Value is Valuable

When I first considered the green building/energy efficiency field, I admit my interest was 40% nerd-out to all the cool and interesting technological applications and 60% well here's an important way to save the planet.

The environmental importance of green building is nothing to understate:  building operation accounts for 35% of global energy consumption--the largest portion of that is associated with heating and cooling--while the manufacture, transportation, and construction of buildings and building components alone accounts for 5% to 8% of US greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet there are so many houses, and no matter how many net-zero homes we start building, the majority of the people are living in a building whose carbon emissions could be reduced with available technology but not with the available economics.  You can add in land-use concerns about building new buildings on undeveloped land in a world where we already need to be preserving natural spaces as potential carbon sequestration, and it's clear that no matter how nerdily-cool are many products, ideas, and systems available for the buildings of the future, the buildings that are already built are what need attention, even though the money to take an existing structure with yesterday's technology and vastly re-doing it with tomorrow's is not there for the majority of the people who own the majority of present buildings.

What I've found is that I care about "green building", energy efficiency, thoughtful design, how to do retrofits--all of it--for an additional reason, the more I do it--since money is so important in decisions made both by the individuals who own these homes and the companies who are trying to find a niche to make this stuff happen.  That reason is value itself, and being part of an industry that takes the time to give people something that really is equal to the advertised value.  Green building is about green but it's also about quality, and that is partially because "green" things like saving energy and avoiding wasteful use of materials are really about doing things right rather than just doing them nominally.  It's not just shoving in extra insulation, it's installing the insulation in a way that makes it actually perform to the level advertised on the package--since you know, you are paying for that level of performance when you bought the material.  It's not just putting on the "eco" windows and gutter option cause somebody told you it's green, it's thinking about how the environment will affect the house so that five or ten years from now the house doesn't fall down due to all the studs around your window being completely rotted out from a hidden leak-- since going into debt for thirty years on a product that only lasts ten is nobody's idea of a good deal.  Maybe the house would have cost you more to buy if your builder had taken more time to care about durability details, and yes, new green construction does typically cost some degree more.  In the more extreme cases of water-management stupidity and energy-efficiency ignorance, it's almost like buying a car with four wheels verses buying one with three:  the one with three is cheaper, but it doesn't function as a car so you still paid too much.  You also ultimately pay more for the car you have to drop a thousand bucks on to fix every ten thousand files than the cheap no-frills new car that lasts.

I just don't want people to throw money away on something that is really a stupid deal for them to begin with--or at least, I want other alternatives to having to do that in order to own a building to exist.  From an environmental standpoint building a low-quality house is hanus, because all those (carbon intensive to produce and ship) materials went into a stupid product that is likely to contribute to landfill waste sooner rather than later, that land is now occupied in something other than wildlife habitat, food production, or carbon sequestration, and the people who own it might find themselves stuck in money-pit repair problems and held captive to ever increasing energy bills, and who knows, maybe the thing is eventually foreclosed upon and now nobody even gets any shelter from the thing until somebody swoops in and buys it for cheap to demolish it (see landfill waste) and start over again.  I don't deny that people need housing and people who can't pay a premium for quality deserve housing of whatever sort they feel no objection to having just because better options exist, but my experience in the industry has driven me to feel the need to advocate for at least understanding what you're getting into, figure out how to add a base level of quality without adding a substantial premium, or just enabling same-cost options that feature quality over other aspects for those who DO value it.

Starport Airport

Been sick, and then had a family emergency related to aging grandparents, and then sick turned into low-level migraines, and oh man, migraines mean all bets are off.

I know, I know, excuses, excuses.

So what I've got for now is just a link to The Awesomeness Way Airport Security Will Ever Inconvenience You.

Thanks to Real Physics, holograms are not just for Star Wars anymore, boys and girls!

The Experience Machine of the Future

Hey.  I've been shoveling snow and consorting with family and trying to help keep a company in business and perfecting graduate school materials.  So.

When Games Invade Real Life is my link for you today, envisioning a future in which everything we do works with the same incentive structure as a video game.  Points for doing things you should do, like taking care of yourself and going to work, etc, points for doing things the advertising companies want you to do, like watching advertisements and buying their products.  A whole world of points, and obviously, a whole world of some crazy computer system knowing everything you are doing all the time, down to the toothbrush in the morning that the toothpaste companies give you points for using.  The speaker of this talk says it much better than I could.

