Urban Green Council relies on our interns to help with our monthly educational programs, assist with fundraising, and work on developing our national certificate program GPRO. The Fall 2012 Internship season is upon us, and we wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to our summer interns and thank them for their incredible work over the past three months.

JESSICA JOANLANNE
[GPRO Intern] Recent graduate from the New York School of Interior Design with an MPS in Sustainable Interior Environments.

Interning at Urban Green Council has been such an amazing experience!  The entire staff is truly dedicated to spreading the message of sustainability, and I am so happy for the opportunity to learn from them and contribute to their mission.  Working on GPRO has been especially rewarding, because I’ve been able to apply so much from my recent graduate studies to the development of the different course modules.  After this internship, I hope to implement all that I’ve learned to advance my career in the field of sustainable design and advocacy.

JAMIE KLEINBERG
[Research Intern] Graduate of Tufts University with a B.S. Chemical Engineering

As a research intern, I have been working on the 90×50 project, which aims to describe the energy efficiency measures necessary to reduce citywide greenhouse gas emissions 90% below 2010 levels by the year 2050. It is truly an eye-opening project, and I hope to see a greener New York City as a result of it! Working on 90×50 has taught me so much about the careful interaction between scientific research and feasible policy. I am so thankful for the opportunity to see the project through to its end, and I expect to use what I’ve learned about sustainability in all of my future endeavors.

NATALIE SELZER
[GPRO Intern] A California native and recent Tufts University graduate with a B.A. in environmental studies and English. 

The past three months at Urban Green Council have been a great learning experience. Working on GPRO curriculum development allowed me to combine my two primary interests—urban sustainability and writing/editing—in a really interesting way that I hadn’t experienced before. It opened my eyes to a new set of professional possibilities in environmental education and training, which I may not have otherwise considered. I was also lucky to work with the small, dedicated staff of GPRO. They gave me both independence and support, and really involved me in the big projects they were working on. They welcomed me as a part of their team, and I was able to learn so much about sustainable building practices, curriculum development, and the nonprofit workplace because of their inclusive attitude. Once my time with Urban Green Council ends, I hope to pursue a career in environmental journalism or communications (anything that involves both words and the environment!).

CHARLOTTE STANLEY
[GPRO Intern] California native with a B.S. in Environmental Science from UCLA.
I’m so glad I got the opportunity to continue my spring internship at Urban Green Council through the summer. As a member of GPRO’s curriculum development team, I gained additional responsibilities and helped with research, writing, editing, and more for the Construction Management and Operations & Maintenance modules. I’ve really enjoyed all aspects of my internship and I’m excited for my next step – joining Urban Green’s staff full-time as GPRO’s Curriculum Associate!

Best of luck to Jessica, Jamie, Natalie, and Charlotte on their future endeavors! We are now accepting applications for our Fall 2012 internship positions through the end of August.

Urban Green Council relies on our interns to help coordinate our monthly educational programs and special events, assist with research and  fundraising, and work on developing our national certificate program GPRO. The Summer 2012 Internship season is upon us, and we wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to our spring interns and thank them for their incredible work over the past several months.

JENELLE HOFFMAN (LinkedIn)
[EBies Intern] A California native, studying Sustainability Management as a Graduate Student at Columbia University.
I loved working this semester as the EBies Intern for this new and exciting competition!  I learned a lot about how sustainability initiatives can be implemented into existing buildings in order to improve our global carbon footprint.  One of the greatest perks of being an intern is being able to go to all the events and presentations by some of NYCs most forward thinking revolutionaries in the sustainable building sphere.  When I graduate from Columbia in December, I hope to find a job as a Sustainability Consultant either here in NY, or back home in San Francisco.

JAMIE KLEINBERG
[Research Intern] Recent graduate from Tufts University with a Bachelors of Science in Chemical Engineering.
As an intern at Urban Green Council, I’ve had the chance to learn about all of the amazing strides that New York City leaders have taken to create a sustainable urban environment. There have been so many opportunities to attend courses and events, with great speakers at the forefronts of their fields. My favorite part about working here has been all of the laughs, advice, and life-talks with the other interns and the rest of my coworkers. After this internship, I hope pursue a career in sustainable development, chemical engineering, or some fusion of the two!

ANDY LETWIN (LinkedIn)
[Programs Intern] B.A. Political Science from Skidmore College, focus on environmental studies and sustainable development.
As someone who is passionate about green buildings and sustainable development, my favorite aspect of this internship has been the networking opportunities. I have met so many wonderful people in a variety of fields. I have also enjoyed working with my great co-workers over the course of my time here.

With the internship winding down, I am shipping off to Vietnam for four months where I plan to teach English and travel. Upon my return, I hope to find full-time employment in the sustainability field!

HANAA ROHMAN
[GPRO Intern] A recent graduate of Princeton University with a degree in architecture and certificate in urban studies.
I’ve met and worked with a lot of amazing people during my time at Urban Green Council. This is what I value the most, as many of the issues we’re confronting could not be tackled without the passion and dedication of those involved. Among my favorite moments were interacting with industry professionals at our GPRO courses and attending many of Urban Green’s programs—both of which left me constantly thinking of the interactions between environment and design, especially in the context of the city. I’m very excited about all of the inspiring discussions I’ve had here and hope to continue developing these ideas in graduate school, where I’ll be pursuing a Master’s in Architecture.

