Sustainability Moves from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS)

Improve your home's and community's energy efficiency with a deep energy retrofit and reduce emissions by up to 75%.

Engineering studies show electric cars are cleaner and cost less now!

Get smarter, lower your costs, and contribute to a smarter and cooler planet. Try this quick, simple tool (20% Cooler this year) from the UCS to complement their book (Cooler Smarter, Island Press, May 2012). See also, their "tip" sheet.

Monsanto's advertising claims its seeds and chemicals are solutions to pollution, gloal warming, and world hunger, but the truth is decidedly less impressive. Read the UCS report.

Read UCS's report: Climate Change in the U.S. -- the Prohibitive Costs of Inaction.

More generally, check out UCS--Citizens and Scientists for Environmental Solutions and their programs.

Regenerative Design and Development - A Pioneer's Perspective

Regenerative design and development is next-generation sustainability innovation now, in its formative moment.  “Sustainability is a neighborhood phenomenon,” Busby says. “We’re moving from buildings to communities—it’s whole-systems thinking.”

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Living Future Challenge - A 2012 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Finalist

See the Announcement for details of the Challenge and other finalists.

The Living Building Challenge, launched by a pioneer in green architecture, is a philosophy, advocacy tool, and performance standard - setting the highest standard of environmental in buildings, reframing how buildings and infrastructure function within ecosystems.

 Also, explore the Bucky Challenge and Institute more generally.

Recent Developments in Green Growth

Is green growth the green-washing oxymoron that many sustainability practitioners think? Or is it the holy grail, the goose that lays the golden egg, the potential perpetual prosperity machine for the 21st century?

OECD has been making some impressive advancements in concept and practice that are pushing neoclassical economics towards an ecological-economic reformulation. 

Read the current state of affairs in the latest Green Growth Newsletter. Korea is pursuing a low-carbon

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How Much Will it Cost to Save Our Economy?

How Much Will it Cost to Save Our Economy’s Foundation?  Lester R. Brown www.earth-policy.org/book_bytes/2012/wotech10_ss4

Altogether, then, restoring the economy’s natural support systems—reforesting the earth, protecting topsoil, restoring rangelands and fisheries, stabilizing water tables, and protecting biological diversity—will require additional expenditures of just $110 billion per year. Many will ask, Can the world afford these investments? But the only appropriate question is, Can the world afford the consequences of not making these investments? 

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OECD Environmental Outlook 2050--Action Needed NOW!

A new OECD Outlook report: OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050--The Consequences of Inaction, provides a credible and sobering understanding of the inhospitable world of 2050 that we, humanity, will face if we do not choose to reverse our present business as usual (BAU) trajectory. The report presents policy recommendations to reverse course, but leaves implementation to enlightened national leaders and citizens, thereby concluding on the traditional simultaneously hopeful and unlikely note.

Following the summary of the Outlook report, the implications for an effective response based on an arena of emerging, leading-edge, "just-in-time," whole systems strategic sustainability knowledge and practice is presented as an extension of the Outlook report. The smartest businesses and communities on the planet have been using strategic sustainabilty for the past 20+ years. It should be included in any understanding and formulation of an effective response within the limited few years of time remaining to begin and avoid critical systems tipping points of no return.

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Whole Systems Design and Factor 10 Engineering

You can find an accessible formulation and starting point for two fundamental practices underlying key sustainability strategies -- radical resource productivity and whole systems thinking -- at the Rocky Mountain Institute. 

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Elegant Pitstops Key to Multi-modal/Sustainable Transportation

Mark Kessler, architect and UC Davis Professor, will soon publish a book on the historical aspects of San Francisco's 1920s-era garages. On March 3-4, 2012, he exhibited a set of photographs of these garages at the Old Mint Building (5th & Mission). He gave a captivating lecture entitled "Elegant Pitstops--The Historicist Garages of San Francisco" in which he discussed the historical value of these buildings that are often invisible to the passerby. When combined with innovative land use-transportation policy, these historic resources could play an key, neighborhood-based, intermediate role in creating a fully funtional multi-modal and sustainable transportation system for 21st century San Francisco.

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Gore's New Sustainable Capitalism Manifesto

Read the article in the Economist.

