This Old Recyclable House (Jon Mooallem, NYTimes Magazine, 9/28/08)

Yesterday, the NYTimes Magazine featured an in-depth look at “deconstruction” — tearing down old houses and buildings in order to reclaim virtually 100% of the building materials. It’s an intriguing concept — with complicated economics and market forces at work. On the surface of it, demolition is faster and cheaper. But deconstruction could contribute in significant ways to sustainable building practices. To start with, we could keep an amazing amount of stuff out of landfills.

Here are a few paragraphs:

A quarter of a million homes are demolished annually, according to the E.P.A., liberating some 1.2 billion board feet of reusable lumber alone. For the most part, this wood has been trucked out to a landfill and buried. Remodeling actually ends up generating more than one and a half times the amount of debris every year that demolishing homes does. (America generates a total of 160 million tons of construction and demolition debris every year, 60 percent of which is landfilled.) The Stanford archaeologist William Rathje, who spent decades excavating landfills, has estimated that construction and demolition debris, together with paper, account for “well over half” of what America throws out. He called it one of a few “big-ticket items” in the waste stream actually worthy of the debates we have over merely “symbolic targets” like disposable diapers.

At the same time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, new construction consumes 60 percent of all materials used in the nation’s economy every year, excluding food and fuel. Few of those resources are renewable. Older homes are among the last repositories of old-growth timber, like heart pine or cypress, and keeping even the most mundane building materials in circulation at the end of a house’s life preserves their “embodied energy” (the energy expended producing and shipping natural resources in the first place) instead of drawing new resources to replace them.

“This is a manufacturing process,” Guy told me. “That’s the way you should look at this. We are making building materials.” In fact, the aim of deconstruction has always been more socioeconomic than environmental: employing local people to harvest a stock of low-cost materials so that lower-income homeowners and rental landlords in the same area can afford to maintain their properties. Denhart talks about houses as being part of a community’s collective history and wealth. Deconstruction maintains and redistributes that wealth.

Smart stuff, and well written. Read the article here: This Old Recyclable House

Mark Svengold: “Wind-Power Politics”

This great in-depth look at offshore wind power in the NYTimes Magazine (Sept. 14) tells the story of Bluewater Wind, the company that is building a huge offshore windfarm in/for Delaware.

The story is told against the larger context of the quickly evolving world of wind power, with a focus on the political forces at work behind the scenes (in the case of Bluewater Wind, the public was 90% in favor of their plan, but it was then stalled — and ultimately scaled back — by political leaders in the state).

The author, Mark Svengold, pulls together many of the threads I’ve been following about windpower into a snapshot of where things stand and where they appear to be going, including the promising potential of windpower in the U.S. Here’s a snippet:

While it’s true that wind is still a tiny part of the energy picture — just 1 percent of the total electricity portfolio in the United States and 3.3 percent in Europe — more than a quarter of the 20,000 megawatts of the world’s new wind capacity last year was installed in North America, where all the global wind-energy players have set up shop, lured by the low U.S. dollar and the high rate of returns. ….In the continental United States, resources are vast — with more than eight thousand gigawatts of potential electricity blowing overhead. “The amount of wind energy potential in this country,” says Walt Musial, a principal engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s National Wind Technology Center, “is bigger than the national grid itself.”

Of the things I’ve been reading about wind power, I’d probably recommend this article most highly because it provides a big-picture overview while telling a compelling story about a visionary company.

Read the full article here: Wind-Power Politics

Tom Friedman: “And Then There Was One”

In the September 2 New York Times, Tom Friedman says of John McCain:

With his choice of Sarah Palin — the Alaska governor who has advocated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and does not believe mankind is playing any role in climate change — for vice president, John McCain has completed his makeover from the greenest Republican to run for president to just another representative of big oil.

…and explains why it it matters — and should matter to Republicans as much as anyone else (because in our global economy, being green isn’t just for tree huggers):

…renewable energy technologies — what I call “E.T.” — are going to constitute the next great global industry. They will rival and probably surpass “I.T.” — information technology. The country that spawns the most E.T. companies will enjoy more economic power, strategic advantage and rising standards of living. We need to make sure that is America. Big oil and OPEC want to make sure it is not.

It’s a smart column. Read it here: And Then There Was One

“Beyond Carbon: Scientists Worry About Nitrogen’s Effect” (Richard Morgan, NYTimes)

Australia's 470 men's crew negotiates its way through the algae during training on June 24. (Source: ABC News / AAP: Australian Sailing Team)

Remember those huge algae blooms in China that mucked up the water for the Olympic sailing events? The culprit was nitrogen.

An article in the Sept. 2 New York Times looks at concerns about nitrogen, and it’s a good reminder that climate change is complicated — yes, reducing carbon is critical, but that many other things need to be in balance for our world to be healthy.

Here are a few paragraphs that set up the issue:

Public discussion of complicated climate change is largely reduced to carbon: carbon emissions, carbon footprints, carbon trading. But other chemicals have large roles in the planet’s health, and the one Dr. Giblin is looking for in Arctic mud, one that a growing number of other researchers are also concentrating on, is nitrogen.