Gaping privacy concerns that we in the Internet age just might have to learn to let go of aside, I'm not a huge video gamer, so this world in no way appeals to me for that reason alone.  I like video games, but they bore me pretty quickly and I'd rather Go Live my Life.  (I do quite like physical world role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, but I'm still going to reach a saturation point after a while.)  But what if the game was my life?  Or rather, my life really did work like a game? There is some powerful research out there into the power of intermittent reward, and don't some economists and social scientists and the like assert that most everything we do is based on reward and punishment, even if the reward is an intangible thing like "happiness" or "doing good things" as opposed to racking up money or points?  This talk caught my attention because, dude, this guy, (Jesse Schell, big shot game designer), presents a downright plausible view of the future world.  What if we really could re-structure our society that way, hi-jack our psychology into make us better people?

Yet I am reminded of an essay from ethics class, The Experience Machine.  Despite the fact that a machine capable of allowing every person to plug in and experience his or her idea of ultimate happiness without realizing that it's all an illusion would, all practical problems like maintaining it and dying of starvation, etc. aside, make everybody as happy as possible, something inside of us still insists that plugging into such a machine would be a very wrong thing to do.  Immoral, in some way we can't quite pin down.  Missing out on something very important about being alive, despite the fact that all of us who were plugged in should have better lives, because we would have only those experiences we want to have.


Even if a game-like reward society could encourage us to do more things that are good for us individually and good for society as a whole, there's something still...if not wrong about it, then certainly something that is lost. Perhaps the problem is that we could make society "better," but better by whose definition?  An "open-source" definition, edited by every entity that contributes to the game structure?  That seems most likely, and it is the most benevolent possibility--although it is not the only possibility, and that is where those heck-of privacy issues start rearing their heads again.

Yet I protest along the same lines as Nozick supposes we would protest an experience machine: what if my definition of "better" falls utterly outside the confines of simple act and reward?   What if I want to do things for reasons unrelated to racking up points, whatever real-world form the concept of "points" might take?  Am I already lying to myself by believing that I do?

Are Electric Cars "Greener"?

Potentially, maybe...but generally not so much.

Electricity as it is right now is not very green--though it is somewhat greening, and there is potential to make it more so.  At least, the biggest opponent of more widespread deployment of renewable and nuclear energy is political, not technical.  I have posited before that we are much better at overcoming technical limitations than we are at overcoming political ones, so one can assume that electricity is not greening at such a rate that the average electric car is powered by anything other than batteries charged with coal.

Cars emit a host of pollutants, most notably carbon dioxide and nitrous oxides of various forms, commonly referred to as NOx (pronounced "nocks.)"  NOx 1)contribute to acid rain, 2) react with sunlight to make ozone, which is great for blocking ultraviolet light in the stratosphere, but when produced at ground level not so good for people who like breathing easily on hot summer days, especially people with risk factors like small children, the elderly, and asthmatics.  Ozone levels in the southeast (I don't have firsthand experience with other regions) get so elevated on some summer days that prolonged outdoor exertion is considered unhealthy for most people.

Ground-level ozone is a concern for multiple reasons: high concentrations damage crop and forest tissue, and it's also a much more potent greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide.   

Here in the southeast most electricity comes from coal.  Coal-fired power plants emit carbon dioxide, sulfur oxides SOx ("socks"), and trace other things like mercury and lead.  SOx 1) contribute even more strongly to acid rain, 2) forms a layer of very fine particles suspended in the atmosphere, that are also irritating to breath in for those who are sensitive, and contribute to smog.

The good news is that SOx emissions in particular are declining thanks to a cap and trade program that's been in place since the 1990s.  Emitters buy credits, ones who have made technology improvements such as scrubbers that make their SOx emissions go below required amounts sell the extra ones, and the total number of overall credits available declines each year.  If you felt like speeding that along, you could go buy a SOx credit. (My econ teacher did that, and framed it.) Both NOx and SOx from large emitters are capped-and-traded, but obviously nobody is cap and trading the NOx that come from private vehicles.

So the trade-off between a gasoline or non-bio-diesel powered engine and a car charged with coal-fired electricity is really between more NOx or more SOx.  Carbon dioxide is gonna happen either way.  Certainly there may be a difference in the carbon dioxide released per unit of petroleum verses coal that makes one less absolutely contributory to climate change--but since coal and fuel combustion technologies alike vary strongly in their age and efficiency, and about three different varieties of coal with very different properties are regularly used by the same plants, that is a difficult and largely apples to oranges comparison.  While we're at it I suppose one should also look at life-cycle costs when considering claims of relative greenness:  the energy and environmental costs of finding, drilling for, securing, shipping, refining, shipping gasoline verses the energy and environmental costs of finding, mining, and shipping coal. I'm curious enough that maybe I'll look into that for another post, but still, apples to oranges.

