If nature spent millions of years solving problems you would think we could learn something, right?

Janine Benyus is one of the leading thinkers on Biomimicry. Enjoy

I contacted my friend Matt Haugland at the University of Oklahoma about his views on climate models. He has a Ph.D. in Meteorology and owns several weather related companies. With permission I quote what he said about climate models.

They're basically simple versions of regular numerical weather
prediction models that solve a set of equations based on physics. Unlike
weather models, they cover a much longer time period and include
projected changes in greenhouse gases.

It's very easy to determine how a change in greenhouse gases would
impact the global temperature if all other factors are equal. What makes
it difficult is that the other factors are not equal and are dependent
on each other and cause positive and negative feedbacks. For example, an
increase in CO2 would increase the temperature but would also increase
plant growth, which would act to reduce the temperature, but would also
add more water vapor to the atmosphere, which can increase the
temperature, but can also create clouds which would reduce the
temperature and create precipitation, which would increase vegetation,
which would reduce the temperature, etc. etc. The way these things
interact is extremely complicated and nearly impossible to predict well,
even with the best climate models. And of course, a lot of assumptions
are made, which may or may not be accurate.

We can say for sure that the earth's temperature has been increasing.
But I don't think anyone knows for sure how much of that is because of
fossil fuels, etc. and how much is because of urbanization, agriculture,
ice caps melting (which has been going on for many thousands of years),
deforestation, changes in the sun, other natural cycles, etc. And
unfortunately, climate models are either not good at or completely
unable to represent such factors.

By the way, I believe the best (or at least one of the best) climate
model is run right there in Boulder at NCAR's Mesa Lab.

Pricing signaling is the best system we currently have to value services. It is not perfect. You can have external costs not priced into a product or service. Example industrial pollutants where the cost is paid by society but not the companies and individuals producing and using. AKA the Free Rider problem.

My question comes how can we effectively price the services that nature provides? Giving a incentive for people to not cut down the rain forest (massive carbon sink). Or clear trees by the river which act as pollution filters? Then who pays for the services? How does rain forest farmer in Brazil get paid by Americans?

I know for carbon this is being address to some extent. A farmer in say Brazil can sell carbon credits on the market where any one can buy them. What is not clear is how to value the rain forest itself. With the exchanges in place supply and demand will be an effective price discovery tool. Personally I am not worried about the government setting prices as the market will be way to large. It is projected in the trillions. Ex look how non effective oil and gas price manipulation is. It can be done but not for very long.

We need to build other markets and exchanges for watershed protection, soil erosion, biodiversity and countless other nature provided services

"US retail giant Wal-Mart on Thursday announced plans to develop a database that it said would revolutionize shopping by putting information about products' sustainability at consumers' fingertips.
The database, dubbed the sustainability index, could put information about how environmentally-friendly suppliers, manufacturers and their products are, just a garment label or barcode-scan away for shoppers, according to Wal-Mart executives speaking at a webcast gathering of their suppliers."Read the Rest

Here is a good analyst of the difficulty of implementing Lifecycle Analysis

You know the joke about economists, put 3 of them in a room, ask 1 question, get 10 correct answers. Well with lifecycle analysts, those same 3 people give you 547 correct answers, not 10. Because those three items, especially number 3, tend to have lots of shades of legitimate gray.

That's why rigorous lifecycle analysts generally shy away from using LCA techniques to compare 2 products or processes, as opposed to using them to assess trends in a single product. Because two products, both with perfectly reasonable assumptions as to what should be counted, often mean a "right" answer for one is not equivalent to a "right" answer for another. In fact, you know you have an idiot for a lifecycle analyst, if he or she tells you his or her answer is right, and product A is better than product B.

