The New York Times has a ton of stuff on green issues today, from the sublime to the ridiculous.  There’s an Op-Ed on Climate Change by Mikhail Gorbachev and an article about Greenpeace targeting Facebook for their reliance on coal plants to power their data centers.

Greenpeace started its campaign in February, urging “ The So Coal Network” — a play on Facebook’s “social network” identity — to “Unfriend Coal,” which it calls “the dirtiest source of energy and largest single source of pollution in the world.”

Following on the data center issue there’s a great piece on European Union efforts to significantly increase the energy efficiency of their data centers. Seriously- the Europeans are cleaning our clocks on this stuff- they are way out in front of us.  While the EU works on advancing energy conservation where it counts we have to beat back attempts to eliminate one of the only clean energy laws in the US.  The Times has a nice editorial on the resounding defeat of the efforts in California to kill their enormously successful Climate Change law.

All of this is book-ended by a style-type piece on upcycling and the growing culture of seeing waste materials as a resource rather than a nuisance to be disposed out of sight, and a business section item on the many bond funds out there working to finance clean energy investments.  This last piece has a lot of great stuff on progressive bond funds but makes one of the most common and most unbelievably frustrating mistakes about the economics of climate change.  They open the piece with:

Financial experts may debate how much it would cost to shift the world to a low carbon economy, but they agree on one thing: the amount would be phenomenal.

It’s a snappy way to start but totally ignores the issue at hand, namely, our options.  Shifting to a low carbon economy might entail spending significant sums of money but it will not be “expensive” when compared to the other options.  As Amory Lovins has pointed out, “The good news about climate change is that it’s cheaper to fix than it is to ignore.”  Yes- reorienting our infrastructure to clean and green energy sources will cost money, but the repercussions of just burning all the fossil fuel the planet has to offer as quickly as possible will cost even more.  This is simple math, folks.

Perhaps I haven’t been paying attention, but I don’t recall the front page of the Sunday Times featuring three-column stories that often, and I certainly don’t remember the last time a three-column story was a review of a piece of architecture.  Soft news day?  Or is the Times beginning to understand the critical role our built environment will play in the future of our planet and our species?  Whatever the reason, I was delighted to see the new Masdar City development receive this much attention.  Ourosoff has a strong piece on the Foster & Partners plan for this new city in Abu Dhabi.  I largely agree with his assessment that, while a fairly stunning example of modern, sustainable architecture, Masdar does not, and could not possibly, represent a solution to the serious problems we face.  Ourosoff’s focus is not on sustainability, per se, but on the cultural implications of Masdar which, he says,

reflects the gated-community mentality that has been spreading like a cancer around the globe for decades. Its utopian purity, and its isolation from the life of the real city next door, are grounded in the belief — accepted by most people today, it seems — that the only way to create a truly harmonious community, green or otherwise, is to cut it off from the world at large.

This is a strong point, no doubt.  But I would have liked a touch more emphasis on the environmental impact of the notion that we can build our way out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves.  A “city” (it’s really a town, by my count) that houses 90,000 souls for one of the wealthiest countries on the planet does not provide a model for reducing the environmental impact of 6 to 9 billion people living mostly in mega-cities of 15 million+.

The promise of Masdar lies not in new city planning, but in it’s emphasis on fairly simple, passive design strategies and careful attention to local climate to reduce it’s environmental impact.  Foster, as Ourosoff nicely points out, has studied the manner in which people have occupied this hot, arid region for centuries and utilized the most basic lessons in his contemporary idiom.  A shame that more celebrity architects are not sensitive to these issues.

Being the Times, they have also put together a phenomenal graphic:

Steven Hill from the New America Foundation has a fantastic op-ed piece in the New York Times outlining the many ways in which Europe’s investments in energy efficiency measures and renewable energy infrastructure has (Surprise!) dramatically reduced their carbon footprint.  As a result, the average European today emits half the carbon of an average American. Buildings are of course a major component of Europe’s success in transforming their energy policy.  The image above is the latest fruit from this tree, the Stephan Behnisch designed Unilever HQ in Hamburg that uses about one quarter the energy of a typical American office building.  But he points out that the hole we have dug ourselves is also an opportunity:

Improving energy efficiency in buildings would translate to a whopping 25 percent reduction in America’s carbon emissions.

