green conferences?
No. It is nothing like them.
(Most of the quotes in this article were gathered at the first colloquium held at that location five years ago.)
Tantalizing photos after the jump:
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• "In spite of persistent claims to the contrary from green advocates, 86% of respondents believe that it costs more to build a green building — and not just by a little." — High Perceived Cost of Green Persists, Says Survey (January 1, 2008)
• "The report, the most exhaustive cost-benefit analysis of green building ever undertaken, found that green buildings have an average 0 to 2% increase in first cost over their conventional counterparts, but that they will recoup 20% of construction costs over 20 years — ­more than ten times the original investment in green features." — Building Green Pays (November 1, 2003)
• "Program administrators were surprised to discover that their stringent criteria are being met using only conventional technologies, with little or no increase in building costs." — Canadian Program Discovers that Design Process is Key (January 1, 1996)
• "Even the highest-cost scenarios fall within GSA's typical 10% design contingency at conceptual design phase." — GSA LEED Cost Study (December 1, 2004)
• "With good integration of all the disciplines on a design team, it is possible to incorporate, within budget, many strategies that taken alone would increase costs." — Building Green on a Budget (May 1, 1999)
• "The building was completed for $19.3 million, well under the $20.5 million budget." — High-Performance Building Skin Pays Off (July 1, 1997)
• "We learned that it does not necessarily cost more to be environmentally sensitive; our project came in under budget." — Felician Sisters Convent and School (Case Study)
• "The school was completed on time and under budget." — Fossil Ridge High School (Case Study)
• "Focusing on libraries, academic classrooms, and laboratories, they compare the cost per square foot of 45 LEED-seeking projects with 93 that are not pursuing LEED certification. They found 'no statistically significant difference between the LEED population and the non-LEED population.' This finding held up within each building type as well as across the whole range of projects." — New Data on the Cost of Building Green (August 1, 2004)
• "It is not possible to detect any statistically significant difference between the cost of green and non-green buildings." — Report Says Green Still Doesn't Drive Building Cost (August 1, 2007)

I have a little treat for Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 users: the BuildingGreen.com Search Plugin. With the plugin installed, you can search BuildingGreen.com directly from the search bar in the top right corner of your browser. In the course of a day, I often have to reference a few case studies. The search plugin allows me to get to the case study I need almost immediately. Same goes for an article, green topic, product, etc. I don't have to click my bookmark to our homepage or find the BuildingGreen tab I already have open, I just click in the search box. I know it's a small thing, but I couldn't live without it.

Sunil Somalwar, a physics professor at Rutgers University, presents the following argument at the Better World Club site:

Let us conservatively say that a Prius goes 40 miles on a gallon of gasoline. After taking into account the 20 lbs CO2 released by burning a gallon of gasoline, 40mpg amounts to two miles per pound of CO2 emission. On the other hand, a plug-in electric car may not emit any CO2 from the tailpipe, but when I draw a kilowatt-hour from the electric grid here in New Jersey to charge the car batteries, a coal plant in some other state belches out 2.5 lbs of CO2. According to Toyota, the plug-in version of the Prius will run about 2.5 miles on that kilowatt-hour of electricity, which means that I get only one mile per pound of CO2 emission. When I plug it in, my 40-50 mpg Prius becomes half as efficient and turns into a 20 mpg SUV. (The story with GM's upcoming Volt plug-in car is no different.)

Here's the rest of the story (it's pretty short). Has the good professor overlooked anything?

Oh, we've written about lawns over the years. And so have other people. The current New Yorker has a great article about lawns — looking backward, forward, and around. A couple juicy excerpts:

The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests, and when grubs attacked the resulting brown spot showed up like lipstick on a collar. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. As Paul Robbins reports in "Lawn People" (2007), the first pesticide popularly spread on lawns was lead arsenate, which tended to leave behind both lead and arsenic contamination. Next in line were DDT and chlordane. Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and chlorpyrifos — both of which affect the nervous system — took their place. Diazinon and chlorpyrifos, too, were eventually revealed to be hazardous. (Diazinon came under scrutiny after birds started dropping dead around a recently sprayed golf course.) The insecticide carbaryl, which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied to lawns. A likely human carcinogen, it has been shown to cause developmental damage in lab animals, and is toxic to — among many other organisms — tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In "American Green" (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to "a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs." Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction. From the gardener's perspective, the result is a denser, thicker mat of green. From the grasses' point of view, the result is a perpetual state of vegetable adolescence. With every successive trim, the plants are forcibly rejuvenated. In his anti-lawn essay "Why Mow?," Michael Pollan puts it this way: "Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much."

"Turf War: Americans can't live without their lawns — but how long can they live with them?" by Elizabeth Kolbert; The New Yorker; July 21, 2008

Twice each month, BuildingGreen publishes an email news bulletin with current news and product information briefs. Sign up here — it's free. We will never share or sell your email address, and you may unsubscribe at any time.

