Like a lot of people, I look forward pretty keenly to major announcements from Apple.  When Steve Jobs takes the stage I often find myself glued to video or transcripts.  I am not a full-time geek- I don’t subscribe to Wired, I don’t know what API means and I have never paid the slightest attention to product announcements of any other tech firm.  But Apple is different.  They are an integral component of the American zeitgeist today.  Whether your principal interests are design, marketing, technical innovation, or business strategy – they are an organization that everyone wants to know more about.  When they announce plans (or, more correctly, when they announce upcoming announcements) a huge portion of the educated class leans forward to listen.

So if you follow the tech space at all you are no doubt aware that Steve Jobs’ WWDC 2011 Keynote was last week.  Typically I leave these announcements fascinated by how quickly the technology on offer is changing (I know, duh) and inspired in a few small ways by the design execution of these innovations.  But last week when I read Engadget’s live blog of the event over lunch I found myself, well, seriously depressed.

The major tech news in the presentation revolves around cloud computing, iCloud in Apple-speak.  You’ll be able to sync loads of stuff in the cloud- mail, music, photos, documents- for free.   Veterans of Apple presentations will know they follow a very strict format.  Black background, simple white text, huge glossy images of screens and products.   It’s as if the presentation itself is a device, with the audience glued to the massive “screen”- replicating almost exactly the way many of us find ourselves transfixed by our iPhone as we wait for a train or walk down the sidewalk.  Humans seem prone to a weirdly unconscious connection to these backlit screens.  Maybe it was because I was in the midst of this trance that I found myself so shocked when Steve Jobs finished his presentation with some images of the real world.  To demonstrate that they are “serious” about this iCloud service, Jobs provided a short tour of their newest data center- and it is massive.

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Weather is what’s happening in the air around us, and climate is how it is, long term, where we are. At least, that’s what we used to mean, back when a location came with a climate: temperate, tropical, sunny, or moist.  Seasonal variations were part of the idea of climate – summer, winter, monsoon, mistral – but there was little room for other change within the concept.  On the other hand, the weather changes constantly, giving us a way to make conversation in elevators with total strangers or romantic rivals.

At the end of the nineteenth century,  Arhennius pointed out that man-made variations in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could alter the earth’s temperature, and the science of climate change was born.  A fringe activity until around 1990, it now attracts most of the attention of atmospheric scientists, since it is well established that if we continue our wasteful ways we will irretrievably alter the earth’s climate, and not in a good way.

But all this talk of climate change is about long term statistical quantities, like average temperature, area of minimum arctic sea ice, fraction of coral reefs bleached past recovery, or the range of altitudes over which the edelweiss can flower.  Ask a climate scientist about the severity of the rainstorm last Sunday night and she will suggest that you talk to a weather analyst, since no individual weather event can be directly tied to the slow process of climate change.

Well, for any individual event, that’s probably true.  But have you been following the news lately?  Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, has, and in an astonishing op-ed piece published in the Washington Post he implicitly challenges climate scientists to deal not with individual weather events, but with the extraordinary series of floods, tornadoes, and everything but a rain of frogs that have been devastating one locality after another.  I won’t tell you his conclusion because everyone should read the entire piece for themselves. Less time than you’ve already put in, guaranteed!

Photo credit: NASA

Catherine is the President of Luthin Associates, an energy management consulting firm that proactively manages energy procurement and sustainability services for their clients.

With the passage of Local Law 43 by the City Council last year, a minimum of 2% biodiesel must be blended into all grades of heating oil – #2, #4, and #6 beginning in October 2012. Local Law 43 also requires that the sulfur content in #4 heating oil be reduced from 3,000 parts per million (ppm) to 1,500 ppm (a NYS law also passed last year requires that sulfur in #2 heating oil be reduced to 15 ppm by July 2012).

This came about because of New York City’s poor air quality – the Fed gives the city a failing grade. The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has concluded that buildings using the dirtiest heating oils—#4 and #6—are a major cause of the city’s high air-pollution levels. Further, the hospitalization rate of New York City children with asthma (which is aggravated by pollution) is twice the national average.  This caused the city to look into cleaner alternative fuels for heating. One solution? A bit of biodiesel in the heating oil mix.

Biodiesel is a 100% renewable fuel that is made from domestic soy oil, recycled restaurant grease and numerous other sustainable “feedstocks.” Biodiesel contains zero sulfur and greatly reduces air emissions when blended with traditional heating oil.

