January 8, 2009
IN THE GARDEN
How Green Is Your Garden? A New Rating System May Tell You
By ANNE RAVER
WASHINGTON
I COULDN’T believe that the giant goldenrod was still blooming in late December, when the temperature was only 32 degrees. But there it was, its curvy seven-foot stems lounging in a landscape devoted to regional plants at the United States Botanic Garden here.
Solidago stricta, or wand goldenrod, is a native of New Jersey’s coastal wetlands. “But it’s very adaptable. I have it blooming at home, in dry clay, right now,” said Bill McLaughlin, the garden’s curator of living collections. “It’s the plant I name when the local rock garden society asks, ‘What’s blooming in your garden in January?’ ”
We wandered on through the three-acre garden filled with plants native to the Coastal Plain and Piedmont areas, from New Jersey to North Carolina, many of which can be grown in southern parts of New York and Connecticut and other places where winter temperatures rarely drop below zero.
There were chokeberry bushes loaded with red berries; beautyberry full of purple fruit; and a variety of evergreens, including pond pine, longleaf pine and the familiar Eastern red cedar, with waxy blue-gray berries that attract flocks of cedar waxwings.
Even in this frozen state, the garden serves as a model for the Sustainable Sites Initiative, introduced in November by the United States Botanic Garden, the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.
The 179-page report, produced after three years of research by a diverse group of architects, landscape architects, ecologists and engineers, includes proposed guidelines for creating sustainable landscapes, as well as diverse examples of successful restoration projects, from Point Fraser, in Perth, Australia, where a toxic wetland full of heavy metals now supports native plants and wildlife, to the Queens Botanical Garden, in Flushing, N.Y., where harvested rainwater feeds into ornamental water gardens, and gray water from sinks, dishwaters and showers is cleansed by plants and used to flush toilets.
The report also includes a point system for rating a landscape, much like the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, which rates the sustainability of buildings. The LEED system, created by the United States Green Building Council, a private group of architects, engineers, builders, manufacturers and others, has been around since 1993. But its ratings — even platinum, the highest one, so sought-after by green builders — focus much more on buildings than on the land around them.
With the current LEED ratings, said Ray Mims, the garden’s conservation horticulturist and one of the leaders in developing the initiative, “you could get a platinum-certified building and potentially do a very poor job with the site.”
“We want to make sure that you look at the soil, the vegetation, the hydrology, so that you are improving — or certainly not harming — the natural ecosystem,” he said.
Deon Glaser, a landscape architect on the staff of the council who helped write the initiative, said that LEED has requirements concerning landscape, which address issues like reducing runoff from buildings and barring development within 100 feet of a wetland.
“But it doesn’t have specific requirements of how to do that,” Ms. Glaser said.
The initiative, on the other hand, goes into detail, specifying the kinds of plants, for example, that can be used to cleanse a disturbed wetland; how trees can be used to shade a building, protect it from wind, prevent erosion and clean the air; and what kind of plantings enhance mental health, draw people outside the building and even engage them in tending the landscape.
The Green Building Council “definitely wants to incorporate those aspects of green design and construction into LEED,” Ms. Glaser said. But that requires a long review process, she added, and a vote by the membership.
Still, Mr. Mims said, “we’re hoping that it will be incorporated into LEED in 2011.” (The Sustainable Sites Initiative can be downloaded at sustainablesites.org. Comments are being accepted until Jan. 20; then the guidelines will be revised and tested on pilot projects.)
IN its efforts to be more sustainable, the United States Botanic Garden now sends all its green waste to the Department of Agriculture’s composting facility in Beltsville, Md., or to Pogo Organics, a commercial composting system in Sunshine, Md. It also recycles paper, cardboard, bottles and cans, and sends plastic pots to a center in northern Maryland where they are cleaned, ground up and sold to a plastics manufacturer.
But the 1931 conservatory and greenhouses at the garden’s production site, in southwest Washington, “are horribly inefficient,” Mr. Mims said. “Glasshouses, in general, are energy hogs.”
The conservatory and greenhouses were conventionally engineered to funnel rainwater into storm sewers, rather than collecting it for irrigation, he said, “but now we’re looking at treating it as a resource.” Through a partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Water, the garden hopes to install a rainwater collection system within a year or two.
For now, the most sustainable part of the botanic garden is the regional garden, where sustainability has much to do with native plants. There are no exotic plants here, not because native plants are tougher or more drought-tolerant — anyone who loves lilacs can attest to the ruggedness of certain Asian plants — but because they provide shelter and food for the organisms they evolved with. Natives “are part of the web of life — insects, even micro-organisms, things we don’t even know about yet,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “They’re part of a system that’s been in place longer than humans have been around.”
The regional garden, which was planted three years ago, mimics the clay soil of the Piedmont on its 15-foot-high north and south slopes and the sandy, moist lowlands of the Coastal Plain in the center.
Pesticides, which can destroy insect larvae and other beneficial organisms, aren’t used here. There is no irrigation system either; the gardeners believe in finding the right place for the right plant instead. (If a plant needs a little extra water to get established, a hose will do the job.) The gravel walkways are all permeable, allowing water to percolate into soil and surrounding plantings. The varied topography channels water naturally, and plants are placed according to their soil needs and preferences for light or shade.
Some of the most striking plantings, though, are the result of serendipity.
When a six-inch caliper sassafras tree was shipped up from North Carolina and moved twice, because of construction, it died. The gardeners cut it down, but didn’t remove the stump.
“I knew the plant’s habit of sprouting from its root system, so we just waited,” Mr. McLaughlin said. A few months later, seven sprouts popped up around the stump. Last fall, he said, those trunks, now five feet tall, glimmered in little canopies of yellow, apricot, orange and scarlet leaves. “I almost cried when that tree died, but this little grove is so much more magical,” he said.
There is food for butterfly larvae here, too. Caterpillars of the spicebush swallowtail butterfly eat the leaves of Lindera benzoin, the native spicebush; the giant swallowtail larvae feed on the aromatic leaves of the hop tree, Ptelea trifoliata, which tolerates shade and can thrive in moist or dry soil. “I have one in my backyard at the edge of the patio, and it’s fantastic,” Mr. McLaughlin said.
I plan to return as the seasons unfold. I want to see the swamp marshmallows bloom — some pink, some white with a red eye, others a shell pink with a dark eye. And I want to see the skippers — those little orange and black butterflies — all over the native switchgrasses, now so tawny in the landscape.
“They add texture and movement to the landscape,” Mr. McLaughlin said, as we watched switchgrasses swaying in the chilly breeze. “And they have a great fibrous root system that holds soil and controls erosion.”
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
From the Los Angeles Times
Why Obama's green jobs plan might work
Some states -- including Michigan -- already see renewable energy as their future: It's the only sector that appears to be making room for more employees despite the recession.
By Marla Dickerson
January 4, 2009
Reporting from Hemlock, Mich. — While Detroit's automakers struggle to rebuild their sputtering operations, the key to jump-starting Michigan's economy may lie 80 miles northwest of the Motor City.
