Buildings and energy consumption.

environment, living environment, sustainable development No Comments »

An interesting article on the architecture 2030 website about energy consumption as it relates to buildings. The article shows three pie charts with the first two showing U.S. energy consumption and the third one showing worldwide energy consumption. Surprisingly, it shows that transportation only accounts for 1% of energy consumption and buildings for 76%.  That energy comes from electricity produced from oil or gas. Sometimes the heating uses oil or gas directly. But in both cases, oil or gas is used. Energy requirements are for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) as well as lighting, elevators, security systems and all other systems using electricity. The charts include energy required for construction, renovation and maintenance of the buildings.

Most of that energy requirement could be reduced by having more intelligent HVAC systems, better insulation and heat management. But most importantly, large buildings could incorporate energy producing features such as harnessing wind and solar energy as well as geothermal energy.

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The Evil Liberal Agenda

environment, sustainable development No Comments »

According to the Conservatives, the Liberals have an agenda:  They want to rule the world.  Here are the facts: 

Al Gore owns 100% of 100% of all the green companies in the world, on top of donating money to all those non-profit organizations who own large pieces of land that they keep unspoiled, forcing us to save the ecosystem instead of being able to exploit the land for coal, natural gas, oil, or to cover the land with concrete and asphalt for parking lots, car manufacturing plants, or mega surface stores.

 Natural resources are limitless, God says so!  It’s written in the Bible, not exactly like that but, we conservatives can make the Bible say anything we want, after all we are spin experts.

 All of our natural resources should be exploited in order to keep our manufacturing sectors alive, since it controls the economy.  8% of total jobs in the U.S. are from this sector, so of course that 8% controls the economy, and not the 40% + jobs in the service sector.

 It is impossible to have a strong sustainable economy with green sustainable companies.   It absolutely has to be oil.  After all, the great world civilizations’ economy,  Egypt, Greece, Rome, and China, were based on oil.

 Pollution is good.  God says so in the Bible.  As Conservatives, we must vanquish those Liberals before they destroy the planet with their green economy.

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The only problem with politics is the politicians

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Politicians make me sick. In a recent post, I commented on my disagreement with Cap and Trade, and why it wouldn’t resolve any issues.  All the hoopla and controversy around the upcoming Copenhagen Summit has to do with politicians not agreeing on political issues.  The United States has yet to agree on their own Cap and Trade.   Because of that, there was no assurance that they would even show up.  Same goes for other nations such as China and India who worked out their own regulations, figuring that they didn’t need to show up.  At last count, 65 nations have indicated their presence.

The politicians who will show up at the summit believe in global warming, but have no clue on how to solve it.  Considering their ignorance of the science behind climate change, they figure they just have to come up with a given percentage of CO2 reduction, and that’s it.  Whether or not engineers and scientists can come up with the technology needed to meet this requirement is another story. 

To make matters worse, Conservatives are spreading the rumor that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax.   They have turned the whole debate into a holy war by stating that the belief in human caused global warming is akin to  ”religious” belief.  

In light of this, the God fearing Christian Conservatives must fight those infidels. 

It is no longer about common sense but about a political war turned to a religious one. 

The Conservatives must vanquish the Liberal heathens before they destroy the planet with their ecological fallacy!

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Copenhagen Summit — controversial for all the wrong reasons

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Last June, a group of scientists met up in Copenhagen as part of the preparation for the December summit. They hinted at some bad prognosis in regards to climate change.

At the time, I thought that this would be the focus of the December summit: Forcing industrialized nations to put in more concrete efforts and act quickly to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What then happened late October was that US Pres. Barack Obama announced that he may not show up at the summit because the United States would probably not have agreed on a cap and trade bill.  But now, with the recent visit of the Danish prime minister in Washington, looks like Obama will be in Copenhagen.

Then comes more controversy with the conservatives trying to turn Copenhagen into a platform for communist leftists wanting to create a totalitarian world regime.

This is hot stuff and I am currently doing some research on that for my next post.

Wombles, a UK group promoting anarchy is planning a series of protests leading up to and during the Copenhagen summit, COP15 for short, since it will be the fifteenth summit related to climate change.

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Copenhagen and low-carbon investments

environment No Comments »

A little quote from the BusinessGreen website

“The potential impact on low-carbon investments of failing to deliver a meaningful deal at the forthcoming Copenhagen Summit was underlined last week with the news that analyst firm Point Carbon is downgrading its long-term price forecasts, primarily as a result of growing uncertainty at the prospects of an international climate change deal being reached.”

What this means is that when carbon price is low, trading carbon credits is less profitable, so there is less of an incentive to reduce carbon emissions in order to have more credits to sell.

Of course, if there is scarcity of carbon credits, that could also drive prices up, but that is mere speculation. The BusinessGreen website is from the UK and they suggest that the European governments, including the UK, may intervene in the ETS market — the European equivalent of the US cap and trade system — to drive up the price of carbon to promote low-carbon investments.

That would mean throwing government money to incite corporations to invest money in R&D so as to reduce their carbon footprint so as to sell carbon credits  to other corporations too lazy or cheap or malicious to invest in R&D and reduce their own carbon footprint. That sounds way too complicated for me, only governments would think such convoluted schemes.

Haven’t corporations and governments heard that ordinary consumers are getting more and more concerned about the environment and that corporations who show themselves as being green do attract consumers. When Wal-Mart decided to change all their lighting fixtures in all their stores to low consumption lighting, and that they even promoted the sale of low energy light bulbs as well as forcing their suppliers to package their products with less packaging and more “eco-friendly” materials, that gave them some good press.

More and more large corporations are jumping on the green bandwagon as well as the philanthropy bandwagon, which at times can be the same bandwagon, depending upon what humanitarian causes one embraces. Being good, being green is good PR. Why need all that government money and artificial incentives when being good is good for business?

If governments want to get involved, they should put more money in quality education so that more consumers are aware of all that is at stakes in our world today as it relates to climate change so that they are even more encouraged to seek out products from corporations genuinely making a difference. For example, Richard Branson, of Virgin, is investing a lot of money to come up with a good bio fuel for his Virgin airways planes. Other airline companies would also benefit from that R&D. If Branson owns that bio fuel company, more power to him since he took the investment risks in developing a better fuel.

In the end, profits is what makes the world go round, not subsidies, rules and coercion. If you can make money helping the world, what more can you ask for?

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