The brand-new Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg is not only hipster heaven (concert venue, food by the Blue Ribbon restaurants, and, of course, bowling!) it was built to LEED standards for sustainability.
As the NYT reports, the building’s systems make efficient use of energy and water and “scrupulous attention was paid to construction materials: the stage was made from recycled tires, for example, and the wood was certified to have come from well-managed forests.”
A few more green elements:
Motion sensors trigger lights in the bathrooms, where toilets and urinals use minimal amounts of water. In the main room, where bowling and music will be played side by side, pin-spotting machines for the bowling lanes use 75 percent less energy than conventional systems, and LED lighting onstage saves 90 percent, according to Caitlin Canty, a consultant at GreenOrder.
“When it comes to saving money and growing our economy, energy efficiency isn’t just low hanging fruit; it’s fruit [lying] on the ground.” —
Energy Secretary Steven Chu, in a statement yesterday announcing new standards for lighting that will boost the efficiency of fluorescent tubes (yep, the very things casting the unattractive glow as you read this in your office cube).
The standards will come into effect in 2012 and by 2042, they will “save as much as $4 billion annually and avoid up to 594 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly the equivalent to removing 166 million cars from the road for a year” (Washington Post).
As the Sallan Foundation gleefully put it: ” The end is nearer for incandescents. You’re on!”
The 90-minute documentary will disgust, infuriate, and inspire you. Multinational food conglomerates, with the help of their cronies in government, have spent millions of dollars to make sure the average consumer never learns the things you learn in this film.*
As we watched pigs being roughly herded to their deaths in the nation’s largest slaughterhouse, I turned to Andrea. “So, will you join me? Twice a month and only if you know where it’s from?”
Without missing a beat, she said: “Oh, I made that decision back at the chickens” — the first segment of the film.
The movie has its flaws — as Ezra Klein put it, “It’s driven less by a thesis than by an intuition: Something is wrong with our food production system. It’s just not clear what.” — and you may feel powerless and hopeless by the end.
I think the best take-away is this: you vote for what kind of food industry you want three times a day. Consumers can change the system. You don’t need to give up industrially-produced meat and poultry full-stop, as I have, but you can significantly reduce, as Marco has. Try food writer Mark Bittman’s “Vegan Before 6” strategy or his “lessmeatism” philosophy. Whatever works for you, do it. But, please: reduce your consumption of industrially-produced meat and poultry (and corn-fed, farmed fish, while we’re at it).
Sadly, most non-meat foods are not much better, because they’re produced with corn- and soy-based chemicals and genetically-modified organisms, and travels thousands of petro-miles to your door. You know the drill: whenever you can, avoid packaged foods, especially ones with ingredients you don’t recognize, and eat what’s grown locally. (Here’s a guide.)
Alright, enough with the soapbox. I want to end with three images from the film that have stuck with me:
* Most of which is not news to anyone who’s read Michael Pollan and Eric Schloesser, but seeing bald corruption and abuse of people and animals on the big screen makes it all the more real.
PS: I just got the film’s companion book in the mail, which includes essays from Pollan, Schloesser, food policy maven Marion Nestle, and Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, among others, so I’ll report back on what I learn.
A Guide to Sustainable Food Blogs
Sears Tower to Be Revamped to Produce Most of Its Own Power -
You go, Chi-town!
By the way, I wrote about the Empire State Building retrofit here and about NYC’s proposed package of green building legislation here. On Friday, I attended City Council hearings about the legislation. It was standing room only, and the mood was decidedly jubilant (though not everyone is in favor — namely, those who represent the real estate industry). However, it looks likely to pass without major changes.
CHICAGO — The Sears Tower, that bronze-black monument that forms the 110-story peak of the skyline here and stands as the tallest office building in the Western Hemisphere, will soon have another unique feature: wind turbines sprouting from its recessed rooftops high in the sky.
The building’s owners, leasing agents and architects said Wednesday that they are literally taking environmental sustainability to new heights with a $350 million retrofit of the 1970s-era modernist building — and the turbines are only the tip of the transformation. The plan, to begin immediately, aims to reduce electricity use in the tower by 80 percent over five years through upgrades in the glass exterior, internal lighting, heating, cooling and elevator systems — and its own green power generation.
In such a huge tower, with 4.5 million square feet of office and retail space, 16,000 windows and 104 elevators, the project is bound to be one of the most substantial green renovations ever tried on one site, planners said. The Sears Tower is significantly larger than the 102-story, 2.6-million-square-foot Empire State Building, for instance, which is also undergoing renovation to reduce energy consumption.
