Eyes Glowing Softly in the Night. Look around your house at night and what do you see? Many, many LEDs glowing balefully at you, each of them indicating a small but growing use of energy
Shut Windows to save power, urges industry: Computer energy bills could be slashed by up to 40 per cent if Windows had its power management settings turned on by default, according to a leading environmentalist.
"PCs consume 96% of their power in on-idle mode," said Catriona McAlister, senior consultant for AEA Energy & Environment, speaking at an Intel discussion on energy efficient computing. "You could save 40% of annual energy consumption just by turning on power management on PCs and monitors."
Living in Your Coffee Cup? Most residential building in New York City is depressingly standard: concrete block as the structure with a brick facade. Insulation is an add-on. There are plenty of alternatives -such as insulated concrete forms (ICFs,) which are faster and better. However, the Styrofoam-embedded blocks used in the Habitat for Humanity housing may be a first, as this article shows.
Brooklyn condos made out of coffee cups? Who'da thunk it?
It may sound unlikely, but Habitat for Humanity of New York City is putting up a nine-family condo in Bedford-Stuyvesant using blocks made of Styrofoam - the same stuff white coffee cups are made of. The blocks are considered environmentally and energy friendly.
This is a first in the city for Habitat, which has built or rehabilitated 165 units of affordable housing in the five boroughs, executive director Roland Lewis said.
How Green We Are (New Yawk City, that is). A pat on the back from a Treehugger blog entry:
“Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of Americait's a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New Yorkis the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County.
New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.” (Owen, David, The New Yorker, October 18, 2004 “Green Manhattan: Everywhere Should be More like New York”)
Or Are We? A somewhat sobering note about New York Green-ness is struck here:
New York City consistently ranks high among the most energy-efficient, sustainable cities in the nation. The ecological advantages of density and of supplanting automobile dependence with the widespread use of mass transit cannot be overstated. Still, as a Berkeley transplant, I can’t help feeling that “green” hardly describes the city where I make more garbage than I ever have in my life (all those take-out food containers and overpackaged Fresh Direct deliveries), and where the streets seem constantly choked by traffic (every day, as I cycle to work, I fear I am being slowly gassed). For New Yorkers who feel they are living ecologically conscious lives, consider that the city’s fleet of taxis is circling the streets 24 hours a day, just for you. (Compare this with the fact that the average American car sits unused for more than 20 hours a day.) And despite the obvious conservation of resources and open space associated with high-density buildings, be they offices or residences, there are downsides to concentrations of this sort: How many of us find ourselves opening our windows all winter to balance out our buildings’ centralized heating systems.
Quote of the Week: Mark Watson, founding chairman of the U.S. Green Building Council:
“Our national interest in building science is zero,” he said. “We know squat about how any building works, including LEED buildings. If we sent our cars out on the road with the checks we provide buildings, customers wouldn’t stand for it."
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