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Hemp at the Olympics?

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New images of the Olympic stadium were revealed by Building Design yesterday, which hinted at the use of hemp to cover the facility. It sparked some pretty grumpy responses from readers, berating the ODA for tokenism in putting forward a sustainable material as a feint to environmental credentials rather than a truly sustainable design in the first place. A G Pearce states - "How about this as an idea - to make it green, just don't clad it. All the hemp is doing it hiding untidy engineering and architectural engineering. If you designed the stadium well in the first place you could dispense with the cladding which will no doubt be shipped from mars using even more co2 thingy's." And a cheap, but still funny, gag from Theo Chalmers: "There goes our last hope for a drug free Olympics!"

A Fantasy Dreamt at the Funfair

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To the Paradise Gardens in Victoria Park on Sunday to take part in and watch Sensazione. You can watch the video on the YouTube link. It's a combination of improvised performance and fairground, with a twist: all the rides are human powered. The big wheel is driven by two punters in giant hamster wheels, the lights on the bar and the spinning hall of mirrors for the fortune teller is spun by stationary bikers, the waltzer turns on the power of people trudging around. We made our own entertainment. The workers got paid in discs which they can exchange for booze, like farm labourers being paid in cider. But they would have done it all the same - the sheer bravado got people pedaling and walking.

Thoughts on oil

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Have oil prices gone up of late? It's a story that has created something of a frenzy amongst commentators and now with hauliers in France and the UK. Newsnight presed the panic button last night, linking oil prices with the collapse of the green agenda in a pretty-poorly constructed lead item to add fuel to the fire. A more intelligent and better argument may be that while we may have not reached peak oil the oil industry has reached a turning point, as author Daniel Yergin does in this morning's Financial Times.

Paper grows on trees

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I am printing out the Forestry Commission's Woodfuel Strategy for England for a piece of research I'm doing. As I stand by the printer, I can't help but notice that the report is heavily Designed; every other page is a title page with pictures of logs on it, or images of flickering flames. There are birch trees and bluebells and clouds. What a waste of resources - ink and energy! - I think.

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But then, I realise my error. It's those tricksy woodsmen getting me to use more paper so they can plant more trees. They're canny at the Forestry.

The Green Way

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Back in 2003 when I was full-time at Building - yes those bygone print days - I got to know Mark Way pretty well. A thoroughly nice bloke he was at architect and engineer RMJM at the time as head of research. He'd dreamt up a simple yet great concept called Soft Landings, which I wrote an article on it back in 2003. As a typical hack I moved on to the next subject and have given the idea little thought in the intervening years. Until a piece I spotted in BSRIA's website came to my attention which promises to give Way's vision renewed momentum.

Building survey

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For those of you Building Sustainability channel readers out there we're running a reader survey to gather information on what information people want, issues we need to be addressing in more detail etc. There's a bit of a bribe in it - four £40 gift tokens on offer from Nigel's Eco Store on offer for a quartet of lucky winners.

The bubble effect

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One always has to be wary of overinflated expectations. This is clearly an issue for Government - the BBC reports this morning that a fund the UK launched last year to offer developing countries money for climate change adaptation will now partly consist of loans - but also for the private sector. Companies and investors can go crazy for the latest fad, pile everything in and then the market over inflates. We're all painfully aware of such a phenomenon. Two recently released report warn of such a bubble effect in renewable and green circles.

No flock pun necessary

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My thanks to weekend visitor, TV producer, cocktail freak and interweb (that's what he calls it) expert Matt Paice, for pointing me to this new neat browser that goes by the name of flock. It's for all you social networking fans out there and is well plugged into the sites you'd expect, such as Facebook, Twitter et al - once you sign in it automatically brings up all your friend, photos etc. I'm writing this post
via said plugin.

Think review part 3 - skills and gender

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I mentioned in a previous post that chairing the Think conference sessions was a highlight of the event, if a rather stressful experience. I found the session on skills a really fascinating one. It's an issue that rarely gets that much of an airing and is probably seen by many as a little worthy, but is clearly fairly fundamental to making any significant change in the industry. The session started rather worryingly with the assertion by Gill Taylor from the Academy for Sustainable Communities that the skills gaps the organisation highlighted last year in the landmark Mind the Skills gap report have actually worsened since it was published.

Don't blame OPEC for oil scarcity

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I'll say it again. Whatever your climate change questions- is it happening? is it that bad? when will it happen? There are a whole set of other answers about sustainability are coming in. But they are about resource scarcity instead, particularly oil.

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In today's FT, Economics columnist, Martin Wolf produces a handy guide to peaking or struggling  oil production for free marketeers.