This is the home of Hemlock Semiconductor Corp. It makes a material crucial for constructing photovoltaic panels. And that has turned this snow-covered hamlet into an unlikely hotbed for solar energy.
On Dec. 15, the same week that General Motors Corp. and Chrysler begged $17.4 billion from taxpayers to stave off collapse, Hemlock announced a $3-billion expansion that could create hundreds of jobs. It's a rare piece of good news for this battered Rust Belt state, whose 9.6% unemployment rate is the nation's highest.
In contrast to Detroit iron, Hemlock's quartz-based polycrystalline silicon is in such demand that workers in white smocks and protective gear toil around the clock to get it to customers around the globe.
Hemlock has been deluged with applications from idle factory hands such as former autoworker Don Sloboda. The 50-year-old Saginaw resident has been retraining at a local community college for what he hopes is the region's new engine of job growth.
"It looks like the future to me," Sloboda said.
Whether clean energy can pull Michigan out of the ditch remains to be seen. But the push is on to retool America with so-called green-collar industries.
President-elect Barack Obama wants to spend $150 billion over the next decade to promote energy from the sun, wind and other renewable sources as well as energy conservation. Plans include raising vehicle fuel-economy standards and subsidizing consumer purchases of plug-in hybrids. Obama wants to weatherize 1 million homes annually and upgrade the nation's creaky electrical grid. His team has talked of providing tax credits and loan guarantees to clean-energy companies.
His goals: create 5 million new jobs repowering America over 10 years; assert U.S. leadership on global climate change; and wean the U.S. from its dependence on imported petroleum.
"Breaking our oil addiction . . . is going to take nothing less than the complete transformation of our economy," Obama said during a campaign stop in Michigan's capital, Lansing, last year.
Americans have heard it before. Every president since Richard Nixon has touted energy independence, yet the goal remains elusive. The U.S. imported less than a third of its crude around the time of the Arab oil embargo in 1973. Today foreigners feed nearly 60% of the nation's petroleum habit.
Skeptics fear that the president-elect's Green New Deal will do little but waste taxpayers' money. The government squandered billions on the Jimmy Carter-era synthetic-fuels program, a failed effort to create vehicle fuel from coal.
Corn-based ethanol -- the latest recipient of fat subsidies -- is loathed by many environmentalists, who say it is an inefficient fuel that gobbles precious cropland and helps to drive up food prices.
Better to let the market decide, not the state, said Donald Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University in Virginia.
"The history of government picking winners in the U.S. is not that grand," he said. "People instinctively love the idea of green jobs. . . . But there is a lot of mass stupidity out there."
Renewable-energy proponents such as former California Treasurer Phil Angelides say stupidity would be to stick with current U.S. energy policy, which has turbocharged global warming, super-sized the trade deficit and propped up oil-rich regimes hostile to American interests.
Angelides heads the Apollo Alliance, a coalition promoting clean industries as a means of rebuilding U.S. manufacturing and lessening the nation's dependence on foreign oil.
"It's the best path to recovery and the best chance of creating jobs that can't be outsourced," he said.
Although Angelides' organization takes its name from the space program that put Americans on the moon, creating green jobs isn't rocket science, said Oakland activist Van Jones, author of "The Green Collar Economy."
Jones said Obama's proposal to weatherize homes would pay for itself through energy savings while putting legions of unemployed construction workers back on the job. A $100-billion investment in a green recovery could create 2 million jobs within two years, a good chunk of them in retrofitting, according to a recent University of Massachusetts study.
"You can employ a lot of people very quickly with off-the-shelf technology like caulk guns," said Jones, founder of Green for All, an economic development group. "This isn't George Jetson stuff."
No one knows precisely how many green jobs exist in the U.S. economy. Estimates range from less than 1 million workers to nearly four times that. What's clear is that clean industries have been growing rapidly without a lot of help from Uncle Sam.
Worldwide, investors poured a record $117.2 billion into alternative energy in 2007, according to London research firm New Energy Finance. The costs of wind and solar power are dropping fast.
But the industry slowed in late 2008 as the U.S. financial system imploded. Plunging oil prices and frozen credit markets have derailed a number of renewable-energy projects. Some advocates say U.S. government support is needed to keep the sector moving forward.
That strategy has worked for Germany and Japan: Neither is blessed with abundant sunshine, yet these nations boast more rooftop solar arrays than anyplace else, thanks largely to government subsidies. That has created vibrant domestic markets for solar power and tens of thousands of jobs. Asian and European solar module makers dominate the industry.
The irony, say American solar executives, is that the U.S. was an early innovator. Bell Labs introduced the world's first photovoltaic device in the 1950s. NASA's space work advanced the field.
The U.S. "created this technology, but we didn't value it because [fossil fuel] energy was so cheap," said Ron Kenedi, an American who is vice president of the U.S. solar operations of Japan's Sharp Corp., a major manufacturer of solar cells.
"We need to reclaim our birthright."
Many state and local governments aren't waiting for Washington.
Tough state mandates to cut greenhouse gases and boost the use of renewable energy have turned California into the nation's hottest market for solar energy. Installers such as SolarCity of Foster City continue to hire even as the rest of California's economy stalls.
Pennsylvania used incentives to lure Spanish wind-turbine maker Gamesa Technology Corp. to set up shop in an old steel facility. The company now employs more than 1,000 workers in the state, most of them unionized.
New Mexico is diversifying its mineral-based economy with green technology. Germany's Schott Solar is building a $100-million plant near Albuquerque and the state is grooming wind power technicians at Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari, one of only a few such programs in the country.
Trained wind workers are in such demand that General Electric Co., a maker of turbines, has promised to hire every Mesalands graduate for the next three years.
Michigan has started its own Green Jobs Initiative to retrain displaced factory workers for careers in renewable energy.
"If we can bend sheet metal for car fenders, we can bend it for windmills," said Ken Horn, a Republican state representative from hard-hit Saginaw.
A tavern owner, Horn said his regulars had been buzzing about green energy -- a sign that the industry was no longer considered fringe or radical.
Michigan's brightest renewable stars are in solar. United Solar Ovonic, a major producer of thin-film photovoltaics, operates three manufacturing facilities in Michigan and has two more under construction in the state.
Hemlock Semiconductor is a joint venture of two Japanese firms and Midland, Mich.-based Dow Corning Corp., which owns a majority stake.
It is expanding its rural campus not far from Saginaw and building a plant in Tennessee to produce more polycrystalline silicon -- a semiconductor that allows solar cells to convert sunlight into electricity.
The exacting chemical process begins with the mining of quartz and ends with huge, gray, U-shaped bars of polycrystalline silicon wheeled to an assembly line at Hemlock's Michigan plant, where they're broken into small chunks for shipment.
Most of the product is sent to Asia and Europe, where solar manufacturers turn it into the familiar panels seen on rooftops. Hemlock employs 1,400 full-time and contract workers in Michigan and expects to add 500 more in the next few years. The plant operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a week, never stopping, even in a recent blizzard.
Snow and ice couldn't keep Rich Steudemann from sliding into work on a recent morning. A mechanical engineer with more than two decades in the auto industry, Steudemann jumped at the chance to join Hemlock last fall as a quality-control expert.
