A Green Building?

What is a green building? Apparently, construction accounts for 54% of greenhouse gas emissions in North America. That’s a lot. So there are groups dedicated to examining how we can “green” our construction industry. From alternative building materials to energy efficient design to vigorous recycling and disposal of construction material there is a veritable revolution in how we plan our buildings. This is quite exciting. Tom Rand’s green hostel plans to place a windmill on its roof. A suburb in New Zealand has designed itself as a communal settlement with rammed earth walls, milk paint interior and pedestrian-friendly design. A straw bale house in downtown Montreal in traditional style? Apparently, all these new materials are easier on the planet because they are locally available, and require less processing than traditional building and insulating materials. A pilot project in Toronto to encourage green roofs – roofs that are covered in vegetation – will hopefully result in more efficient use of all the rooftops in Toronto. Think about that! All those warehouses that you see when you fly into town, imagine them covered in grass, or crops, or solar panels! Harper says that there is no way we can meet our Kyoto requirements. I simply don’t believe him.

John Gibson Comes Down on Polar Bears...

John Gibson, of FoxNews fame, had this to say about labelling polar bears 'threatened'...

Apropos of today's warm weather in the East and impending return blizzard to the Plains, let us consider the plight of the world's endangered polar bears.

The Wall Street Journal carried a story Thursday about how polar bears may be added to the endangered list by the Bush administration because of fears that their habitat may be melting in our current global warming heat wave. We even had an administration official on this program last week on the polar bear problem.

Well, am I red-faced. Turns out if you look at the polar bear problem, the problem is too many polar bears. Well, maybe not too many, but there's a lot of them.

In the 1950s the polar bear population up north was estimated at 5,000. Today it's 20- to 25,000, a number that has either held steady over the last 20 years or has risen slightly. In Canada, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory of Canada has found that the population there has increased by 25 percent.

Turns out the polar bear is being used by environmental groups to force the Bush administration to cave on global warming. To admit it is here, to admit it is bad, and to ratchet back the U.S. economy to slow down our production of greenhouse gases, which would save the polar bears habitat from melting, maybe, even if there are more and more polar bears around to watch their habitat melt.

This is called the spotted owl theory of environmentalism. Find a critter that might be hurt by human activity, and using that critter as a plaintiff in a lawsuit — I'm exaggerating only slightly — get the human activity to stop.

I've seen logging stopped this way, fishing stopped, and now with the polar bear mega population in danger of breaking into a sweat, a whole lot of things might be stopped if environmentalists get their way. And that’s my word.

and "BloggyBlogster" Comes Down on John Gibson...

A famed Toronto comedian, here going by the name BloggyBlogster responds to Mr Gibson (caution: strong words ahead)...

Dear Mr. Gibson!!

Thank you for your in depth analysis of the current environmental crisis. Thank you for your diligence and unwavering devotion to the scientific evidence. Who knew! More polar bears now than before!! Wow! Guess global warming isn’t happening!!

When you wake up in the morning, do you have to take your brain out of barbicide and put it in the container that is your head? Or do you just shake around until you can see, and then have a coffee and some fucking eggs, with your bottle of Jack Daniels?

There are indeed more polar bears now than in the 1950’s indeed! There are also a lot more dick bags. And by dick bag, I mean dick bag, by which I mean you.

How dare these polar bears cry for help when they are clearly able to fuck and reproduce!! That would be like the human population increasing astronomically over a 50 year period, and then crying for help during a famine or flood! Which is preposterous. Just as no humans anywhere on planet earth need help, so too don’t the polar bears! And so too doesn’t the earth!

I am arranging a gathering of dickbags in Nunavut this winter. Would you like slap your dick bag in a wheel barrow and wheel it on up there and see the north floating away like your conscience?

One might think that you are just trying to incite people with your brilliant opinions. One also might think that you are the lowest common denominator, therefore a non-believer in Darwin.


Yours truly,
Rona Ambrose, I mean John Baird, I mean, Steve Harper, I mean ahh fuck it!! Eat Polar Bear!!!…

Green Hostel in Downtown Toronto!

Tom Rand, the smartest person most of us know, has a new blog on The Globe and Mail's website, starting now. It will chronicle his attempt to turn a decrepit building on College Street in downtown Toronto into a cutting-edge "green" hostel/hotel.

The URL is: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/hoteldiaries

Please link to it, bookmark it, sign up for the RSS feed (which will deliver updates right to your inbox) and comment often!

Ecological Footprints...

We all know that overconsumption is bad for Earth, but I was shocked to find out from taking my ecological footprint that it would take 3 Earths to sustain us all if everyone lived like me. And I’m fairly conservation-minded. This can be a kind of depressing statistic, but a fascinating one. Take it yourself, find out how you score. Then get your boss to take the office quiz. If you find you want to make changes to lower your score, then you can balance those luxuries that you need, and those that you don’t… If you want to do further research into ideas to cut down your material consumption check out this site for some basic tips or this one to lower your energy consumption.

The concept of the ecological footprint is based on a comparison between the amount of arable land on earth divided by its population. Apparently, when the total amount of ecologically productive land area is divided by the human population, there are about 4.5 acres (1.89 hectares) available for each person.

Our global footprint is 23% larger than what Earth can regenerate, which means that it takes Earth one year and two months to regenerate what we use in a year. Humans solve this imbalance by liquidating more assets. Check out how this breaks down by country and by other factors.

From Poo to Petroleum?

There is a Canadian company who can transform dung into diesel! Dynamotive is a Vancouver based company that uses a process called pyrolysis to convert waste wood chips, coffee hulls and other throwaway bits of junk into Bio-oil, a diesel oil like fuel. Bio-oil is sulphur dioxide free and has 50% of the nitrogen oxide of conventional fuel (these are the compounds that get together to form acid rain...) The company has successfully transformed the flatulence into fuel scheme on a pilot scale and is presently looking to increase operations.

Dynamotive's pyrolysis is interesting because it breaks apart organic material that we would usually toss out - waste wood, coffee hulls, garden clippings - and reforms their molecules to make fuel. The processor seems to feed off its own fuel and recycles any spare combustible gases to operate at 75% efficiency. Hey DBH, this could be a possible solution to your legitimate worries about ethanol and overuse of arable land for fuel! Looking for an ethical investment, anyone?

Pity poor Exxon!

An appeals court cut in half the $5 billion (U.S.) in punitive damages that Exxon was ordered to pay after its Valdez tanker spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil off the Alaska coast 1989 (yes, it's been in court all this time). The judges ruled it was "unconstitutionally excessive." Tell that to the 34,000 fishermen whose livelihoods were destroyed -- not to mention the hideous environmental damage that drunken captain caused.

But here's the kicker: Exxon Mobil reported earnings of $10.49 billion (U.S.) in the third quarter of 2006. That's the second-largest quarterly profit ever recorded by a publicly traded company in the U.S. I had to check this on Exxon's own website because I just couldn't believe any company could pull down $10.5 billion in just three months. But alas, it's not a typo.

Read the Globe's story here.