How can LEED hope to transform the building industry in an environmental mold if, to highlight the achievements of buildings, it relies on outmoded stores of value whose extraction and use does vast environmental and social harm: Silver, Gold and Platinum? Those, of course, are the three top tiers of achievement for green buildings in the LEED Rating System. The lowest tier? Plain-vanilla "Certified." C'mon, USGBC, you couldn't pull out palladium or beryllium as a consolation prize? These tiers are also spreading a pox of heavy metals in the green building world. They've recently been spotted in the NSF-140 sustainable carpet program, and in the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) product certification program, whose founders, William McDonough, FAIA, and Michael Braungart, Ph.D., should know better. Speaking of C2C, it was Braungart himself who suggested to me last year that there should be a more environmentally conscious tier system. His suggestion at the time was something like: 3) Microbe
2) Ant
1) Butterfly
I guess he likes insects and other creepy crawlies. I've come up with a few ideas of my own, and please send me yours. The best ideas will be noted, with proper credit, in a future post on BuildingGreen.com. I'll also present them to USGBC. [More]

Over at the New American Village blog:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the Emotional and Economic bonds which have connected them with a destructive Energy Policy, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should chart a New Course. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Energy sources are not created equal...

It goes on.

Excerpted from a post titled "The Unclear Origins of Oil" on Kevin Kelly's CT2 (Conceptual Trends and Current Topics) blog:

Crude oil is almost $140 per barrel. By now you'd think we would know where it comes from. The conventional wisdom is that oil descends from algae from eons ago. Lots and lots of algae. Unimaginable mounds of dead algae in quantities no longer found on this planet, pressed, and cooked into hydrocarbon liquids. Thus: fossil fuel. Others, notably the Russians, have an alternative theory that oil comes from non-biological carbon compounds deep in this planet, like the methane oceans we find on other planets. An emerging third theory is that bacteria living within rocks produce oil.

Read the original post...

Excerpts from a BuildingGreen press release that's being distributed today:

Some heating fuels that used to be quite affordable, such as heating oil, have risen in price dramatically, making competing energy sources such as electricity relatively less expensive. In parts of the Northeast and Upper Midwest, even the most expensive form of electric heat — electric-resistance baseboard heat — is now less expensive than fuel oil. The challenge in comparing fuel costs is the fact that most fuels are purchased by volume or weight, rather than energy content. It's hard to compare gallons of fuel oil with hundreds of cubic-feet (ccf) of natural gas and kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. Adding to the complexity, there are big differences in how efficiently energy sources are converted into heat and how efficiently that heat is distributed throughout a building.

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Twice each month, BuildingGreen publishes an email news bulletin with current news and product information briefs. Sign up here — it's free. We will never share or sell your email address, and you may unsubscribe at any time.

On June 20, a briefing about straw-bale construction organized by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) was held in the Russell Senate Office Building. Laura Bartels (President of GreenWeaver Inc. and member of the Builders Without Borders Building Team), Sandy Wiggins (immediate past Chairman of the Board of the USGBC), Bob Gough (Secretary of the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy), and David Eisenberg (Director of the Development Center for Appropriate Technology and chair of the USGBC's Codes Committee) spoke.

• Laura Bartels presentation (PDF)
• Bob Gough presentation (PDF)
• Sandy Wiggins presentation (PDF)
• David Eisenberg presentation (PDF)

• Audio of the briefing (MP3)

In researching Forbo's Marmoleum Composition Tile (MCT) for the July issue of EBN, I found out that the product wasn't actually all that new. We had first covered the idea of it in 1998: "Forbo Industries also has some exciting new developments. The company is introducing a new linoleum tile this December that will be thinner (2.0 mm) and priced to compete more directly with VCT. This 13" by 13" (330 mm x 330 mm) tile is being targeted specifically toward K-12 schools." (EBN Vol. 7, No. 9) Curious, I got in touch with Tim Cole, the director of environmental initiatives and product development for Forbo. He told me that the product met with limited success ten years ago, but that the market for environmentally friendly products had grown, particularly for schools, so MCT's chances of making it as a product now were quite good. LEED for Schools, the Collaborative for High-Performance Schools (CHPS), and other programs are bringing green schools into the mainstream. Parents are worried about their children's exposure to chemicals at school, including those present in vinyl composition tile (VCT). Enter MCT. In one sense, MCT is a product made mostly of marketing. It's the same material as Marmoleum, only thinner and less expensive. At the same time, MCT's similarity to VCT in size, thickness, and cost may make it more acceptable to a market that tends to stick with what it knows. The guaranteed installed cost is pretty cool, too. So maybe Forbo was just ahead of its time ten years ago, and now the time is right.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, swings and swings and swings and misses the point entirely. As do most of the comments — over 2,200 of them so far. So much darkness.