zerochampion

Olympics - bronze medal?

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

If as I just wrote 2008 (and beyond, of course) should be the year of delivery what are we to make of the Olympic green targets set yesterday? Permanent buildings to perform 15% better that Part L 2006 standards? Homes to reach Code Level 4? A legacy target of reducing emissions from the Olympics Park by 50%? I'm sure the clamour to keep costs down on this job has probably hampered the environmental ambition. So our next challenge for the next year and beyond is achieve the dream, to prove that the sustainable solution is the lowest cost one. It's a target set by a evangelical consultant I met last week and if he nails it I'm thinking he's found a licence to print money.

The Busines Case

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

What's stopping clients, especially private ones, from taking the plunge and pressing ahead with financing, building, buying or renting a sustainable building? Evidence, of course. This is the overwhelming feedback I'm getting from people grappling with sustainability come back to me with. Without hard facts, figures and benchmarks the market will only pick up in a patchy and piecemeal fashion. Hence I'm detecting some frustration amongst those trying to push ahead with bold and exciting projects about how they can truly persuade those that really matter, ie the guys or girls with the cash, to come on board.

Eco towns: so yesterday

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

Guest post by blogger Mark Brinkley

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

How cuddly is this? Gordon Brown has just promised us another five eco-towns. I don’t know about you, but something sticks in my craw when I hear announcements like this. New towns, whether eco or otherwise, are not things to be dispensed with, at the whim of a prime minister, as if he was tossing sweets out into a pantomime audience. Yes, I feel patronized and, what’s more, it’s a patently absurd way of running a supposedly sophisticated economy. Try substituting the word airport for the word town. And then putting the prefix eco in front of it, as in “I have decided we shall be having another five eco airports.” It just sounds barmy.

Intensely complicated, intensely important

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

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?

West is best?

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

I'm becoming more interested in the growing sustainable movement in the West Country and Wales. This is both from local and regional authorities as well as amongst committed individuals. One movement which is particularly intriguing is low-impact developments, where 10-20 residents team up and create dwellings that blend in with the surrounding woodland. Some blend so well into the environment that they are hand to actually pinpoint and traditional yurts or roundhouses rely on construction techniques such as rammed earth, mud, straw bales and local timber. Photographer David Spero took some photos of a some of these developments in Pembrokeshire and Somerset (these are on show at a Tate Britain photography exhibition I went to last weekend) and Observer writer Lucy Siegle wrote an interesting piece on the phenomenon back in 2005. I'm not sure how widespread the movement will become but it's certainly laying down a challenge for mainstream developments.

Renewables reverse

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

Just picked up story in the Independent on Sunday which gives a depressing statistic on the take-up of micro-generation renewable systems. Suppliers of solar panels and wind turbines are reporting a 90% drop in demand for their products after the Government cut grants for the products in May. "This whole system is not working," says Rajiv Bhatia, head of renewable energy supplier Alternergy. "Tony Blair said the UK was leading the world when it comes to emissions and greenhouse gases but I don't see that from where I'm standing."

Floods fiasco

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

Quite a challenge for new environment secretary Hilary Benn. Can he and his Government convince us they are in any way on top of the flooding issue? The Observer reports today that ministers were warned months ago about the threat of inclement weather over the summer by the Met Office. And Benn's assertion this morning on Radio 5 Live that this was "exceptional rainfall", while true, is beginning to sound rather hollow. Until there is proper responsibility for flooding - that is both the planning for, mitigating and responding to - the groundhog day of the last few weeks will continue.

Welcome to the world of flood certainty

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

I picked up a report produced by the College of Estate Management yesterday. It sums up succinctly the flooding crisis our country is currently in, and how much worse it's going to get in the future. It looks at flood insurance and concludes that the issue "has the potential to seriously undermine both the economic and social fabric of Britain, and as a consequence its political stability as well... it seem that flood risk in many parts of the country is changing to flood certainty and, in such a situation, will cease to be an insurable risk".

Thames Gateway: A counterblast

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

In yesterday's Guardian historian Tristram Hunt delivers a stinging condemnation of the Thames Gateway project. He says the £6bn scheme - one that promises 120,000 new homes and 180,000 jobs - will destroy much of the historical meaning and geographical beauty that make up many parts of the Kent and Essex coastlines.

Severn Barrage: one thing Blair and Brown agree on

This blog has now moved. Please visit Zerochampion.com and update your bookmarks

The proposed Severn Barrage - a barrier that would stretch between Weston-Super-Mare and Lavernock Point, on the south coast of Wales, has been approved by Tony Blair in his closing days in office. However, the barrage has encountered fierce criticism from environmental groups and commentators. George Monbiot, author of Heat, recently said that, "It will cause too much environmental damage: there are far better ways of getting energy from the sea."