zerochampion

Grist's begging bowl

I see that the much respected, and witty, green website over in the US, Grist, is seeking some urgent donations in the next week from its audience. It needs $60K to "keep our computers running" over the summer months. I'm probably going to put my hand in my pocket on this one but wonder why the site is still non-for-profit. Am I being a rampant capitalist but shouldn't a brand such as this, which clearly has built a considerable audience and influence in the US and beyond, be looking to establish itself as a business? Is it squeamish about attracting advertising? For me if brands such as Grist remain charitable ones then so does the movement.

Pitt put in his place

I see Brad Pitt's self importance knows no bounds. Not content with boring us with self importance about his acting craft he now has taken it upon himself to explore his "passion" for architecture. Announcing his desire to design a "sustainable" resort in Dubai he adds: "It will underpin not only my values for environmentally-friendly architecture, but also embrace my career in entertainment." Thankfully some Building readers, including a D Vinnels, give it to him with both barrels. Please leave our industry alone Brad.

Biblical proportions

Interesting, and probably planned, appearance of two pages of content in today's Guardian, nestled together on a spread. On the right hand side sits an article on a Texas oil giant's plans to 2,700 wind turbines across the State. The appositely-named T Boone Pickens is no green but wants to "make a lot of money" out of the venture. On the opposite page is an advert for a book written by author Vernon Coleman called, wait for it, Oil Apocalypse: How to Survive, protect your family and profit through the coming years of crisis. A couple of thoughts spring to mind.

From our Accra correspondent

I'm chatting to a college friend, Sara, who is out in Accra, Ghana. She threw away a cosy policy job at the 350-year-old Royal Society, St. James, to work on projects helping commercialise health research out in the field. She turned that bourgeois malaise that many in the West feel into energy to do something useful in the developing world, despite the fact that the shortsighted VSO turned her down for lack of practical experience.

Gore news, or not

News from American environmental site, Grist, that Al Gore is planning to run for president as an Independent had us all of a flutter in the Building Sustainability office. "I can't believe he would split the vote like what happened to HIM, like eight years ago!" I fumed (I was in the US at the time; it brings back bad memories.) "Mention on your blog that he spoke at Think! last year," said Phil, as ever slaying narrow self-interest for the bigger picture. Of course it was an April Fool.

Fools Cap-and-Trade

I've been trawling through the Government's response to the consultation on Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme. This will mean that firms that pay more than about £500,000 for energy a year will have to purchase allowances to a set Government cap and have to buy allowances beyond that. The idea is that 'polluting' companies will have to buy credits off 'clean' companies.

Life without oil

Among the global marker turmoil (GMT?) of yesterday. An important development was lost. Reuters reported that Dick Cheney (still VP, still surviving, dicky ticker and all) on a tour of the Middle East said that crude oil at $100 a barrel reflected market conditions. The charmingly named 'light sweet crude' was $50 in 2005. Cheney continued more startlingly, saying: "One of the problems we've got now obviously is that there is not a lot of excess capacity worldwide."

Green on Red

Guest post from France by Phil's boss Adrian Barrick
To Cannes for Mipim, the alcohol-fuelled annual gathering of Europe's property and construction clans. In many ways, Mipim is an odd setting for a serious debate about sustainability. Apart from a few laudable souls who take the train, or - bravissimo! - cycle, most of the pin-striped pilgrims jet in to nearby Nice airport, immediately jump in a cab, and spend the next three or four days emitting sufficient hot air to blow a hole in the ozone layer the size of France.

11th Hour review

To a swish Soho hotel last night for a preview showing of new film The 11th Hour. This was care of consultancy firm Gleeds, who had managed to bag an early copy of the Leonardo Di Caprio-backed and fronted offering before its UK release. The firm invited a pretty impressive guest list of industry green figures along, a few of which (Paul King from the UKBGC, RIBA president Sunand Prasad) discussed the challenge raised by the film after the showing. Unfortunately I found the film somewhat of a disappointment.

Weekend Review

Ken's Congestion Charge is mutating into an emissions charge with confusing results. Some people point out that, since the area covered is expanding, more residents will be able to travel for free. The Charge is getting increasingly complex and Livingstone doesn't seem to have worked out the difficulties of pursuing this new policy - such as the need to raise targets based on performance over time. The Sunday Times points out others say that increasing numbers of cars - 10% - are now able to sneak in beneath the new £25 fee. Janice Turner in the Times says all these new, free-to-enter runarounds are driven by potential voters.