"This is like the era of Henry Ford," said Steudemann, 45. "This industry is just starting to take off."
Why Obama's green jobs plan might work
Some states -- including Michigan -- already see renewable energy as their future: It's the only sector that appears to be making room for more employees despite the recession.
By Marla Dickerson
January 4, 2009
Reporting from Hemlock, Mich. — While Detroit's automakers struggle to rebuild their sputtering operations, the key to jump-starting Michigan's economy may lie 80 miles northwest of the Motor City.
This is the home of Hemlock Semiconductor Corp. It makes a material crucial for constructing photovoltaic panels. And that has turned this snow-covered hamlet into an unlikely hotbed for solar energy.
On Dec. 15, the same week that General Motors Corp. and Chrysler begged $17.4 billion from taxpayers to stave off collapse, Hemlock announced a $3-billion expansion that could create hundreds of jobs. It's a rare piece of good news for this battered Rust Belt state, whose 9.6% unemployment rate is the nation's highest.
In contrast to Detroit iron, Hemlock's quartz-based polycrystalline silicon is in such demand that workers in white smocks and protective gear toil around the clock to get it to customers around the globe.
Hemlock has been deluged with applications from idle factory hands such as former autoworker Don Sloboda. The 50-year-old Saginaw resident has been retraining at a local community college for what he hopes is the region's new engine of job growth.
"It looks like the future to me," Sloboda said.
Whether clean energy can pull Michigan out of the ditch remains to be seen. But the push is on to retool America with so-called green-collar industries.
President-elect Barack Obama wants to spend $150 billion over the next decade to promote energy from the sun, wind and other renewable sources as well as energy conservation. Plans include raising vehicle fuel-economy standards and subsidizing consumer purchases of plug-in hybrids. Obama wants to weatherize 1 million homes annually and upgrade the nation's creaky electrical grid. His team has talked of providing tax credits and loan guarantees to clean-energy companies.
His goals: create 5 million new jobs repowering America over 10 years; assert U.S. leadership on global climate change; and wean the U.S. from its dependence on imported petroleum.
"Breaking our oil addiction . . . is going to take nothing less than the complete transformation of our economy," Obama said during a campaign stop in Michigan's capital, Lansing, last year.
Americans have heard it before. Every president since Richard Nixon has touted energy independence, yet the goal remains elusive. The U.S. imported less than a third of its crude around the time of the Arab oil embargo in 1973. Today foreigners feed nearly 60% of the nation's petroleum habit.
Skeptics fear that the president-elect's Green New Deal will do little but waste taxpayers' money. The government squandered billions on the Jimmy Carter-era synthetic-fuels program, a failed effort to create vehicle fuel from coal.
Corn-based ethanol -- the latest recipient of fat subsidies -- is loathed by many environmentalists, who say it is an inefficient fuel that gobbles precious cropland and helps to drive up food prices.
Better to let the market decide, not the state, said Donald Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University in Virginia.
"The history of government picking winners in the U.S. is not that grand," he said. "People instinctively love the idea of green jobs. . . . But there is a lot of mass stupidity out there."
Renewable-energy proponents such as former California Treasurer Phil Angelides say stupidity would be to stick with current U.S. energy policy, which has turbocharged global warming, super-sized the trade deficit and propped up oil-rich regimes hostile to American interests.
Angelides heads the Apollo Alliance, a coalition promoting clean industries as a means of rebuilding U.S. manufacturing and lessening the nation's dependence on foreign oil.
"It's the best path to recovery and the best chance of creating jobs that can't be outsourced," he said.
Although Angelides' organization takes its name from the space program that put Americans on the moon, creating green jobs isn't rocket science, said Oakland activist Van Jones, author of "The Green Collar Economy."
Jones said Obama's proposal to weatherize homes would pay for itself through energy savings while putting legions of unemployed construction workers back on the job. A $100-billion investment in a green recovery could create 2 million jobs within two years, a good chunk of them in retrofitting, according to a recent University of Massachusetts study.
"You can employ a lot of people very quickly with off-the-shelf technology like caulk guns," said Jones, founder of Green for All, an economic development group. "This isn't George Jetson stuff."
No one knows precisely how many green jobs exist in the U.S. economy. Estimates range from less than 1 million workers to nearly four times that. What's clear is that clean industries have been growing rapidly without a lot of help from Uncle Sam.
Worldwide, investors poured a record $117.2 billion into alternative energy in 2007, according to London research firm New Energy Finance. The costs of wind and solar power are dropping fast.
But the industry slowed in late 2008 as the U.S. financial system imploded. Plunging oil prices and frozen credit markets have derailed a number of renewable-energy projects. Some advocates say U.S. government support is needed to keep the sector moving forward.
That strategy has worked for Germany and Japan: Neither is blessed with abundant sunshine, yet these nations boast more rooftop solar arrays than anyplace else, thanks largely to government subsidies. That has created vibrant domestic markets for solar power and tens of thousands of jobs. Asian and European solar module makers dominate the industry.
The irony, say American solar executives, is that the U.S. was an early innovator. Bell Labs introduced the world's first photovoltaic device in the 1950s. NASA's space work advanced the field.
The U.S. "created this technology, but we didn't value it because [fossil fuel] energy was so cheap," said Ron Kenedi, an American who is vice president of the U.S. solar operations of Japan's Sharp Corp., a major manufacturer of solar cells.
"We need to reclaim our birthright."
Many state and local governments aren't waiting for Washington.
Tough state mandates to cut greenhouse gases and boost the use of renewable energy have turned California into the nation's hottest market for solar energy. Installers such as SolarCity of Foster City continue to hire even as the rest of California's economy stalls.
Pennsylvania used incentives to lure Spanish wind-turbine maker Gamesa Technology Corp. to set up shop in an old steel facility. The company now employs more than 1,000 workers in the state, most of them unionized.
New Mexico is diversifying its mineral-based economy with green technology. Germany's Schott Solar is building a $100-million plant near Albuquerque and the state is grooming wind power technicians at Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari, one of only a few such programs in the country.
Trained wind workers are in such demand that General Electric Co., a maker of turbines, has promised to hire every Mesalands graduate for the next three years.
Michigan has started its own Green Jobs Initiative to retrain displaced factory workers for careers in renewable energy.
"If we can bend sheet metal for car fenders, we can bend it for windmills," said Ken Horn, a Republican state representative from hard-hit Saginaw.
A tavern owner, Horn said his regulars had been buzzing about green energy -- a sign that the industry was no longer considered fringe or radical.
Michigan's brightest renewable stars are in solar. United Solar Ovonic, a major producer of thin-film photovoltaics, operates three manufacturing facilities in Michigan and has two more under construction in the state.
Hemlock Semiconductor is a joint venture of two Japanese firms and Midland, Mich.-based Dow Corning Corp., which owns a majority stake.
It is expanding its rural campus not far from Saginaw and building a plant in Tennessee to produce more polycrystalline silicon -- a semiconductor that allows solar cells to convert sunlight into electricity.