A simplistic example, let's say you have a plant in Thailand, that ships 1 mm cotton shirts a year to several vendors, including Walmart, and uses 1 mm kwh of energy a year. Should the energy allocation be then 1 kwh/shirt? What if 20% of those shirts are extra large? Should the XLs get a higher allocation because they're bigger? Do you make that allocation based on size, %, square footage, time to manufacture, or cost, or a combination? Even financial inventory accounting leaves room for differences. What if some shirts cost less than others to produce, should cost be included as a variable in the allocation, and if so, should average, LIFO, or FIFO be used? What if only 30% of the shirts go Walmart, and the others go to a place that doesn't have ecolabels? How do we account for shifting allocations over time if products in one batch come up with different labels, or get shipped by different ships? What if one ship is 20% full and the other 100% full? And how do you allocate the energy footprint for product returns, shrinkage, or wastage? What periodicity do you pick? Allocate quarterly, monthly, annually? Not every answer is material, and not every answer is difficult in every case. That's the whole point, it varies. All of these can have legitimately different answers depending on the nature of the business (and if we get comments on this article explaining the "right" answer, that will just highlight the point), and when you consider that multiple companies or plants supply components, and therefore part of the answer to each other to calculate the final footprint, the permutations of "right" blow out fast.Continue

Wal-Mart has been rather impressive on the sustainability front the past few years. If they can increase the sustainability of its supply chain it will have a massive impact across the world.

Now only wish they could Wal-Martize the health industry. Bringing massive cost reductions to a screwed up industry.

"William McDonough + Partners debuted their 100% Cradle to Cradle Flow House this past week. The Flow House is the first in a series of duplexes being designed by architects for the Make It Right campaign to revitalize the Lower 9th, an area in New Orleans which was devastated during hurricane Katrina. The Flow House aspires to follow the firm's Cradle to Cradle mantra, meaning that after its useful life, all materials in the house can be either recycled or returned to nature." Read more on the Flow House

This gets me excited. One of my favorite cities in the country advancing sustainability. Also check out the Make it Right site, a lot of good work. Hopefully they can teach the local community sustainable practices. Thus becoming the norm in NOLA.

For better or worse man is reshaping the earth in his image. All prior changes on the planet where brought about by nature. This one is brought about by humans. We are changing a dynamic system that we barely understand. Sustainability brings together three factors. Environmental systems, human systems and financial systems. We must learn how they interact with each other. In this lies a major problem. Can these systems be brought under the hand of reductionism to provide a model we can use? Or is the earth itself a non reducible problem. Meaning the only way to model the system is to have a system bigger then the observed system.

This is why I believe sustainability will be a bottom up system. It will follow the path of evolution. Working towards a solution based on trial and error. We have started the process already. There is no turning back. Humankind is changing the face of the earth at an unprecedented pace. We have wiped out whole ecosystems. We have accelerated the extinction rate. At the same time we have brought real choice to hundreds of millions of people. No longer struggling to survive. Millions are added annual to our ranks. There is nothing pretty or predictable about the process. Global wealth is one of the keys to a sustainable human made system. The question is how do we get there without destroying the earth in the process.

China is dealing with this firsthand. They use to say the West expanded with no pollution controls so can we. What they got is a river nothing can live in and the worst polluted cities in the world. But something amazing is happening China is expanding on all fronts in the clean energy arena. Finally seeing that clean energy is in the best interest of China's future.

So is sustainability an impossible problem? Yes there will be no equilibrium. It will be built on continuous decisions made over time. Every decision changing the dynamics of the system. We live in exciting times. It will be amazing to see what the earth will look like over my lifetime.

I have been following Van Jones career over the last few years.

Van Jones, one of the icons of the "green" jobs movement, March 10 was appointed by President Barack Obama as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. According to an e-mail message Jones sent to his supporters on March 11, Jones' job "will be to help shape the administration's energy and climate policy, so that climate solutions produce jobs and justice for all Americans."Read the Rest

I have hope that he will be able to help the less privileged. We must bring the lower and lower middle class into new jobs in the green sector. The green movement historically has been ignorant of their needs. I include myself in the ignorant. To see a brilliant mind like Van Jones be an advocate for the less fortunate is a blessing. He has a strong track record in meeting his goals hopefully he can carry that record into his new job.

Good luck Van Jones.

Amazing stuff

by Daniel Flahiff
On the western outskirts of Shanghai, China, a dragon is coming to life. Constructed of concrete, steel and glass, the new corporate headquarters of Giant Pharmaceutical Corp looks for all the world like something between a sci-fi battleship landing on a highway, and a steampunk dragon frozen in time. L.A.-based architectural firm Morphosis is focusing on the building's sustainability as much as its aesthetics, with a green roof, generous use of skylights, and advanced insulation materials like cement-fiberboard paneling and a double-layer, fritted-glass curtain wall.Shanghai Dragon

Yes this is going to actually get built. It shows that both sustainability and cutting edge design can go hand in hand.