Mr. Hill has written a book about all this progress across the pond, Europe’s Promise.  Its on my list and should be on yours as well.

Continuing on our recent European theme- I’ll point you to a couple articles on high performance windows from across the pond.  The first focuses on triple glazed windows, and the second on Passive House certified windows.  It’s amazing to see the difference in technology and quality of the units available from places like Germany and Sweden- most of which are triple glazed.  It’s a shame that our codes don’t require these type of windows but it’s even more of a shame how difficult it is to source them even if you want to take the plunge.  This is one of the issues we hope to address at our conference, Urban Green Expo 2010, the theme of which is Pushing the Envelope.

James Russell has a great piece in Bloomberg news today on the stunning headquarters of Unilever by the German architect Stefan Behnisch.  The building, which uses about 1/3 the electricity of a typical office building in the States, is remarkable in many ways- daylighting, an operable envelope, lush public spaces-  but Russell also draws a stark contrast between Germany’s focus on efficiency and renewable energy (which in some ways makes a building like the Unilever HQ possible) and our own moribund political scene. As he says:

Germany benefits from refining green technologies and pushing them into the market. Americans are left to pray that global warming is a fraud, energy prices won’t skyrocket, and drilling — as in the Gulf of Mexico — will be the answer.

Most of you probably know there’s a debate raging in green building circles around proposed changes to the LEED Certified Wood credit.  To receive credit for using sustainably forested wood products, previous versions of LEED required that 50% of your wood be Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.  For a decade or more the industry-backed Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) has waged a campaign for it’s standard to be accepted- and USGBC’s current draft of the certified wood credit does just that- effectively offering partial credit for SFI certified products.  Alex Wilson lays out the specifics of the proposed credit here.  And there is a good overview of the controversy from the New York Times last year here.

FSC is a standard with significant teeth and for small timber firms the costs of certification can be a hurdle (though something like 30,000 have done it.)  To some, having only one wood standard has felt like a monopoly.  Others have pointed out that SFI was created by the big timber trade association, the American Forest & Paper Association, and figure it has simply been created to water down certified wood standards.  Certainly, the first version of SFI was almost comically lenient- but they’ve improved things significantly in recent years.  Chris Hayes and the Cascadia GBC are on the side of FSC.  SFI claims Green Globes and the Australian GBC as supporters.

Here at Urban Green we find ourselves collectively on the fence.  FSC has penetrated a relatively small percentage of the timber market so you can argue it’s not having a transformative effect on the industry and that allowing partial credit for more lenient standards might improve baseline forestry practices for a greater segment of the market.  Basically, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  On the other hand, there are suspicions that big timber companies might not care so much about getting their wood used on the still tiny percentage of projects that pursue LEED certification.  What they might care more about is the marketing potential of saying their timber is sustainably harvested, according to LEED and USGBC.  It’s not an easy argument to resolve, but the USGBC is about to try.  We’ll let you know when the next draft of the Certified Wood credit is released.

Lastly, I’ll note that there’s a similar struggle happening in Europe, as they try to set in place standards to ensure their imported timber has been harvested legally.

The 2010 BREEAM Sustainable Building Awards were announced at Ecobuild in London last week (via Dexigner.com.)  With more than 15 categories (including my personal favorite: prisons) there is something for everyone in British green building.

George Hargreaves and the design team for the London 2012 Olympics site are using the opportunity of the games to regenerate the ecology of the Lea river.  The north London river and it’s many tributaries have suffered from 100 years or more of industrial use, including long stretches boxed into canals.  The regeneration project reintroduces the natural landforms of the river bank and includes the planting of some 300,000 native wetland plants.  This restored ecology will be the central component of the Olympic Park with further expansion planned post-Olympics that effectively stitches several north London communities together for the first time in a century.

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.

Norman Foster’s Tower Bridge project has achieved the BREEAM rating system’s ‘Outstanding” level. The first building in London and only the third in the UK to have done so. Kieran Long outlines the ways in which the team achieved this impressive result.