The exacting chemical process begins with the mining of quartz and ends with huge, gray, U-shaped bars of polycrystalline silicon wheeled to an assembly line at Hemlock's Michigan plant, where they're broken into small chunks for shipment.
Most of the product is sent to Asia and Europe, where solar manufacturers turn it into the familiar panels seen on rooftops. Hemlock employs 1,400 full-time and contract workers in Michigan and expects to add 500 more in the next few years. The plant operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a week, never stopping, even in a recent blizzard.
Snow and ice couldn't keep Rich Steudemann from sliding into work on a recent morning. A mechanical engineer with more than two decades in the auto industry, Steudemann jumped at the chance to join Hemlock last fall as a quality-control expert.
"This is like the era of Henry Ford," said Steudemann, 45. "This industry is just starting to take off."
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
weatherize
December 30, 2008
Focus on Weatherization Is Shift on Energy Costs
By MATTHEW L. WALD
MARRIOTTSVILLE, Md. — In the basement of Phyllis Fick’s ordinary-looking suburban house, Tim Kenny of C&O Conservation, a nonprofit weatherization company, found black streaks of dirt on the yellow fiberglass insulation, evidence of air infiltration from the window beneath, a sure sign of an energy leak.
Nearby on the basement ceiling, a drainpipe from the bathroom above had spider webs around it, another bad sign. Spiders build near air currents to draw insects to their webs, Mr. Kenny, C&O’s manager, said, and the current probably ran from the basement to the attic, taking heated air with it.
But the “aha!” moment for the C&O team belonged to Brian Kinzer, who put a ladder on the front porch and pulled down the vinyl covering of the underside of the roof overhang. Instead of plywood, he was staring at the bright metal of a heating duct that curved up to the second-floor bedroom of Mrs. Fick’s 18-year-old daughter. The duct had been unprotected from the outdoor temperature since the house was built about 30 years ago.
“Look at this!” Mr. Kinzer said in triumph.
Call it CSI: Thermal Police — energy experts armed with mostly low-tech tools but strong sleuthing skills, finding flaws that let the air inside a house go through a full exchange with the outdoors twice an hour, instead of once every two or three hours.
Correct those flaws, and heating and cooling costs are typically cut by 20 percent to 30 percent, a saving of more than $1,000 annually in some households. In addition, carbon dioxide emissions and the strain on the national electric and gas systems are reduced.
About 140,000 houses will be weatherized with public help this year, a total that President-elect Barack Obama has promised to raise to one million, to reduce energy consumption and cut energy costs for households and taxpayers, who often absorb those costs for the poor. This would represent a historic shift in emphasis for the federal and state governments, reducing poor people’s energy bills instead of helping to pay them.
Weatherizing a million homes annually would also create about 78,000 jobs for a year, according to the federal Energy Department’s weatherization project director, Gil Sperling.
The current 140,000 annual total creates about 8,000 jobs, Mr. Sperling said.
Although that is a tiny fraction of the five million green-collar jobs that Mr. Obama promised in the campaign, “it’s a decent number of jobs per dollar spent,” said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit group in Washington. “The work is productive, and the jobs are at a mix of skill levels.”
Congress added $250 million to the weatherization budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Energy experts say that money could be effectively spent in low-income households and in households that have no need of public assistance.
In the forgotten corners of tens of millions of American attics and basements, near the old Trivial Pursuit games and out-of-season clothes, are flaws that waste vast amounts of energy. Buildings often resemble colanders. Leaking ducts bleed heated air into areas outside living space. Cold-air returns suck in dust and mold from attics, or gas and oil fumes from garden equipment stored in basements. Long-neglected air filters clog, forcing furnaces or air-conditioners to work harder.
Mr. Obama’s choice for energy secretary, Steven Chu, told a group in Washington in June that an extra $1,000 could make a new house energy efficient “but the American consumer would rather have a granite countertop.”
For the Fick family, the issue was not new countertops. Mrs. Fick and her three children live mostly on disability payments because her husband, Edmund, has multiple sclerosis. For months, she has been paying just enough to avoid having her electricity cut off. Because she is eligible for government aid to help pay her bills, her house, in a subdivision set amid the rolling farm country west of Baltimore, is also eligible for a state weatherization program.
Because most of the houses in the subdivision were built by the same developer and probably the same workers, they are likely to have many of the same energy deficiencies, Mr. Kenny, the manager of C&O Conservation, said.
C&O, which Maryland has designated as the publicly financed weatherization company for half the state’s 24 counties, will work on about 300 of the 2,400 houses that are eligible.
Typical repairs require expertise but generally cost $2,000 or less. The most significant improvement for the Ficks’ house was an inch-thick piece of foam board, which Mr. Kinzer shaped with a utility knife and applied to the exposed heating duct.
The repair cost less than $100, including $10 for materials, but it will cut the Ficks’ heating bill by several hundred dollars per heating season, said Tim Kenny’s father, Tom, a veteran weatherizer.
The larger problem, Tom Kenny said, is selling the concept of weatherization.
“I provide something that’s invisible,” Mr. Kenny said, explaining why there was limited private-sector demand for sealing air leaks, say, compared with the appeal of new windows. But new windows, widely marketed as an energy-saving investment, are not the place to start, experts say.
“We have found weatherization to be a more cost-effective option in decreasing energy bills,” said Mr. Sperling, of the Energy Department.
The four-member team at the Fick home wrapped additional insulation around the water heater, installed compact fluorescent light bulbs, and sealed air ducts with an adhesive compound scooped from a big tub. (Duct tape, Tim Kenny said, has lots of uses, but sealing ducts is not among them.) The work cost about $4,000 and the rate of air infiltration was cut by at least half, he said.
Government aid for weatherization has been modest.
Energy technology research competes for federal aid, said a spokeswoman for the Energy Department. Some states contribute their own money or divert federal money intended to help the poor pay their energy bills.
But utilities that furnish electricity, natural gas and home heating oil have lobbied strongly for programs that provide money to help pay bills.
Although Congress added $250 million to the original $227 million budget for weatherization in the current fiscal year, the number of people receiving weatherization aid is dwarfed by those receiving assistance in paying their energy bills.
“You have six million families a year getting energy assistance, possibly eight million this year, and 150,000 getting weatherization,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, an organization of state officials.
Achieving residential energy efficiency nationwide is a far bigger job than industrial or commercial efficiency because the number of houses dwarfs the number of factories, offices and shopping centers, Mr. Wolfe said. So little has been done in the last few years that “when you start to look at the infrastructure that’s there to do residential energy efficiency in a cost-effective way, it’s very thin,” he said.
“There’s been a lot of talk over the years,” he said, “but there’s not a lot to point to.”
To weatherize a million houses for low-income families every year, Mr. Wolfe said, would require more workers at every level. While it is possible, he said, weatherization companies would have to commit to expanding, and that would happen only if they were persuaded that they would have more work over the long term.
“A lot of the companies that do this work are fairly small,” Mr. Wolfe said. “They need some certainty it’s not a one-year deal, because for them to buy a second truck for $100,000, it’s not a minor decision.”