Hybrid cars by contrast actually are greener, because they are tapping into an otherwise unused energy source and charging batteries with something one does while driving anyway--putting on the breaks.  That idea, tapping into otherwise unused sources, is certainly thinking along the right track toward sustainability.  I will note that my fully gasoline-powered Saturn, a product of GM, for goodness sake, regularly equals or exceeds the gas mileage of the first-generation hybrids, although they've outstripped me in recent model-years.

The advantage I do see of fully electric cars is that it takes two huge pollution problems, coal and gasoline, and turns them into one, just coal, which is theoretically much more capable of being supplemented by more environmentally sustainable production methods.  Sometimes simplifying your problems is progress--turning your oranges into apples.  The only apples to apples "green" alternative to gas combustion is biofuel, which is great when produced from used vegetable oil, but actually very un-green if made from palm-oil planted on illegally logged rain-forest.  From a climate change mitigation standpoint, we cannot afford more deforestation, and could really use some re-forestation instead.

Maybe a hybrid biofuel engine is the future.  Or crazy superconducting mag-levs, assuming room-temperature super-conduction is possible, something we have not yet observed but haven't found evidence yet either that it is impossible.

There's also the issue of American driving patterns--which is a lot of downtown, where electric or hybrid cars are doing something, anyway--but also a lot of inter-city.  People generally want cars for both capabilities, getting to work each day, visiting your sister on weekends.  Hybrids can take you inter-city no problem but don't perform much better than regular vehicles when doing so.  Electric cars don't generally have enough juice to go more than one or two hundred miles--although this could be changing.

Light passenger rail would be sweet, but way too expensive right now, and not practical at rural to suburban density levels, most common here.

By the way, your gas is pretty much exclusively 10% ethanol in North Carolina.

Fuel cells?  Still have to work out that hydrogen exploding thing.  Super efficient though, and non-emitting in the carbon dioxide department, although the method of obtaining the hydrogen is probably going to be quite carboniferous.

Offshore Wind Is Just So Darn Cool

It really breaks my heart to wake up every morning to more doom and gloom about that oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. 

I've never been big on offshore oil, but then again, like the still-have-to-drive-my-car-to-work hypocrite that I am, I've never been big on oil consumption.

Anyway, I don't think anybody could have predicted this.  The trouble is, from an NPR interview I heard this morning with a BP official, it sounds like the kind of equipment failue that happened just wasn't even figured into the cost-benefit-analysis equation, because we thought we knew the safety of the technology.  It is perplexing that super-redundant failsafe technology somehow still managed to fail, and discouraging but understandable that nobody got much practice in fixing Stuff That Really Should Not Break to Begin With.

Should we figure unprecidented, remotely-possible and bizzare failure into our collective okay-ness or not with the risks of offshore drilling?  I am fine going rock climbing with my laboratory-tested, ever-redundantly-set-up safety equipment.  Most all of us--especially those of us who think offshore drilling is at least better than buying it from terrorists--are willing to stuff ourselves in metal boxes that travel at high speeds near other metal boxes multiple times a day, even knowing the risk of death is actually quite substantial.


Although if you ask a Louisiana fisherman, and he'd probably tell you that no risk to something You Can't Fix Once You Broke It is acceptable.  In the case of large-scale, vital systems likes oceans, estuaries, wetlands and the like, I am inclined to agree.  Messing with stuff you depend on but can't fix has never been a particularly wise course of action, and I think as a society we know this.  It's just that finding the balance:  how great is the actual risk, how great is the potential gain, is where a practical and phisophical question enters the realm of politics.

So here's where I want to plug Offshore Wind.  It's just so darn neat.  The wind blows quite a bit on the ocean, so you don't have to listen to that "renewable aint reliable" guff the critics give you about land-based forms of the technology.   Large-scale offshore wind farms are already operational in other parts of the world:  Denmark has over 300 MW of wind in use, and Sweeden and the Netherlands have been running offshore wind sites since the 1990s.  That doesn't sound like un-tested technology to me.  Yet in the United States, we have a plethora of proposed projects--including the newly approved Cape Wind project--that have yet to be brought to life.  The current climate bill really could change this, so now is a great time to think about how cool it is.

Windmills may be considered ugly, but I fail to see how they are any uglier than an oil rig, or the smokestacks of a coal-fired power plant, for that matter.  I suppose the absolute ugliness of windmills will always be a matter of taste, but I don't see how the relative ugliness, when compared to the alternative, can ever be considered particularly great.

Windmills disrupt, kill wildlife.  Obviously, so does an oil spill.  But even in the more normal, spill-free reality of most oil drilling, I want to point out that climate change disrupts and kills wildlife.  Photochemical smog is neither a friend of the animals.  I've heard some, not necesarily authoritative sources, say that offshore wind is actually better about wildlife death than land-based wind.  Just miss the migratory paths of birds, you know?