Weekly Green Gauge

Green ... on a screen

Way in advance of the WWF's world's greenest city in Masdar, Abu Dhabi, the initiative for which was formally announced last month, Greenpeace has unveiled its town powered purely by renewable energy. A turbine on the football stadium feeds into a grid meeting power generated by woodchip biomass plant down the way and wave power. Unfortunately, this city is nothing but a SIMS-like animation up called Efficiencity (population 124,500). To be fair, nearly all the examples of CHP-powered hospitals and power generating sewage are based on examples in the real world.

The Green Gauge February 8th

A trawl through the web this week has revealed the Government's new plans for water usage, green gadgets and the new Housing Minister's first banana skin

Government will fluff zero-carbon homes, report warns

As found by Jo Will in the Society Guardian, a report in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, says that the Government should be making Code Level 6 mandatory for all new homes if it wants to deliver zero-carbon homes by 2016. With only housing associations required to reach Code Level 3 at present and no current obligations at all for commercial housebuilders, this is a problem. Another one is 'user error.' Where malfunctioning enregy systems, residents removing the technologies and installing 'low performance alternatives to suit their colour scheme' might be an issue.

Shock Brutalist Loves of a Sustainabile Icon

Visited the yin and yang of architecture yesterday, in the form of the World's largest (HOK), famous for the Barclay's tower in Canary Wharf and Grosvenor Place, winner of the British Council of Office's best of the best in 2001, and Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, known for introducing straw bale houses into the mainstream. The firm with 2000+ employees worldwide said it was a pioneer of sustainability and gave me a 500 page book on sustainable design (second edition) while Sarah's firm, with about eight people barely mentioned the topic but embody it. It is surely a peculiarity of the term which forms half of my job title that two such different organisations can lay claim to it.

Letter from Brussels

EUSEW and So

Back from a very wet Brussels, dodging in and out of extraordinarily named buildings (Berlaymont, Breydel, Charlemagne) and each one down a different rainswept traffic-ridden street from a central roundabout, it was clear that the EU's Sustainable Energy Week would take more cracking than just one day. The requirements to show passports, remove outwear and pass through scanners whenever entering a building slowed the whole thing down somewhat and made me pine (extraordinarily) for the NEC. Getting into the enormous Berlaymont, where the Commissioners commission for a press briefing, involved registration of passport numbers and took about half an hour.

Blogging from Brussels

Just to inform you that my new blogging partner Michael Willoughby will be zipping out of the gleaming St Pancras station tomorrow to report from the EU Sustainable Energy Week in Brussels. I think it will be an interesting opportunity to get under the skin of what's coming out of Brussels. Given the influence European policy has it's relatively unreported territory.

The R word and sustainability

I don't know about you but it's been pretty gloomy year so far. And now the R word enters stage left. Yes recession appears on the cards. So where does this leave clients, both in the private and public sectors, and their decisions on future sustainable budgets? Will the talk be cheap or will the rhetoric really turn to reality?

Growth challenged

I picked up an interesting magazine up today called Adbusters - the edition I bought, which looked uncannily like the Economist, was entitled The Big Ideas of 2008, and the environment featured heavily as an issue covered. Of particular note were three articles from economists Clive Spash, Tom Green and Herman Daly. All three were arguing for a fundamental rethink in economic thought to allow for the environment.

Gore gets grief

I was going to headline this The Backlash Continues but I'm not sure it warrants such importance. Former vice president Al Gore was picked as the 30th most annoying person of 2007 in a BBC3 show of the same name aired last night. His crime was one that he has been accused of for most of last year - hypocrisy. For having a huge house, flying around the world, eating rare Chilean sea bass at a rehearsal of his daughter's wedding etc. I'm not sure he will be losing too much sleep over this dubious honour given the list mostly consisted of Z-list celebrities, former health secretary Patricia Hewitt (for banning smoking), rapper P Diddy (apparently he has sired six children with various different partners) and Kylie Minogue's ex.

Bali thoughts

Hard to know what to think and feel after the Bali agreement that was struck early this weekend. I viewed the surreal soap opera on the TV wondering whether this was really the best way for us to strike such a critical deal, or as it has now been unfortunately and ironically dubbed "a roadmap". And I couldn't help but agreeing with a leader in yesterday's Telegraph (in spite of its hint of denial, confirmed by some typically loopy commenters) that such a process is far from effective or instructive, that such a deal should be negotiated in different circumstances and with the critical role of scientists as well as politicians.

Brad Pitt's New Orleans push

Brad Pitt, who recently appears to be under the impression that he looks cool in stupid hats, launched his drive for new green and flooding-proof houses in New Orleans yesterday. The campaign is called Make it Right and Pitt has enlisted 14 architects to work on designs for the Lower 9th Ward of the city, including our very own Adjaye Associates.