In addition to having a role in climate change, nitrogen has a huge, probably more important biological impact through its presence in fertilizer. Peter Vitousek, a Stanford ecologist whose 1994 essay put nitrogen on the environmental map, co-authored a study this summer in the journal Nature that put greater attention on the nitrogen cycle and warned against ignoring it in favor of carbon benefits.

For example, Dr. Vitousek said in an interview, “There’s a great danger in doing something like, oh, overfertilizing a cornfield to boost biofuel consumption, where the carbon benefits are far outweighed by the nitrogen damage.”

And here are some troubling numbers that show how agribusiness contributes to nitrogen imbalances:

Fertilizer use is largely inefficient. With beef, only about 6 percent of nitrogen used in raising cows ends up in their meat; the rest leeches out into air or water supplies. With pork, it is 12 percent; chicken, 25 percent. Milk, eggs and grain have the highest efficiency, about 35 percent, or half of what, in the metric of report cards, is a C-minus.

Finally, a good analogy:

Reactive nitrogen competes with greenhouse gases that have greater public awareness. “But it’s like looking at malaria and AIDS in Africa,” Dr. Rabalais said. “They’re both problems. And they both need vigilant attention.”

Read the full article here: Beyond Carbon — Scientists Worry About Nitrogen’s Effect

Book Review: The Golden Spruce

I’ve just finished reading The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed by John Vaillant (2005). It tells the story of Grand Hadwin, who sawed down the Golden Sitka in British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands in 1997. The tree was a unique Sitka Spruce with golden needles — a “freak of nature” that shouldn’t have survived, but had — that was sacred to the Haida people.

I picked the book up because it had an Into the Wild appeal (a book I’ve read twice, as well as seeing the movie). And there are some similarities between the main characters. However, Vaillant weaves a much larger story around Grant Hadwin and the Golden Spruce, providing wide-ranging background on the cultural and geographical history of British Columbia, the history and beliefs of the Haida nation, and the evolution and impact of the logging industry.

This story takes place at a complicated intersection of culture and commerce, and it’s really a story about sustainability and how our insatiable need for wood has destroyed virtually all the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. It also seems to me that the lessons of the Golden Spruce have parallels in our use (and misuse) of other natural resources.

There were a lot of facts that I found fascinating, like this tidbit:

As early as 1605, samples of white pine from Maine were being sent back to England for testing by the Royal Navy, and by 1691 England’s “Broad Arrow Policy” was in effect. Reflecting the wholesale audacity of the times, this highly unpopular decree stated that any trees twenty-four inches or more in diameter located within three miles of water were automatically the property of the king. Lest there be any confusion about whose woods these were, the royal mark of the broad arrow was blazed on their bark. The marked trees were considered so valuable that mast ships — custom built to accommodate long timbers — traveled in convoy with armed escorts.

It was this search for trees for ship’s masts (who knew??) that first led the British to plunder the old-growth of the Pacific Northwest. But it was the advent of the chain saw after WWII, accompanied by ever-more-efficient methods of felling trees and extricating them from the wild, that tipped the balance and led to wholesale destruction of old-growth forests. Vaillant provides fascinating descriptions of the dangerous life of loggers, and of the machines and methods that were developed over the last century (which continue to make logging an incredibly dangerous profession).

What the chain saw and its mechanical attendants — the bulldozer, log skidder, and self-loading logging ruck — have done is reduce the great trees of the Northwest down to objects that a man of average size and physical condition can fall, buck, load, and transport. Today, a tree ten feet across the butt can be felled in ten minutes flat, and bucked up in half an hour. Afterward it is a matter of moments for a grapple yarder — essentially a huge mobile claw on caterpillar treads — to pick up the multiton logs and load them onto a waiting truck (no need for a spar tree anymore). In theory, then a 200-ton tree that has stood, unseen, for a thousand years and withstood wind, fire, floods, and earthquakes can be brought to earth, rendered into logs, and bound for a sawmill in under and hour — by just three men. In 1930 it would have taken a dozen men a day to accomplish the same thing. In 1890 it would have taken them weeks, and in 1790 it would have been a matter of months — assuming they were even able to fell the tree.

It’s a smart book on many levels, weaving together complex threads into a compelling tale that left me thinking about the true costs of the 20th century — and what, if anything, we can do in the 21st to undo some of our destruction and restore a sense of balance (impossible to replace thousand-year-old trees, of course, but maybe some recompense is possible in other places and with other natural resources).

Grant Hardwin was probably more than a little crazy. But, like many loggers Vaillant spoke to, he loved the wild places he was helping to destroy. So it’s a crazy I can relate to.

Fast Draw video: Hybrids vs. Used Cars

The Fast Draw guys (featured on CBS Sunday Morning) show why buying a used car that gets decent MPG is “greener” than buying a new hybrid. As always, they make it quick, fun, easy to digest — but very smart. Like many things, smart recycling is better than buying something new (cars, clothes, housewares…) because you aren’t supporting the significant environmental costs to manufacture something new (trouble viewing the video? visit the Fast Draw blog.)

