Archive for the ‘Public Policy’ Category

DOE: Building Energy Codes – Home

Friday, March 5th, 2010

DOE: Building Energy Codes – Home

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Energy Codes Program is an information resource on national model energy codes. We work with other government agencies, state and local jurisdictions, national code organizations, and industry to promote stronger building energy codes and help states adopt, implement, and enforce those codes.

The Program recognizes that energy codes maximize energy efficiency only when they are fully embraced by users and supported through education, implementation, and enforcement.

Here’s the site.

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Op-Ed Contributor – We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change – NYTimes.com

Monday, March 1st, 2010

By AL GORE</ br>Published: February 27, 2010</ br>It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it. </ br>Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

via Op-Ed Contributor – We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change – NYTimes.com.

Rethinking NIMBY: Why Wind Power Could Lead To New Ways of Defining (and Dealing With) Public Naysaying

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Note from IR2: Worth a look….

Boing Boing

Rethinking NIMBY: Why Wind Power Could Lead To New Ways of Defining (and Dealing With) Public Naysaying

True story: A small college in the Midwest wanted to put up a wind turbine on their campus. The school, being on top of a hill in the middle of the prairie, had enough wind to produce upwards of 3/4 of their needed electricity, so the project made good sense. But when it came time to talk to the people living nearby, the school ran into some opposition. In particular, from a farmer who thought the noise and appearance of the wind turbine would lower property values.

The punchline: He was a pig farmer.*

Here’s the article…

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More from Ed Mazria

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

I guess you can tell I’m a fan….



For the Greener Good “A Green World is a Safer One” from National Building Museum on Vimeo.

Venture capitalist says U.S. losing green race

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

SF Gate

(01-08) 04:00 PST Washington – –

Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, whose early investments helped launch Google and Amazon, delivered a stark warning to Congress on Wednesday that the United States is on the verge of being left behind in the green tech revolution.

Here’s the article…

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Technology Review: Blogs: Guest Blog: Dispelling Carbon Capture’s Scaling Myth

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

Technology Review: Blogs: Guest Blog: Dispelling Carbon Capture’s Scaling Myth

Dispelling Carbon Capture’s Scaling Myth
Pipelines needed to deploy CCS technology pose little impediment, according to an overlooked national lab study.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
By Peter Fairley

PNNL estimates that CO2 pipeline build (red or blue) will look slim compared with natural-gas pipeline growth (yellow). [Larger image]
Credit: PNNL
Critics of carbon capture and storage (CCS) often deride the scale of infrastructure required for CCS to make a meaningful dent in global carbon emissions–not just in equipment to capture emissions at power plants (and other “point” sources of CO2), but also in pipelines to move the captured CO2 to storage sites. But an overlooked recent study by t

Here’s the article…