Here are some of the most common questions on biofuels, and answers to them:

Where do I purchase these fuels?
By the 2012 heating season, when the legislation kicks in, all of these products are expected to be widely available. However, biodiesel is competitively priced and readily available today. All bioheat oil sold in New York must meet ASTM biodiesel spec D6751 and heating oil spec D396.

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Cheers to Vornado for having an e-recycling bin in the lobby of our office building, in recognition of Earth Day. What are you, your company or building doing to celebrate Earth Day 2011?  The list below is just a handful of the many events in NYC:

April 1st – May 22nd
Electronic Waste Recycling: 10 events at locations around NYC!
The Lower East Side Ecology Center is holding its spring electronic waste (“e-waste”) recycling events around the five boroughs to responsibly recycle unwanted or broken electronics from New York City residents. Get your spring cleaning done while protecting the environment!

April 20th – April 29th
Columbia University | The Earth Institute
Columbia’s Earth Institute has a whole slew of lectures related to environmental colloquiums, symposiums, lectures, and events going on between now and the end of April. From the Farmer’s Market Tours, a discussion on Impacts of Dams in China, and a seminar on Environmental Engineering – they’ve got it covered.

April 28th – May 1st | 8:30am – 5:00pm
NYC Green Roof Bootcamp Series
Green Roofs for Healthy Cities’ mission is to increase the awareness of the economic, social, and environmental benefits of green roofs and walls and other forms of living architecture through education, advocacy, professional development and celebrations of excellence. Join the more than 400 accredited GRPs (Green Roof Professionals) and add another green building qualification to your professional standing.

April 29th | 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Pratt Sustainable Planning and Development Lecture Series:
New York State Climate Action Plan
Alan Belensz, Director of the Office of Climate Change with NY State Department of Environmental Conservation, will be presenting an update on the progress of New York State’s Climate Action Plan. The plan identifies possible ways for state government and key economic sectors to keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, help communities and businesses adapt as the climate changes and promote a thriving green economy. The lecture is free and open to the public.

For years, boiler service people have been saying (in strictest confidence, of course) that #6 fuel oil would soon be banned by the NYC Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). In December, 2009, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) released a report, The Bottom of the Barrel, (co-sponsored and co-authored by Urban Green Council) calling for just that, and soon after, the Green Codes Task Force did the same in recommendation HT 9, Phase Out Dirty Boiler Fuels. After a few twists and turns, it now appears to be happening through a local law passed last August and new boiler rules on which the DEP will hold a hearing next week. Why is this good, how did we get here, and what will it mean for building owners and operators? First, it’s good because #6 is the dirtiest oil available, and when consumed in even a well-maintained boiler, produces substantially more particulate emissions than either lighter and cleaner #2 oil or natural gas. These particulates, especially the ones that are smaller than 2.5 micrometers (in lay terms, that means very, very small), are a serious pollutant, since they readily penetrate our lungs and come to rest there, irritating and poisoning the tissue and giving rise to problems from asthma to lung cancer. However, #6 has historically been cheaper than other fuels, so it is now burned in about 10,000 of New York City’s larger buildings.

Getting rid of #6 will remove more particulate pollution from our air than would banning all the cars, trucks, and buses on our roads.

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Credit: Mark McCormick and Paul Scruton, The Guardian

The Guardian has produced the beautiful graphic you see here showing CO2 emissions by country.  According to the Guardian the big story here is that China now produces more CO2 than the US and Canada combined, and that India is now #3 on this list.  But don’t be despondent, we still crush China in the category that matters, CO2 emissions per capita.  As you can see in the graphic below, each American proudly pumps 18 tons (or tonnes, to the Guardian) of CO2 into our precious atmosphere every year.  China can only manage a measly 6 tons per year per person and India only a pathetic 3+.  Note: the graphic above uses 2009 data, and the below is based on 2007 data.

Credit: Stanford Kay Studio.com

Christmas Eve, 1968. Source: NASA

Al Gore gave sustainable urbanism a plug yesterday at a Beijing conference, including a strong emphasis on energy-efficient buildings.  Glad to know the built environment is featured prominently in his talking points these days, and fingers crossed that it remains front and center when he’s not addressing the building industry (as he was in Beijing.)  Also gives me a chance to plug his book, Our Choice.  “An Inconvenient Truth” had a profound impact on our culture and helped alter the conversation around climate change.  But as a presenter for the Climate Project (Gore’s foundation that trains people to deliver his slide-show on the global climate crisis) I can tell you first hand that the piece missing from “An Inconvenient Truth” is solutions.  It describes the problem wonderfully but the gravity of the challenge can leave your audience despondent.  Our Choice corrects for this with brilliantly illustrated chapters on energy, its use, and the living systems that we depend on for survival.  It won’t change the life of an engineer already versed in these issues, but for everybody else I highly recommend it.