Focus on Weatherization Is Shift on Energy Costs
By MATTHEW L. WALD
MARRIOTTSVILLE, Md. — In the basement of Phyllis Fick’s ordinary-looking suburban house, Tim Kenny of C&O Conservation, a nonprofit weatherization company, found black streaks of dirt on the yellow fiberglass insulation, evidence of air infiltration from the window beneath, a sure sign of an energy leak.
Nearby on the basement ceiling, a drainpipe from the bathroom above had spider webs around it, another bad sign. Spiders build near air currents to draw insects to their webs, Mr. Kenny, C&O’s manager, said, and the current probably ran from the basement to the attic, taking heated air with it.
But the “aha!” moment for the C&O team belonged to Brian Kinzer, who put a ladder on the front porch and pulled down the vinyl covering of the underside of the roof overhang. Instead of plywood, he was staring at the bright metal of a heating duct that curved up to the second-floor bedroom of Mrs. Fick’s 18-year-old daughter. The duct had been unprotected from the outdoor temperature since the house was built about 30 years ago.
“Look at this!” Mr. Kinzer said in triumph.
Call it CSI: Thermal Police — energy experts armed with mostly low-tech tools but strong sleuthing skills, finding flaws that let the air inside a house go through a full exchange with the outdoors twice an hour, instead of once every two or three hours.
Correct those flaws, and heating and cooling costs are typically cut by 20 percent to 30 percent, a saving of more than $1,000 annually in some households. In addition, carbon dioxide emissions and the strain on the national electric and gas systems are reduced.
About 140,000 houses will be weatherized with public help this year, a total that President-elect Barack Obama has promised to raise to one million, to reduce energy consumption and cut energy costs for households and taxpayers, who often absorb those costs for the poor. This would represent a historic shift in emphasis for the federal and state governments, reducing poor people’s energy bills instead of helping to pay them.
Weatherizing a million homes annually would also create about 78,000 jobs for a year, according to the federal Energy Department’s weatherization project director, Gil Sperling.
The current 140,000 annual total creates about 8,000 jobs, Mr. Sperling said.
Although that is a tiny fraction of the five million green-collar jobs that Mr. Obama promised in the campaign, “it’s a decent number of jobs per dollar spent,” said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit group in Washington. “The work is productive, and the jobs are at a mix of skill levels.”
Congress added $250 million to the weatherization budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Energy experts say that money could be effectively spent in low-income households and in households that have no need of public assistance.
In the forgotten corners of tens of millions of American attics and basements, near the old Trivial Pursuit games and out-of-season clothes, are flaws that waste vast amounts of energy. Buildings often resemble colanders. Leaking ducts bleed heated air into areas outside living space. Cold-air returns suck in dust and mold from attics, or gas and oil fumes from garden equipment stored in basements. Long-neglected air filters clog, forcing furnaces or air-conditioners to work harder.
Mr. Obama’s choice for energy secretary, Steven Chu, told a group in Washington in June that an extra $1,000 could make a new house energy efficient “but the American consumer would rather have a granite countertop.”
For the Fick family, the issue was not new countertops. Mrs. Fick and her three children live mostly on disability payments because her husband, Edmund, has multiple sclerosis. For months, she has been paying just enough to avoid having her electricity cut off. Because she is eligible for government aid to help pay her bills, her house, in a subdivision set amid the rolling farm country west of Baltimore, is also eligible for a state weatherization program.
Because most of the houses in the subdivision were built by the same developer and probably the same workers, they are likely to have many of the same energy deficiencies, Mr. Kenny, the manager of C&O Conservation, said.
C&O, which Maryland has designated as the publicly financed weatherization company for half the state’s 24 counties, will work on about 300 of the 2,400 houses that are eligible.
Typical repairs require expertise but generally cost $2,000 or less. The most significant improvement for the Ficks’ house was an inch-thick piece of foam board, which Mr. Kinzer shaped with a utility knife and applied to the exposed heating duct.
The repair cost less than $100, including $10 for materials, but it will cut the Ficks’ heating bill by several hundred dollars per heating season, said Tim Kenny’s father, Tom, a veteran weatherizer.
The larger problem, Tom Kenny said, is selling the concept of weatherization.
“I provide something that’s invisible,” Mr. Kenny said, explaining why there was limited private-sector demand for sealing air leaks, say, compared with the appeal of new windows. But new windows, widely marketed as an energy-saving investment, are not the place to start, experts say.
“We have found weatherization to be a more cost-effective option in decreasing energy bills,” said Mr. Sperling, of the Energy Department.
The four-member team at the Fick home wrapped additional insulation around the water heater, installed compact fluorescent light bulbs, and sealed air ducts with an adhesive compound scooped from a big tub. (Duct tape, Tim Kenny said, has lots of uses, but sealing ducts is not among them.) The work cost about $4,000 and the rate of air infiltration was cut by at least half, he said.
Government aid for weatherization has been modest.
Energy technology research competes for federal aid, said a spokeswoman for the Energy Department. Some states contribute their own money or divert federal money intended to help the poor pay their energy bills.
But utilities that furnish electricity, natural gas and home heating oil have lobbied strongly for programs that provide money to help pay bills.
Although Congress added $250 million to the original $227 million budget for weatherization in the current fiscal year, the number of people receiving weatherization aid is dwarfed by those receiving assistance in paying their energy bills.
“You have six million families a year getting energy assistance, possibly eight million this year, and 150,000 getting weatherization,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, an organization of state officials.
Achieving residential energy efficiency nationwide is a far bigger job than industrial or commercial efficiency because the number of houses dwarfs the number of factories, offices and shopping centers, Mr. Wolfe said. So little has been done in the last few years that “when you start to look at the infrastructure that’s there to do residential energy efficiency in a cost-effective way, it’s very thin,” he said.
“There’s been a lot of talk over the years,” he said, “but there’s not a lot to point to.”
To weatherize a million houses for low-income families every year, Mr. Wolfe said, would require more workers at every level. While it is possible, he said, weatherization companies would have to commit to expanding, and that would happen only if they were persuaded that they would have more work over the long term.
“A lot of the companies that do this work are fairly small,” Mr. Wolfe said. “They need some certainty it’s not a one-year deal, because for them to buy a second truck for $100,000, it’s not a minor decision.”
Monday, December 22, 2008
green building code
December 14, 2008
IN THE REGION | CONNECTICUT
The Green Standard
By LISA PREVOST
COME January, Connecticut will become the second state, after California, to begin turning its building code green. Even as the law is poised to go into effect, however, building industry officials are calling on the state to turn back.
Bill Ethier, the chief executive of the Home Builders Association of Connecticut, uses adjectives like “awkward,” “unworkable” and “messed up” to describe the statute mandating energy-efficient design for certain commercial and residential projects. His group and a number of other industry organizations are pushing for a rewording of the law, which they see as well intended but overzealous.
If legislators don’t amend the statute, said Joanne Rees, the program director for the Connecticut chapter of the American Institute of Architects, their attempt to be environmentally responsible may instead slow some projects down.