Shining a light on the linkage between the short term and long term profitability, particularly when short term actions reduce or obliterate the long term, is the critical point.

One curious aspect is that discussions about carbon pricing are often conducted as if humans have the choice! As any economist knows, there is no free lunch. We either fully reflect real prices in the human

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No-Carbon Economy by 2050

RMI's Reinventing Fire Initiative: Whole Program (go here). Building Sector Video (5 mins).

Also, article by Amory Lovins.

Vancouver - World's First Green City?

Envisioning the EcoCity--With the adoption of the EcoDensity Charter and Initial Actions, the City of Vancouver has begun a new chapter in planning for a sustainable, affordable, and livable future. Find out here about the many initiatives underway to use density, design, and land use to help reduce our carbon footprint, expand housing choices, and ensure Vancouver remains one of the most livable cities in the world...

From Where? Deconstructing the I-Phone & Electronics

Mother Jones Magazine provides a short answer to this one. Read the short article and check out their interactive graphic.

With globalization, variations on the enclosure movements, and deep poverty from fundamental Malthusian trends (population outstrips resources, at some point), the

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Microplastic Bioaccumulation from Synthetic Clothing Discovered in Food Chain -- Another On-Going Sustainability Violation

New research from UCSB (see BBC) reveals consistent pollution patterns of microplastics around the world, with higher concentrations at beaches located near sewage disposal points. This violates one principle for a sustainable society in the biosphere--the systematic accumulation of compounds that natural cycles cannot break down. The violation creates business risks for firms and reveals economic distortion and inefficiency. Smart firms will self-regulate through innovation to sustitute materials and processes that eliminate pollution. For all others, regulations should be passed to protect human health and spur the innovation industry-wide to correct a source of distorting, uneconomic activity related to imperfect price signals. Doing so will strengthen the economy and move towards sustainability. 

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Petroleum Production Peaked in 2005

A new analysis concludes that easily extracted oil peaked in 2005, suggesting that dirtier fossil fuels will be burned and energy prices will rise. Read the Scientific American Article.

131 Years of Global Warming in 27 Seconds & the Fallacy of Adaptation

See the visualized data map here.  The public policy mantra on global warming has shifted in the last few years from mitigation, which is viewed as impractical, to adaptation, which is viewed as smart and practical.

If only! The problem with such a "positive, constructive, boosterism" framing of the challenge of catastrophic climate change is that full mitigation (full societal mobilization/innovation to stay below 1, 2 at most, degrees C average surface temperature warming), is our best and only shot at success. Even that success is uncertain.

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Governments' Oil Subsidies Increase Debt & Accelerate Catastrophic Climate Change

A recent 3-minute brief from the Earth Policy Institute states that global public sector subsidy of the oil industry amounts to $500 billion per year. This spending increases public debt and accelerates catastrophic climate change. Should this be de-factor government policy in an age of catastrophic climate change when accurate understanding and a meaningful and sufficient response is nowhere to be seen?

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World Turns Back on Enlightenment -- Implications for Sustainability?

This article in the Guardian, argues that the world is turning its back with increasing frequency on its core enlightenment values.

Given that an effective response to the sustainability challenge hinges on extending core enlightenment values, the article illuminates one "sticky" source of resistance and reaction to sustainability proposals, or does it?

IEA Says 5 Years Left Before We "Lock In" Perilous Climate Change

Vancouver Sun, AFP, Nov 9, 2011

PARIS - The world has just five years to avoid being trapped in a scenario of perilous climate change and extreme weather events, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned on Wednesday .

On current trends, "rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change," the IEA concluded in its annual World Energy Outlook report.

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Keystone XL Pipeline - Bad For the Environment AND Economy

It's not only an environmental issue. It is the wrong way to invest in and develop the economy.

It would produce unsustainable jobs that kill the planet and the people.

It reinforces our addiction to oil. It does not substantially address the petro-dollar/petro dictator/terrorist foreign policy/international security issue.

Alternatively,

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Climate Warming Skeptics Denied!

An SF Gate article begins with, "A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming [Richard Muller] spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly."

Although the scientific method triumphs, public discourse on the topic still reflects a misunderstanding of the relationship between science and public policy decisions.

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