Jennie Hills

The London Science Museum has opened a permanent exhibit on climate change science including a real ice core on display.  (How cool is that?)  In 2009 the American Museum of Natural History, the one here in NYC, had a great interactive exhibit on climate change.  It is the exhibit that inspired my nine-year old son to come into the bathroom and turn the water off whenever I’m shaving.  Sadly, the exhibit was only temporary (though my son still hassles me about the tap.)  I see that the principal sponsor in London is Royal Dutch Shell and that some folks are not happy with their stance on the urgent action needed in response to the science, but it still seems infinitely better than the deeply watered down and, frankly, silly exhibit at the Smithsonian funded by David Koch.  Sigh.

Urban Green Council Executive Director Russell Unger recently spoke with Bruce Fowle, Founding Principal at FX FOWLE Architects about buildings and bird safety – an issue that has been important to Bruce for many years. Research by leading scientist Daniel Klem [PDF] estimates that at least 100 million and up to 1 billion birds are killed annually by collisions with buildings and other man-made structures in North America alone.

Russell Unger: How did you get involved in this subject?

Bruce Fowle: I would have to attribute most of it to my wife Marcia, who grew up in a birding family. She had been asking me for years what I was doing about all these birds that were killing themselves by colliding with glass – “what are you, Mr. Architect, doing about this?” So I had this guilt trip every time I put up a piece of glass. Then Marcia became Executive Director of New York City Audubon, where she then really put the pressure on. She has since served as President of the Board there and has written a book on birding in the New York City area.

I had spoken out on this issue and made myself known as somebody who was concerned about it from the architectural side, and was invited to speak at a Conference at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in 2005 (Birds and Buildings). The conference was at IIT for the obvious reason that the original Mies van der Rohe buildings were killing birds by the thousands every year with all that glass; they were the first real all-glass or almost all-glass buildings in the U.S. This conference really kick-started the whole movement, which New York City Audubon picked up on and eventually led to the writing of the Birdsafe Building Guidelines under their auspices. Groups in Chicago and Toronto have made similar efforts.

RU: What’s the scope of the problem?

BF: Well, there’s a scientist–Daniel Klem at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania–who has been doing testing and analysis of this for probably 25 years. Based on rough calculations, he has concluded that a billion birds a year are killed in this country alone by colliding with buildings. Most of the birds that collide with glass tend to be the smaller songbird species – and a lot of these species are already endangered because of loss of habitat, climate change and so forth. Glass buildings are one more factor contributing to their demise.

There are three primary conditions that contribute to this problem: lights at night – which draw birds to buildings or other illuminated features during migration; transparency – when a bird sees daylight beyond or an illuminated tree it can roost on and thinks it can fly right through the glass; and reflectivity – when a bird sees sky or vegetation in the reflection from the glass and flies into it.

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To follow up with my post from last week, the COP 16 Meeting of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded last weekend without any binding deal on emissions reduction, as many had predicted. They did, however, produce an agreement sufficient to allow them to announce that the process was not dead, and in doing so, included two potentially valuable steps forward.

All countries will now have to present inventories of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, developed countries annually and developing countries biennially. Although they will not have to file their data on the EPA’s Portfolio Manager web site (where it would not fit), the transparency this will promote concerning emissions mirrors that we expect for building energy consumption from the New York City Benchmarking rule (Local Law 84 of ‘09).

Further, each country must also submit reports on mitigation actions and projected emission reductions that sound remarkably like the audits required by New York Local Law 87 of ‘09. Countries are not required to take action, but must report on the actions they take or will take and estimate the savings. New York City buildings must report on actions they could take and estimate the associated savings.

All this and not a word of credit for our fair city!

In another item in the Agreement, the governments and nonprofit organizations who dominated the meeting agreed on the necessity of funding to help developing countries mitigate climate change and also adapt to it, to the tune of $30 billion from 2010 to 2012 and $100 billion by 2020. In subsequent discussions with reporters, the parties indicated that the funding would largely come from the private sector.

Found relaxing in a Cancun bar after two weeks of hard work, the Private Sector said it was unaware of any commitment, but expressed confidence that progress would be made next year in Durban, South Africa.