Disclosure: I have a vested interest in GHG reporting. I believe it is a substantial step forward my interest notwithstanding.

The Environmental Protection Agency today proposed a rule that would require a broad range of industries to tally and report their greenhouse gas emissions.......According to the E.P.A., the proposed rule -- which is promulgated under the Clean Air Act -- would cover 85 percent to 90 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The reporting requirements would not only include carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, but also other sources like methane, hydrofluorocarbons and nitrous oxide. KATE GALBRAITH NY Times

What this means is a cap and trade or carbon tax regime is on its way.

This is an extremely exciting time for me. God's providence is allowing me to be on the edge of a new industry.

As news comes out of Washington I will post how a cap and trade system might actually work.

Tuesday I attended a meeting on a coal plant. Did I somehow step into a religious event? No, no this was about shutting down a coal plant. Even still, I was being sucked in, each and every word was better then the one before. Here lies the problem with sustainability. It has become the end, it has become a god. Humans are built to worship and so we worship. When does passion become worship?

A though came over me as I awoke Wednesday morning. Am I a follower of this new sustainable religion, a peddler of green, a preacher of green salvation? Chills ran down my back. These are not the thoughts I want waking up in the morning. Yet there they where, the first thing on my mind.

As my head cleared I thought no I am not part of this religion. I am part of Christ's church that is where my allegiance lies.

Maybe many of you believe "green" to be religious? You know what? It is. It is either a false religion or part of God's truth. For too long we have been told our beliefs are private and that they have no business in our daily lives. That is bunk. The holistic view of God is what brought me to sustainability.

I became interested in sustainability, creation care, environmentalism, etc because of my trust in the Lord. I see it as the next step on our journey. We are just being to understand the complex systems we inhabit.

Last, what ideas would you, as the reader, like addressed? I can go on and on for ages talking as those close to me know. Any topic, even vaguely, about green or sustainability is fair game. I will continue to write about what I am thinking and how my work is going in the Boulder area.

I'm amazed at how many greenboozled churchy types believe silly things like "by recycling you're helping the environment", or that ethanol is better for the environment than gasoline (great job corn lobby!), buying "organic" and not asking what that means, etc.

A recent column at the Acton Institute:

Greenboozled

by Anthony B. Bradley

Being "green" is the new cool. Your family's "green Christmas" and toy purchases from Greentoys.com this season will advertise to your friends and relatives that you care about the environment. But environmentalists are balking. They say that too many companies are claiming to be green and thus are "greenwashing" everything.

Greenpeace describes greenwashing as the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service. The deeper irony is that greenwashing was the original tactic many environmentalists used to manipulate us into adopting practices that actually do not sustain the environment. A another term for greenwashing would be greenboozled.

One of the unintended consequences of a greenwashing environmental rhetoric is that being green has turned into a fad. Marketing departments have discovered how easy it is to sell products to people who want to feel good about their consumption problem. Greenwashing works because most Americans do not think about negative spill-over effects, environmental processes, long-term effects on the poor, or the economic implications of allegedly environment-friendly proposals. Simply saying something is green is enough for most of us. Who cares if it's true or if it works? We are satisfied with the arbitrary labeling.

Read the rest here.

I think I might write a separate piece sometime called "Recycle-boozled: releasing greenshouse gases, polluting water, creating toxic waste for land fills, and giving toxic products to your kids to play with leading to all kinds of allergies by "recycling" one aluminum can, plastic carton, sheets of office paper, and newspaper at a time." Think.

Friends, if you think wind energy will play a major part in meeting America's energy needs, think again and again about the process. Wind energy doesn't help cities. Go, go nuclear!!

Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid's Limits, New York Times

When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.

That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore's hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.

The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.

The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.

"We need an interstate transmission superhighway system," said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

While the United States today gets barely 1 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, many experts are starting to think that figure could hit 20 percent.

Achieving that would require moving large amounts of power over long distances, from the windy, lightly populated plains in the middle of the country to the coasts where many people live. Builders are also contemplating immense solar-power stations in the nation's deserts that would pose the same transmission problems.