CHARLOTTE STANLEY
[GPRO Intern] A California native and UCLA graduate with a BS in environmental science and environmental engineering.
I’ve had a great experience interning at Urban Green Council these past few months. I’ve learned a lot about green building practices from working on the GPRO Fundamentals and Electrical Systems curriculums. The best part of the internship was attending the Urban Green Council events (and eating the delicious food at those events!) with my coworkers. While I don’t know where my next move will take me, I know I’ll welcome any opportunities to show my commitment to a more sustainable future.

Looking out my window, I see a classic pre-war lower Manhattan office building, twenty-one stories of reproductions of Greek details.  Lots of double-hung windows provide good natural light.  At least one-third of them have a window air conditioner sticking out, and did all winter. Because of the ACs, those windows are never really shut.  I look around in other directions and see several late 20^th century residential high-rise buildings.  They are almost all energy abominations, with exposed slab edges efficiently conducting building heat out all winter long, and with large cutouts for PTACs (package terminal air conditioners) under the largest windows.

Even though those PTAC openings were designed for their job, a study (There Are Holes In Our Walls) recently completed for Urban Green Council by Steven Winter Associates shows that in real life they leak as much as the window AC units, and that both leak as much as a hole of six square inches. That’s about as big as the hole Rutger Hauer’s character Roy made in the wall he punched through to grab Deckard near the end of Blade Runner.  In post-air-conditioning Los Angeles six square inches may not amount to much; here in New York City SWA found it can add $32-$45 annually to a heating bill, and two to three times that cost if the heat is electric.  That puts the total annual citywide tab at $130 to $180 million.

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Check out this great video of U.S. Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu, discussing energy efficiency, both as a basic building block to tackling climate change but also as a simple measure you can take at home. He’s got some great quotes, including telling us that insulation is:

. . . like blocking and tackling, the most important thing.

An interesting proposal to increase funding for clean energy research in the absence of a cap-and-trade bill from Congress.  From David Leonhardt at the NYT, here.

A friend of mine, Rich Rosen of the Tellus Institute in Boston, has been involved in a very interesting exchange on Andrew Revkin’s New York Times blog. I strongly recommend checking it out, but the gist of it (for those in a real hurry) is that although research is good, we understand the basic physics of energy technology well enough to know that we are not going to find renewable technologies that will be cheaper than coal. We have to make the transition to more sustainable energy sources, but we should start now, with the technologies at hand, laying out actual money, and not expect solar energy, fusion power, or the hydrogen economy to come rolling in and rescue us with painless, or even relatively painless, sustainable sources of energy.

Rich and Andrew Revkin are discussing large scale power sources, but the same physics and economics constrain the future of buildings. After we have picked up the “free” 20-30% savings that come from correcting today’s really bad practices, we get to energy savings measures that have 20 year payback periods or more. But we have to lower energy consumption much more than 20-30% – we must get carbon emissions down by 80-90% by 2050. We already know how to make buildings that use very little energy, and to some extent how to convert existing buildings: lots of insulation, not much glazing, carefully controlled ventilation, and smart controls. Research may give us more options – aerogel windows could make glazing much less lossy – but these improvements will arrive incrementally and they will cost money.

As a society, we will just have to start spending more on energy use reduction and on sustainable sources – if they were cheaper we would be using them already. Not pleasant news, but the alternative isn’t a silver bullet, it’s a nuclear weapon scale problem: the rapid or gradual collapse of the ecosystems that sustain our civilization.

Check out Andrew Revkin’s blog.

Post Occupancy Evaluations are gaining traction here in the States but, like a lot of things, are significantly more advanced in Europe.  NYAS brings together a panel that includes local luminaries Adam Hinge of Sustainable Energy Partnerships and Brian Schwagerl of the Hearst Corporation as well as Stephan Plesser from Braunschweig Technical University in Germany.  Should be an excellent dialogue on an important emerging subject.

UN-Habitat has released a new biannual review, State of the World Cities, at the World Urban Forum in Rio. The report finds that by 2050 nearly 70% of our global population will live in cities- a stunningly rapid shift.  However, if this transition is not planned for appropriately most of these people will be living in megaslums- perhaps an even more pointed reminder of the need for sustainable development than CO2 reductions.

A host of other sustainable cities initiatives were announced at WUF, outlined by the folks at DIRT.

A study by the EPA provides further evidence of our perceived shift from a nation fleeing cities to a nation returning to our urban cores.  According the the New York Times:

In 26 of the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, the share of residential construction taking place in central cities more than doubled since 2000.

The full study is available here.

They note that LED have not yet surpassed induction lights in efficiency or cost but appear poised to do so in the near future with expected technical advances.

University of Pittsburgh researchers have conducted the first cradle-to-grave assessment of light-emitting diode (LED) streetlights and determined that the increasingly popular lamps strike the best balance between brightness, affordability, and energy and environmental conservation when their life span-from production to disposal-is considered.

Here.