“People will be afraid to begin to build if they don’t understand what they have to do,” she said.
State Representative Steve Fontana, a chairman of the Legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee, where the bill establishing the law originated, said he wasn’t averse to revisiting the language. He faulted the industry for waiting until “the very last minute” to sound an alarm.
“If the industry wasn’t monitoring our efforts on the issue,” Mr. Fontana said, “that’s their fault.”
The law, adopted in 2007, requires that all privately financed construction with projected costs exceeding $5 million meet standards set by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, known as LEED. Renovations above $2 million will be similarly affected after Jan. 1, 2010. Residential projects with four or fewer units are exempt.
LEED, which is overseen by the nonprofit United States Green Building Council in Washington, offers rating systems and checklists that guide developers pursuing high performance in energy efficiency, indoor air quality, water savings and other areas.
Points are assigned to various features, like locating the project close to public transportation, landscaping with plants that don’t require irrigation systems or installing solar panels. Applicants may pick and choose.
Like some 20 other states, Connecticut already requires large state construction projects to be built to a LEED standard. In Connecticut’s case, projects must reach LEED “silver,” the second lowest rating. School projects receiving state financing will have to comply as of next year.
The primary problem with the portion of the law pertaining to commercial construction, said Barry Trilling, a lawyer who heads the climate change and sustainable development practice at Wiggin & Dana in Stamford, is that it was drafted without industry input, and therefore doesn’t acknowledge the intricacies of the marketplace.
For one thing, said Mr. Trilling, who also works with the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, the statute uses a dollar threshold to determine project eligibility. It would be more meaningful, he said, to go by square footage. In southeastern Connecticut, a $5 million project may be major construction, but in affluent Fairfield County, he noted, “that may be someone’s garage.”
Nor does the law acknowledge that the LEED certification process is lengthy and may extend past the project’s completion, said Nick Everett, a senior vice president at the A.P. Construction Company in Stamford, which is building a public library to LEED standards in Darien.
“If you follow the implication of that,” Mr. Everett said, “you wouldn’t be able to occupy the building until you got that certification. That’s kind of goofy.”
The state Department of Public Safety is still trying to write building-code language that reflects the new requirements for commercial projects.
“We don’t have the framework in place to implement it properly,” said Lisa R. Humble, the state building inspector.
Mr. Trilling questions how the department can create a framework when the legislation is so ambiguous. For example, it doesn’t specify whether all projects that begin construction after Jan. 1 must comply, or only projects that receive a building permit after Jan. 1. It provides for an exemption in cases where building to LEED standards wouldn’t be cost-effective, but doesn’t specify how that determination should be calculated.
Charles Rothenberger, a staff lawyer at the Connecticut Fund for the Environment, which supported passage of the new law, said some of the industry’s concerns were well founded. Nevertheless, he said, the state should not move away from green standards tied to LEED, which he called essential.
California took a more comprehensive approach to the issue by developing its own green building standards code after a fierce tug of war between construction and environmental groups. Adopted last July, the code is voluntary until 2010.
Commercial developers in Connecticut are increasingly incorporating LEED standards voluntarily where there is market demand, as in Class A — meaning top-quality, ideally located — office buildings. But Robert J. Kravitz, one of the first to pursue LEED efficiencies, said he had done so more because it “made sense.”
A partner in the Go-Green shopping plaza in Orange, Mr. Kravitz registered the 12,000-square-foot project for basic LEED certification in 2002, began construction in 2005, and is just now finishing up space for his last tenant, a children’s gym.
The higher investment required for energy-efficient products — he estimates a 5 to 7 percent premium — was worth it, Mr. Kravitz said. His other two tenants — a laser eye surgery office and a women’s fitness center — realize considerable utility savings, and he is able to charge slightly more per square foot.
But what is widely accepted as a logical practice now was completely foreign to officials back in 2002, Mr. Kravitz recalled. When they heard the name of his plaza, Go-Green, “most people at that time thought I was a New York Jets fan.”
IN THE REGION | CONNECTICUT
The Green Standard
By LISA PREVOST
COME January, Connecticut will become the second state, after California, to begin turning its building code green. Even as the law is poised to go into effect, however, building industry officials are calling on the state to turn back.
Bill Ethier, the chief executive of the Home Builders Association of Connecticut, uses adjectives like “awkward,” “unworkable” and “messed up” to describe the statute mandating energy-efficient design for certain commercial and residential projects. His group and a number of other industry organizations are pushing for a rewording of the law, which they see as well intended but overzealous.
If legislators don’t amend the statute, said Joanne Rees, the program director for the Connecticut chapter of the American Institute of Architects, their attempt to be environmentally responsible may instead slow some projects down.
“People will be afraid to begin to build if they don’t understand what they have to do,” she said.
State Representative Steve Fontana, a chairman of the Legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee, where the bill establishing the law originated, said he wasn’t averse to revisiting the language. He faulted the industry for waiting until “the very last minute” to sound an alarm.
“If the industry wasn’t monitoring our efforts on the issue,” Mr. Fontana said, “that’s their fault.”
The law, adopted in 2007, requires that all privately financed construction with projected costs exceeding $5 million meet standards set by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, known as LEED. Renovations above $2 million will be similarly affected after Jan. 1, 2010. Residential projects with four or fewer units are exempt.
LEED, which is overseen by the nonprofit United States Green Building Council in Washington, offers rating systems and checklists that guide developers pursuing high performance in energy efficiency, indoor air quality, water savings and other areas.
Points are assigned to various features, like locating the project close to public transportation, landscaping with plants that don’t require irrigation systems or installing solar panels. Applicants may pick and choose.
Like some 20 other states, Connecticut already requires large state construction projects to be built to a LEED standard. In Connecticut’s case, projects must reach LEED “silver,” the second lowest rating. School projects receiving state financing will have to comply as of next year.
The primary problem with the portion of the law pertaining to commercial construction, said Barry Trilling, a lawyer who heads the climate change and sustainable development practice at Wiggin & Dana in Stamford, is that it was drafted without industry input, and therefore doesn’t acknowledge the intricacies of the marketplace.
For one thing, said Mr. Trilling, who also works with the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, the statute uses a dollar threshold to determine project eligibility. It would be more meaningful, he said, to go by square footage. In southeastern Connecticut, a $5 million project may be major construction, but in affluent Fairfield County, he noted, “that may be someone’s garage.”
Nor does the law acknowledge that the LEED certification process is lengthy and may extend past the project’s completion, said Nick Everett, a senior vice president at the A.P. Construction Company in Stamford, which is building a public library to LEED standards in Darien.
“If you follow the implication of that,” Mr. Everett said, “you wouldn’t be able to occupy the building until you got that certification. That’s kind of goofy.”
The state Department of Public Safety is still trying to write building-code language that reflects the new requirements for commercial projects.
“We don’t have the framework in place to implement it properly,” said Lisa R. Humble, the state building inspector.
Mr. Trilling questions how the department can create a framework when the legislation is so ambiguous. For example, it doesn’t specify whether all projects that begin construction after Jan. 1 must comply, or only projects that receive a building permit after Jan. 1. It provides for an exemption in cases where building to LEED standards wouldn’t be cost-effective, but doesn’t specify how that determination should be calculated.