It seems to me such an obvious win-win idea, such a no-brainer to produce energy with a lessened environmental impact, stimulte economic growth in a new industry, and, you know, use our brains to evaluate risk, gain, and consequence, and select from all options the most satisfying solution to the various concerns involved.

There is an obvious caveat here, which is that oil-drilling and wind-milling are feeding two separate energy streams.  Electricity powers light bulbs (and industry, and the Information Technology we depend on, and your plug-in hybrid), while petroleum powers cars, among other things.  We depend* on plastic bottles and plastic bags, manufactured from petroleum resin, propane and jet fuel and many thousands of household and industrial chemicals.  Even if our electric needs were met cleanly, do we drill those other things out of our oceans, or buy them from people who like to blow other people up?  Furthermore, should our demand fuel an oil spill on somebody else's beach, or are we man enough to take on the consequences of our material demands ourselves?  (Although accepting the consequences of one's actions, might actually be more of a woman thing).

*hardship often shows us that the definition of "depend" is quite relative.

I don't have an answer to that, not 100%.   Chemical energy and electrical energy can certainly be cross-converted (with some loss): in fact, that is what a car engine, battery, and alternator together accomplish.  I have often thought that we could make our energy quagmire simpler and more attackable if we trended our technology toward one method of energization, instead of two.  Of course a practical way to accomplish that involves some government determination of Things Market, and some would call that a slippery slope toward tyrannical socialism.  I don't agree with that classification, but I can see their point.

But why not offshore wind, too?  Why not have the wind component, together with the oil? Anyone who thinks the government is not already deeply involved in utility regulation lives in something of a dream-world.  Currently, federal approvement is required to begin an offshore operation.  If people are going to see this gulf oil slick as a reason to put a moratorium on drilling, a reason to be very careful with drilling, or whatever--can't we take this moment of pause to really consider the benefits of renewable technology? 

The Thing about Hybrids

Like a good environmentalist, I should be excited about all the new hybrid models out, right?

Well, because I love the Nissan Altima so much, that being my first car and all, I'm pretty excited about that one. It's also pretty stupid to use the first-generation of some technology, like people did with the first Priuses (Prii?) and with solar photovoltaic kits bought at Lowes, see the flaws and assume it just means the technology doesn't work at all, when really it's still being developed. But really, though it's good to keep the technology possibilities going, I'm pretty much convinced that battery powered fuel-electric hybrids, at least, aren't the thing that's gonna work for us here in America.

First off, the fuel economy of hybrids isn't really all that spectacular, especially of hybrid SUVS. Like a true environmentalist, I am not a fan, and hybrid SUVS might be a genuine great thing for people who genuinely need an SUV, but are sort of a feel-good excuse to help us keep our bad habits. There's even some evidence to suggest that the feel-good aspect of these cars makes a fair number of people justify driving more, because hey, driving's not bad anymore if you have a hybrid.

Yet the main issue is that the hybrid concept isn't that applicable to the United States, because the country is for the most part, a very spread out place. People in the US do have a huge problem with driving when they shouldn't, like my friend who drives the 0.5 miles to the gym so she can walk around the track. We aren't going to get real change in our pollution environment until we fix this mentality where it is possible to fix it, and because human nature is in the way, that is no easy thing to do.

But Americans also drive many places they really should drive to, because a lot of us live so far from stores that walking would be ridiculously impracticable, because there's no space for you on our traveling surfaces if you're a tiny bike-rider or a tiny walker, and you're likely to get hit on or yelled at besides, if not killed by someone who doesn't see you cause he or she is texting. We travel between spread-out suburbs and spread-out cities regularly for work, family, friends and attractions, and if we had to walk or bike, our productivity would plummet (though so would obesity rates). We live this way because there is so much space, so it gets filled with lots of stuff, and most people can't locate themselves to live in walking or biking distance to all of it, even those who are walking or biking inclined.

Public transport and good city planning is the answer to this, but I don't think people are going to give up private vehicles all together, because the space issue is an obstacle to public transit as well. How do you design a route that takes care of all of it in a time and cost efficient manner? Hybrids don't much help the space problem, because when you're traveling between North and East side of town you go a dozen miles at highway speeds, not a few miles with lots of breaking, where hybrids do their best work. When you make your monthly trip to the next state over to visit grandma, you're electric battery is never even going to cut on.

I have some friends, who happen to be unnaturally obsessed with volts-wagon diesel vehicles, which also tend to kick your hybrid's mpg-ass with what they clock traveling between their college town and their hometown. I certainly think they have the right of it: those German cars are designed for Audubon-reminiscent, high-speed efficiency, and that is why their gas mileage in our country always ends up being comparable.