Solar responses

Good to see a steady stream of feedback from readers on the Building site. Two recent examples stand out. Solar Century took issue with an article I penned on research on micro-renewables performance, detailing some own figure they had put together on performance. And two readers, both sounding like they are Amercian, questioned the logic of the solar city planned by Arup in Arizona, one arguing that it is in the wrong area of Amercia and the other arguing that it would be better to divert the effort into retrofitting buildings in existing Arizona cities.

China to put us to shade?

There are clearly many troubling things about the growth of China which I won't go into. One thing it's probably difficult to question (probably just because of said troubling things) is that if the country sets a target it usually hits or exceeds it. Compare and contrast with the UK. Proof of such delivery comes in a report released last week by the Worldwatch Institute, which has plenty of publications of interest on its site, on the renewables sector in China.

US lessons

Martin over at Fairsnape has been saying nice things about my Building site, so I'm going to says something nice about a response he made to Paul King's piece on how we can inspire change in the industry. I've been banging on about the momentum building up around sustainability over the pond and Martin confirms this, pointing to a webcast organised by the Greenbuild event earlier this month that attracted 7,000 people online through the Greenbuild365 site (which nealy crashed my computer). "The growth in the green building sector in the US is remarkable - because it makes commercial and good business sense - not because of legislation," he says.

Maybe I was wrong...

Blogging is pretty ephemeral so sometimes you write something one day and then disagree with it the next. Such especially is the case with sustainability issues, when we rely on information that can then turn out to prefixed by mis-. Here's a couple of examples:

Carbon neutral software

Just watched a five minute video rather glibly called "Designing a carbon neutral building in five minutes". It's from US software house Green Building Studio who have developed a system whereby you input design information, press return, and hey presto you've got yourself a green building! Perhaps the US delivery brought out the cynic in me. I'm sure we'll see a lot of such tools coming out in the market in the future and they will have an important part to play in appraising and tweaking designs. Just don't promise the earth with a computer programme.

You wait for one eco special...

And then three come out in a matter of days. It's at times an exhausting business keeping up with the green coverage that is out there. Today the Guardian has published a special supplement called The green list looking how the world's biggest business are tackling climate change. Yesterday the Sunday Times magazine published a Climate Change Special Report (with free pull out and keep wall posters!), which looks at renewable technologies, the house of the future and the man that altered his own shirt to reduce his footprint.

Dubai must grow up

So there's going to be some green standards in Dubai. This followed news that the RIBA were planning to open up an office in the region in an attempt to bring some restraint in design. I'm tempted to laugh slightly wildly on both counts, given the task ahead. On the sustainable side, sure this this is tilting at windmills somewhat? After all, the region is selling itself off the back off a massive airport, has dwindling water supplies and seems to work on the following principle - develop first, think later.

CNN's Planet in Peril show

CNN has produced a four-hour documentary on the affects of Global Warming called Planet in Peril. It started last night and continues this evening. From the looks of the programme, which appears on CNN International, it's a guide to the affects on nature and to humans of overpopulation and consumption, including obligatory trip to the Poles, to rainforests, Africa and it contains plenty or meaningful looks from the CNN reporters. Not sure how much it looks at the solutions.

Cost values

I'm not sure how closely one can compare the supply and the market for food and building materials, but on first consideration there seem obvious parallels. I was drawn to this reading an article written by Organic food provider Abel & Cole I received with a delivery earlier this month. It was on the rising cost of food - the reasons and how consumers would need to change their attitudes to buying food.

Muddled thinking

I'm glad a Building reader has picked up on a bit of muddled thinking from PricewaterhouseCoopers. The firm is urging the industry to buy more products from China, according to a report in the magazine last week. John makes the point that this may be cheaper in pounds, but comes at a considerable price in carbon. This runs counter to PWC's web page on sustainability, which says: "We advise clients that getting on the right side of sustainability will make considerable demands of their time and resources. But that's simply the price of responsible leadership. Is your company ready to assume greater responsibility?" Is yours by rethinking your procurement advice?

Al Gore interviewed

New Nobel peace prize winner Al Gore gives an interesting interview to the McKinsey Quarterly. It's a discussion about sustainable investment - Gore and David Blood formed a firm called Generation Investment Management in 2004 which is doing just that and discuss the take up amongst corporates and how short termism is still holding back investors and companies from fully embracing change. Blood singles out praise for facilities management group Johnson Controls for its strides in embracing this new culture.

Met Office issues latest climate change research

The Met Office has found "strong evidence of human influence on changes in global surface humidity" according to new research released this evening. Peter Thorne, climate scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, says: "This confirmation, that humidity and temperature are both increasing as expected, also has important implications for future human health and comfort - especially our ability to undertake outdoor activities in a warming world."