Charles Rothenberger, a staff lawyer at the Connecticut Fund for the Environment, which supported passage of the new law, said some of the industry’s concerns were well founded. Nevertheless, he said, the state should not move away from green standards tied to LEED, which he called essential.
California took a more comprehensive approach to the issue by developing its own green building standards code after a fierce tug of war between construction and environmental groups. Adopted last July, the code is voluntary until 2010.
Commercial developers in Connecticut are increasingly incorporating LEED standards voluntarily where there is market demand, as in Class A — meaning top-quality, ideally located — office buildings. But Robert J. Kravitz, one of the first to pursue LEED efficiencies, said he had done so more because it “made sense.”
A partner in the Go-Green shopping plaza in Orange, Mr. Kravitz registered the 12,000-square-foot project for basic LEED certification in 2002, began construction in 2005, and is just now finishing up space for his last tenant, a children’s gym.
The higher investment required for energy-efficient products — he estimates a 5 to 7 percent premium — was worth it, Mr. Kravitz said. His other two tenants — a laser eye surgery office and a women’s fitness center — realize considerable utility savings, and he is able to charge slightly more per square foot.
But what is widely accepted as a logical practice now was completely foreign to officials back in 2002, Mr. Kravitz recalled. When they heard the name of his plaza, Go-Green, “most people at that time thought I was a New York Jets fan.”
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
December 4, 2008
Proposal Ties Economic Stimulus to Energy Plan
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama and leaders in Congress are fashioning a plan to pour billions of dollars into a jobs program to jolt the economy and lay the groundwork for a more energy-efficient one.
The details and cost of the so-called green-jobs program are still unclear, but a senior Obama aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a work in progress, said it would probably include the weatherizing of hundreds of thousands of homes, the installation of “smart meters” to monitor and reduce home energy use, and billions of dollars in grants to state and local governments for mass transit and infrastructure projects.
The green component of the much larger stimulus plan would cost at least $15 billion a year, and perhaps considerably more, depending on how the projects were defined, aides working on the package said.
During the campaign, Mr. Obama supported a measure to address global warming by capping carbon emissions while allowing companies to buy and trade pollution permits. He said he would devote $150 billion of the revenue from the sale of those permits over 10 years to energy efficiency and alternative energy projects to wean the nation from fuels that are the main causes of the heating the atmosphere.
But the Obama adviser who discussed the green energy project said Mr. Obama would not await passage of a global warming bill before embarking on the new energy and infrastructure spending. House and Senate supporters of a climate bill said they would continue working on legislative language but did not expect quick action on a cap-and-trade law because of the economic emergency.
That means that the green-jobs program would not be financed with pollution credits bought by power generators and other carbon emitters, but instead would be added to the budget deficit.
Congressional officials working with the Obama administration said the stimulus program was also likely to involve tax breaks or direct government subsidies for a variety of clean energy projects, including solar arrays, wind farms, advanced biofuels and technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants.
The programs will be a part of a larger economic stimulus package whose outlines are faint but which is expected to cost $400 billion to $500 billion. Mr. Obama has said that his goal is to create or save 2.5 million jobs in the next two years. He has assigned to his economic and environmental advisers the task of devising a proposal that is expected to combine a shot of new federal money into existing federal and state programs and the possible creation of agencies modeled on New Deal public works programs.
“We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead,” Mr. Obama said in a radio address last month, echoing a campaign promise with a new sense of urgency.
The political climate seems favorable to an economic stimulus plan, but large sums of new money touch off lobbying frenzies and energy projects spur debate between conservationists and those who want to more fully exploit domestic sources of oil, natural gas and coal.
Some experts said the record of government’s intervention in energy markets and new technologies was not promising, citing as a spectacular example the Carter-era Synthetic Fuels Corporation, which spent more than $3 billion without producing any commercially usable amount of coal-based liquid fuel.
Ethanol and other non-oil-based fuels have also not proved their commercial value, in some cases yielding less energy than was needed to produce them, or, in ethanol’s case, diverting land to corn and driving up food prices.
The plan could also face resistance from fiscal hawks. In 2004, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, almost single-handedly blocked a $100 billion energy package, saying the billions of dollars in subsidies for ethanol and other alternative fuels were little more than a special-interest boondoggle. The bill was revived a year later at half the cost, and much of the money in it has not been spent.
“Now they’re talking about some large amount of money — what, $100 billion? — and spending it on windmills, job training, whatever,” said David Kreutzer, who studies energy economics and climate change at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group. “But where do you get the $100 billion in the first place? Are you going to take $100 billion from some other part of the economy, are you going to tax some people to pay for it? Are you just going to print it or borrow it? The money has to come from somewhere.”
The Obama team and Congressional leaders say they want a plan ready shortly after Congress reconvenes in January.
Mr. Obama has said that, after stabilizing the economy and the markets, putting the nation on the path to a more energy-efficient future is his top priority. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, said this week that rebuilding infrastructure and creating green jobs was “the first order of business that we will have” when Congress reconvenes in January. Several hearings are planned even before Mr. Obama takes office on Jan. 20.
State officials say a lack of financing has stalled billions of dollars in projects. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California told Mr. Obama this week that the states were ready to break ground with $136 billion in infrastructure projects that could provide new jobs within two years.
The American Public Transportation Association, which represents local mass transit authorities, said there were $8 billion in “ready-to-go” projects that could preserve or create thousands of jobs and provide more energy-efficient transportation.
Beverly A. Scott, the chief executive of Atlanta’s transit agency and head of the national association, told Congress in October that the projects included diesel-electric hybrid buses for Chicago; a new bus maintenance shop for Eugene, Ore.; and a set of crossover tracks to allow San Francisco’s rapid transit trains to turn around more quickly and carry more riders.
The Obama aide said the residential smart meters were a relatively small project that would not create a large number of jobs, but the aide said they would be an essential building block for the electric grid of the future. The new grid — a multiyear, multibillion-dollar project — would more efficiently move electricity from its source to its destination and would reward those who saved power or used it during off-peak hours.
Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, who heads the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he was sympathetic to Mr. Obama’s desire to pump up the economy and reduce energy usage. But Mr. Bingaman said he was wary of big government spending programs without sufficient oversight or expertise.
“Just buying smart meters for everybody doesn’t really move the ball very far,” said Mr. Bingaman, who will hold a hearing next week to gather ideas for energy-related stimulus spending. “Realistically speaking, getting money properly spent in a short period of time requires some degree of competence in the government agency doing it. The best plan is to start with existing programs that work, like weatherization, and build on those.”
Proposal Ties Economic Stimulus to Energy Plan
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama and leaders in Congress are fashioning a plan to pour billions of dollars into a jobs program to jolt the economy and lay the groundwork for a more energy-efficient one.
The details and cost of the so-called green-jobs program are still unclear, but a senior Obama aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a work in progress, said it would probably include the weatherizing of hundreds of thousands of homes, the installation of “smart meters” to monitor and reduce home energy use, and billions of dollars in grants to state and local governments for mass transit and infrastructure projects.