“If we can take care of one building that size, it has a huge impact on society,” said Adrian Smith, an architect whose firm designed the Sears Tower renovation. “It is a village in and of itself.”
Science and the planet sold out for a bowl of grits -
This legislation might be our last hope of tackling climate change before it’s too late.
It looks like that hope is lost.
From The Reality-Based Community:
[Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry] Waxman appears to have sold out the indirect land use issue in a deal with [Agriculture Chairman Collin] Petersonon the climate change bill.
Waxman also consented to block EPA from calculating “indirect” greenhouse gas emissions from land-use changes when implementing the federal biofuels mandate. The Democrats will impose a five-year moratorium to allow further study of the issue, with consultation from Congress, EPA, the Energy Department and USDA instrumental in restarting the measurements in the biofuels rules.It’s not easy to exaggerate just how bad this is. Waxman-Markey has been savaged on the implicit principle that climate stabilization is good, but only if no-one important has to actually do anything different to accomplish it. Among the people who get a pass are anyone who burns coal, and anyone who grows corn or makes fuel out of it; I was worried months ago that a president from a coal state and a corn state might be a problem, but then he promised flatly that in his administration, science was not going to be yoked to a political ox. Boy, is the bloom off this rose: DADT, climate and energy, transparency… “Better than Bush in some ways” is a mighty big comedown from the PR of a few months ago.
In Copenhagen this December, the Indians and the Chinese will be within their rights, and maybe even well-advised, to say “you spent the last eight years burning as much oil and coal as you could, and denying climate change was a problem. Now you enact legislation that forces use of corn ethanol that’s more global warming intensive than gasoline, muzzles your scientists, and requires your regulatory agencies to lie to the public about greenhouse gas releases, all to put money in the pocket of your farmers and reelect a few rural legislators. You’ve made sure no-one who uses electricity from coal will have any reason to use any less of it. You expect us to do your climate stabilization for you, and even more to make up for the antics of these yokels, and to help you pretend you’re being green when you’re not? You trashed Kyoto and now you’re here to trash Copenhagen: get a grip. We’re out of here.”
Rest for the weary (and feathered): check out plans for a rooftop aviary for migrating birds on the Goldman Sachs Headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
(Via Sallan Foundation.)
Putting A Financial Spin On Global Warming -
Interesting segment on NPR this morning on an Oakland think tank, The Breakthrough Institute, that is aiming to make clean energy as cheap as possible through government-supported innovation, rather than making carbon expensive through regulation.
Michael Shellenberger, one of the Institute’s founders, explains his position to a group of new summer interns:
“When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?” he asks the interns. “And, of course, by now you probably know that the answer is never.”
Personal computers didn’t take off because there was a tax on typewriters, he says. And the Internet didn’t sprout up because the government made telegraphs more expensive.
“So is there a better way to do this? Well, we think that there is. It’s very simple: It’s that we need to make clean energy cheap worldwide.” […]
Shellenberger and [co-founder Ted] Nordhaus argue that the best way to develop those clean technologies is to increase federal energy research tenfold, and to create a project akin to the Apollo mission to the moon. But a massive increase in federal energy research spending is not a popular idea at the moment.
“There’s this idea that the government shouldn’t be involved in technology, the government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers,” Shellenberger says. “Which is sort of a funny thing to say. It’s kind of like, well, why not? And when hasn’t the United States government been involved in picking technology winners and losers?”
He points to the computer industry as just one example of something that came into being because of deliberate federal investments.
But seriously … meet you in Kalawao?
Air Toxins Raise Cancer Risk In U.S. Neighborhoods:
Millions of people living in nearly 600 neighborhoods across the country are breathing concentrations of toxic air pollutants that put them at a much greater risk of contracting cancer, according to new data from the Environmental Protection Agency.
The levels of 80 cancer-causing substances released by automobiles, factories and other sources in these areas exceed a 100 in 1 million cancer risk. That means that if 1 million people breathed air with similar concentrations over their lifetime, about 100 additional people would be expected to develop cancer because of their exposure to the pollution. […]
People living in parts of Coconino County, Ariz., and Lyon County, Nev., had the lowest cancer risk from air toxics. The counties with the least toxic air are Kalawao County, Hawaii, and Golden Valley County, Mont.