Myth-busting

I picked up on an document released earlier this month from Australia called Clean Coal and Other Greenhouse Myths. There's a link to it on the government's Policy Hub website and, given it's penned by three Antipodeans, it's a typically blunt and plain speaking approach to answering typical arguments about why we don't need to worry/act/bother or rely on silver bullets such as nuclear etc. It makes for useful reading. My favourite myth buster is: "9. We can plant enough trees to get us out of trouble. We can’t."

Walmart takes a stride forward

Asda owner Walmart unveiled ambitious plans to measure the carbon footprint of all its 60,000 suppliers today. The supermarket behemoth is hardly the most popular of US corporations but appears to be taking quite a step forward here. It's enlisted the help of the Carbon Disclosure Project, a not for profit agency which appears to hand-holding big business through the process of fessing up to their carbon sins, or in its own words it has "become the gold standard for carbon disclosure methodology and process".

Intensely complicated, intensely important

I've been putting off writing this post for some days, given how ear-bleedingly complicating the issue is. It's carbon intensity and I attended a debate on the issue, orgainised by the UK Green Building Council and Building Services Journal, last Tuesday morning. As far as I understand it the nub of the problem is this - is the current way of measuring the carbon make-up of grid electricity correct?

DiCaprio does a Gore

India: getting greener, but how quickly?

Three parts of the world are now synonymous with extensive construction: Dubai, China and India. The building industry in the Asian subcontinent now accounts for approximately 7% of GDP, the largest sector after agriculture. Its growth prospects look immense: it is set to grow at 10% per annum over the next five years, far more than the world average of 5.5%.

US targets carbon neutral buildings by 2030

News out of US this week - six industry and Governmental bodies signed a memorandum of understanding with the goal of creating "carbon neutral buildings by 2030". A statement by the World Green Building Council defined carbon neutral dwellings as using "no energy from external power grids and can be built and operated at fair market values". The groups represent architect engineers, the US Green Building Council and the US Department of Energy. "The task is daunting," says founder of Architecture 203 Edward Mazria. "But by working together we actually have a chance to influence the course of history - and we will."

Glacial progress in carbon market plans

Guest post by economics writer Phil Thornton from Washington

Are plans for a global carbon trading market to put a price on pollution finally going to get lift-off? There was a lot of positive talk on the margins of the April meetings of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and finance ministers of the G7 countries in Washington DC.

The meetings were overshadowed by frantic speculation Paul Wolfowitz, the Bank’s president, would lose his job after he helped negotiate a large pay rise for a woman he is romantically involved with (he didn’t).

Staged flood on Second Life

I've yet to get my head fully around the phenomenon that is Second Life but I see that an interesting stunt was played on the virtual world last week. Environmental group and website Adventure Ecology staged a virtual flood on several areas of the online world such as Tokyo and Amsterdam. This was not just a way of highlighting the dangers of climate change. According to Adventure Ecology founder David de Rothschild in an interview in National Geographic it was a way of flagging up the energy used to create and operate Second Life itself, by both the creators and users.

How to reduce business travel emissions

Here's a handy site which offers a 10-point guide to making business travel more environmentally friendly, from making the process itself more efficient to investigating video-conferencing.

International news

• Composite is the future - For elephants wanting to cross bridges at least. FiberCore Europe has created what it claims is the world’s largest carbon composite bridge. Designed for the Dutch municipality of Dronten using resin supplied by DSM Resins, the bridge is 24.5m long and 5m wide, weighing as little as 12 metric tonnes which is 30 times lighter than a similar concrete bridge.

  FiberCore and DSM believe that the bridge will demonstrate how composites can be produced and used in any conceivable shape. It can be employed in all conceivable load bearing structures -- for instance in road roofing, piers, bridge widening or balconies and is sustainable, apparently. The developers claim that the composites don’t have the same ecological drawbacks as using concrete and steel.

• Cutting Delhi congestion - Mott MacDonald will act as consultant on the revolutionary design of two bus rapid transit corridors in Delphi.

America watch - LEED buildings take off

I've picked up on three intersting pieces in the mainstream press over the pond on sustainable construction. There is real momentum building up over there, no doubt partly prompted by the continuing vociferous stance on the issue taken by ex-vice president Al Gore, who I note will be appearing at the new conference Think07.

• The Chesapeake Bay Foundation Building which received a LEED platinum certification and is seen by many as the greenest in the US.

Piercy Conner picks up sustainable prize at MIPIM

Piercy Conner Architects won the sustainable award for its SymHomes Mk.1 scheme in Rajarhat, India at the MIPIM awards last week in Cannes which uses plenty of standardisation in the design and the components.

Stuart Piercy, Partner and Piercy Conner told Architecture Week, which has plenty of interesting info on the project: “We prefer to think of it as urban sustainability - it’s not just about generating energy, it’s more about the actual community that the housing produces. And that’s very important: to create a streetscape that is sustainable.”