The grid's limitations are putting a damper on such projects already. Gabriel Alonso, chief development officer of Horizon Wind Energy, the company that operates Maple Ridge, said that in parts of Wyoming, a turbine could make 50 percent more electricity than the identical model built in New York or Texas.

"The windiest sites have not been built, because there is no way to move that electricity from there to the load centers," he said.

The basic problem is that many transmission lines, and the connections between them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

Nuclear folks. Nuclear!!! Wind power is one of the most unreliable sources of generating energy while it's clean, kind'a, it's popular but it does work. It many, many severe limitations, and by the way, serves like a blender in the air for birds, which is why the Sierra Club has been against wind energy for years.

Also, the production and maintenance of towers has substantial toxic effects on the environment. Oh yeah, like the article notes, it actually only works for your town if you live close to bird-mincing towers.

Nuclear!! (France generates 80% of its electricity from nuclear power plants and they down-cycle the waste).

Here's a whole website set up help expose the naivete that wind power can serve as a major component in meeting our energy needs. Think about the process, not just the promise.

Boston - the historic cradle of the American Revolution, home to innovations that have far-reaching impact and the perfect place to celebrate Greenbuild 2008's theme of "Revolutionary Green: Innovations for Global Sustainability." Join us at the U.S. Green Building Council's Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Boston November 19-21, 2008.

Buildings play a critical role in protecting and improving our environment and the health of the people who occupy them. USGBC's Greenbuild conference and expo is an unparalleled opportunity to connect with other green building peers, industry experts, and influential leaders as they share insights on the green building movement and its diverse specialties.

I wonder how many church groups are going to this? If I wasn't already scheduled for something that week, I would totally be there. There are too many conferences in the fall! It's frustrating. And, and a very important "and," it's during college football season. Can you get more green than chasing a football on real grass (for those of us real schools that still have grass fields--Go Tigers, Beat Bama!!).

A young architect uses a high-tech material to solve a chronic problem: the transportation of clean water.

By Kristin Palm, Metropolis Magazine Posted May 22, 2008

As an elementary school student in Las Vegas, Eric Olsen rou­tinely reviewed the basics of desert survival: First, always carry water. Second, bring along a few rudimentary objects such as plastic sheeting and a small cup. Third, should you find yourself without hydration, dig a pit in the sand, fill it with cactus, place the cup in the pit, cover the pit with the plastic, top it off with a rock, and wait (and wait) for condensation to drip down. Though Olsen tried this procedure in his backyard without success, the San Francisco-based architect learned an indelible lesson: "Water, even when I was a kid, and more so now, was part of the ethic of how we lived in Las Vegas. We knew it was finite."

Which makes it especially fitting that Olsen is the winner of this year's Metropolis Next Generation Design Competition on the theme of water. Guidelines for addressing this theme were broad--entrants were asked to consider uses, reuses, controls, management, efficiency, and conservation.

Olsen's design is called the Solar Water Disinfecting Tar­paulin, a flexible, adaptable vessel to render it simpler and more effective for both carrying water and making it safe to drink. Next Generation runners-up include a housing project powered by rain­water, a synthetic ice floe for use by endangered animals, a solar- and wind-powered aquaponic food-growing system, a water-­purification system using seeds from the moringa tree, and a thermally conductive water condenser.

Olsen's pleated tarpaulin, constructed from clear laser-cut LDPE and reflective rubberized nylon, is designed to hold up to 20 liters of water (it contains an integrated filling tube) and can be rolled into a bundle or worn as a shawl-like kanga for carrying. It can be laid across a rooftop, spread on the ground, or hung vertically to allow passive solar heat and ultraviolet radiation to disinfect the water (a World Health Organization-approved purification method that takes only five hours).

The tarpaulin is designed for use in a wide variety of settings--from urban disaster sites to remote villages in the Third World. "You can imagine that in post-Katrina New Orleans something like this would have been useful as an alternative to the energy required to transport clean water to some other site," Olsen says. "It's really applicable anywhere there isn't a functioning water infrastructure. Whatever your situation is, ideally it can be incorporated into it."

Get the rest of this story here.

This is some of the best in innovation and ideation!! WOW!!