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Bill McKibben: “The Greenback Effect”

I’m working to educate myself about environmental issues, and Bill McKibben’s books The End of Nature and Deep Economy are on my growing need-to-read list. His smart, engaging article in the May/June 2008 issue of Mother Jones has me looking forward to delving into his books.

In “The Greenback Effect” (subtitle: “Greed has helped destroy the plant — maybe now it can help save it”), McKibben makes a good argument for how we could/should use traditional market forces to battle global warming. Here’s the premise:

For those who wanted to stop thinking about politics and responsibility and morality and science and all that stuff, the advent of Reagan-era market fundamentalism was a godsend, and anything that threatens to disrupt it is an identity-challenging tilt of the psychic pinball machine.

So what I tend to say to these people is, I hear you. Markets are powerful. Let’s think about why they’ve failed here and how to make them work.

And there’s a one-word answer: information.

Markets are impotent in fighting the greatest challenge our planet has ever faced because we’ve given them absolutely nothing to work with. They exist in childlike innocence about the crisis because carbon carries no required cost. And in fact almost everything that environmental campaigners are doing at the national and the international level is an effort to fix that problem—to feed information into markets so they can help slow the rise of carbon. That’s right: If there are true believers (or at least true hopers) about markets right now, they tend to be green.

McKibben goes on to explain how carbon credits could be used to provide the “information” markets need, and different ways that could play out.

Even as he makes an argument for how to tap into the power of markets to create change, he doesn’t think markets have all the answers:

There’s a deeper flaw to my argument: Continuing to rely on a growth economy for change keeps us locked into the wider damage an ever-more market-centered civilization causes—the constant “creative destruction” beloved by economists and hated by those of us who would like to, say, live in the same community for a long time.

Nonetheless, the case for tapping into capitalism is compelling, with McKibben concluding:

…for the atmospherically relevant time frame, we’re not going to change our basic economic framework any more than we’re going to sign on to some new nature religion that would turn protecting the planet into some kind of Eleventh Commandment. Given how fast the ice caps are melting, speed is of the essence. And markets are quick. Given some direction, they’ll help.

Read the full article here: The Greenback Effect

On a side note, learned a new piece of lingo from one of the comments by someone who doesn’t believe in global warming (which, to me, seems a little like not believing in weather…), who refers to McKibben and his ilk (uh, that would be me) as “warmies.” Hilarious!

Tyler Colman: “Drink Outside the Box”

Now, this is an environmental-impact issue I can really get excited about.

In the August 17 NYTimes, guest columnist Tyler Colman, who has a blog called Dr.Vino.com, writes about Italy giving the green light for some wines to be sold in boxes, and why boxed wine is a preferable way to package wines that are meant to be drunk within a year of purchase.

More than 90 percent of American wine production occurs on the West Coast, but because the majority of consumers live east of the Mississippi, a large part of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with wine comes from simply trucking it from the vineyard to tables on the East Coast. A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.

Colman also explains that boxed wine lasts longer once its opened and is more economical. Read the rest here: Drink Outside the Box. Bottoms up!

Tom Friedman: “Eight Strikes and You’re Out”

In the August 12 NYTimes, Tom Friedman points out that while John McCain is out there talking big about America’s energy crisis, he has failed to vote eight times on a Senate Bill that would extend tax credits that support renewable energy.

Both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits — which expire in December — to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas. Unlike offshore drilling, these credits could have an immediate impact on America’s energy profile.

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn’t leave his office to vote.

Friedman doesn’t let Barack off the hook for his recent failure to vote:

Barack Obama did not vote on July 30 either — which is equally inexcusable in my book — but he did vote on three previous occasions in favor of the solar and wind credits.

Friedman’s closing words capture my frustration with the huge gulf between reality and campaign rhetoric:

Without taxing fossil fuels so they become more expensive and giving subsidies to renewable fuels so they become more competitive — and changing regulations so more people and companies have an interest in energy efficiency — we will not get innovation in clean power at the scale we need.

That is what this election should be focusing on. Everything else is just bogus rhetoric designed by cynical candidates who think Americans are so stupid — so bloody stupid — that if you just show them wind turbines in your Olympics ad they’ll actually think you showed up and voted for such renewable power — when you didn’t.

Read the full column here: Eight Strikes and You’re Out

William McDonough on cradle to cradle design | Video on TED.com

Last week, I blogged about a Newsweek Q&A with architect William McDonough. That’s a great 5-minute introduction, but if you have 20 minutes, watch this TED talk (from February 2005). Be patient — McDonough warms up once he gets going (the main problem is he’s probably fitting two hours of ideas into 20 minutes). By the end, like his TED audience, I felt like standing and applauding. Trouble watching the video from here? Find it on the TED site: William McDonough: The Wisdom of Designing Cradle to Cradle.

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