The green component of the much larger stimulus plan would cost at least $15 billion a year, and perhaps considerably more, depending on how the projects were defined, aides working on the package said.
During the campaign, Mr. Obama supported a measure to address global warming by capping carbon emissions while allowing companies to buy and trade pollution permits. He said he would devote $150 billion of the revenue from the sale of those permits over 10 years to energy efficiency and alternative energy projects to wean the nation from fuels that are the main causes of the heating the atmosphere.
But the Obama adviser who discussed the green energy project said Mr. Obama would not await passage of a global warming bill before embarking on the new energy and infrastructure spending. House and Senate supporters of a climate bill said they would continue working on legislative language but did not expect quick action on a cap-and-trade law because of the economic emergency.
That means that the green-jobs program would not be financed with pollution credits bought by power generators and other carbon emitters, but instead would be added to the budget deficit.
Congressional officials working with the Obama administration said the stimulus program was also likely to involve tax breaks or direct government subsidies for a variety of clean energy projects, including solar arrays, wind farms, advanced biofuels and technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants.
The programs will be a part of a larger economic stimulus package whose outlines are faint but which is expected to cost $400 billion to $500 billion. Mr. Obama has said that his goal is to create or save 2.5 million jobs in the next two years. He has assigned to his economic and environmental advisers the task of devising a proposal that is expected to combine a shot of new federal money into existing federal and state programs and the possible creation of agencies modeled on New Deal public works programs.
“We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead,” Mr. Obama said in a radio address last month, echoing a campaign promise with a new sense of urgency.
The political climate seems favorable to an economic stimulus plan, but large sums of new money touch off lobbying frenzies and energy projects spur debate between conservationists and those who want to more fully exploit domestic sources of oil, natural gas and coal.
Some experts said the record of government’s intervention in energy markets and new technologies was not promising, citing as a spectacular example the Carter-era Synthetic Fuels Corporation, which spent more than $3 billion without producing any commercially usable amount of coal-based liquid fuel.
Ethanol and other non-oil-based fuels have also not proved their commercial value, in some cases yielding less energy than was needed to produce them, or, in ethanol’s case, diverting land to corn and driving up food prices.
The plan could also face resistance from fiscal hawks. In 2004, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, almost single-handedly blocked a $100 billion energy package, saying the billions of dollars in subsidies for ethanol and other alternative fuels were little more than a special-interest boondoggle. The bill was revived a year later at half the cost, and much of the money in it has not been spent.
“Now they’re talking about some large amount of money — what, $100 billion? — and spending it on windmills, job training, whatever,” said David Kreutzer, who studies energy economics and climate change at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group. “But where do you get the $100 billion in the first place? Are you going to take $100 billion from some other part of the economy, are you going to tax some people to pay for it? Are you just going to print it or borrow it? The money has to come from somewhere.”
The Obama team and Congressional leaders say they want a plan ready shortly after Congress reconvenes in January.
Mr. Obama has said that, after stabilizing the economy and the markets, putting the nation on the path to a more energy-efficient future is his top priority. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, said this week that rebuilding infrastructure and creating green jobs was “the first order of business that we will have” when Congress reconvenes in January. Several hearings are planned even before Mr. Obama takes office on Jan. 20.
State officials say a lack of financing has stalled billions of dollars in projects. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California told Mr. Obama this week that the states were ready to break ground with $136 billion in infrastructure projects that could provide new jobs within two years.
The American Public Transportation Association, which represents local mass transit authorities, said there were $8 billion in “ready-to-go” projects that could preserve or create thousands of jobs and provide more energy-efficient transportation.
Beverly A. Scott, the chief executive of Atlanta’s transit agency and head of the national association, told Congress in October that the projects included diesel-electric hybrid buses for Chicago; a new bus maintenance shop for Eugene, Ore.; and a set of crossover tracks to allow San Francisco’s rapid transit trains to turn around more quickly and carry more riders.
The Obama aide said the residential smart meters were a relatively small project that would not create a large number of jobs, but the aide said they would be an essential building block for the electric grid of the future. The new grid — a multiyear, multibillion-dollar project — would more efficiently move electricity from its source to its destination and would reward those who saved power or used it during off-peak hours.
Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, who heads the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he was sympathetic to Mr. Obama’s desire to pump up the economy and reduce energy usage. But Mr. Bingaman said he was wary of big government spending programs without sufficient oversight or expertise.
“Just buying smart meters for everybody doesn’t really move the ball very far,” said Mr. Bingaman, who will hold a hearing next week to gather ideas for energy-related stimulus spending. “Realistically speaking, getting money properly spent in a short period of time requires some degree of competence in the government agency doing it. The best plan is to start with existing programs that work, like weatherization, and build on those.”
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
code and permit info
This is exciting. It will be a great tool in sharing info, ideas and knowledge with each other.
Unfortunately, Goshen does not have a green building code, though the ICC does have a sample one and a workbook on developing a "personalized" one. I order the book and give you all a synopsis. They also have a slew of books on sustainable design, alternative energy, etc. If you're interesred, their website is http://www.iccsafe.org . go to the ICC Store and green products.
Happy Blogging and Thanksgiving to all.
Michael
Unfortunately, Goshen does not have a green building code, though the ICC does have a sample one and a workbook on developing a "personalized" one. I order the book and give you all a synopsis. They also have a slew of books on sustainable design, alternative energy, etc. If you're interesred, their website is http://www.iccsafe.org . go to the ICC Store and green products.
Happy Blogging and Thanksgiving to all.
Michael
account sign up
Hey All,
Andy asked me a question wich I will answer in email and in the blog, hopefully soon all communications will be in the blog.
Andy asked,"Question—Do I need to set a Google account for this blog?"
No and maybe yes.
You do not HAVE to use a google account if you have an aol im account or other blogger accounts, etc., BUT...
I am guessing that the majority of you don't have any existing blogger accounts so I would say that getting a google account is the easiest, and free. On our blog page look for the link " Follow this blog" and click on it. A new window will pop up and it will prompt you to sign in or set up a new google account, click on "sign up". Follow the directions, very simple, and your done. You can now comment and post questions and answers on our blog!
hope this helps,
Jeff
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Welcome!
Welcome to the Blog for The Sullivan County Sustainable Building Group!
or Green County Group for short?
or something completely different!
Having a dedicated web based blog will allow us to easily communicate as a group. Though it might take a little while for us to shape our formatting. Lets give it a try. I will start...
I believe that organizing our information exchange into subjects, or labels, can help us flush out our objectives, interests, and ideas with direction. This will also help keep us from having a single "run on" dialog.
What subjects should we divide the content of the site into?
Here is a base I came up with that we, as a group, can add on to and edit(note indented topics are sub topics with in catagory)-
Green County Group
general info
events and meetings
Construction and design
solar thermal
pv
insulation
materials
Renewable Energy Rebates
Codes and Permits
Outreach and Community
What else? Feel free to add to this or start a new question or topic!
Cheers,
Jeff
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