Blog ACTION Day: First the bad news……

The buildings we use account for over 40% of all green house gasses. A recent study showed that due to the global recession total greenhouse gas emissions have gone down 1%, the only sector where they went up is from our buildings, nearly 2%. Homes, offices and factories play the biggest role in what is now by all intensive measures the teraforming of our planet. This teraforming event is obviously not on purpose but everyone seems to be running around with some massive plan to either re-teraform (geoengineering) or to reverse the process by slowing emissions.

The ideas for re-teraforming the earth include shading the planet with billions of reflective two foot wide satellites to a continuous injection of sulfates into the stratosphere. Soot that comes from our cars and factories also help cool the planet (really mask global warming). The sulfur and soot from volcanoes are understood to work similarly, so don’t be surprised when artificial volcanoes become a hot topic.

The slowing emissions folks have a grand imagination too. Sulfur-acid batteries the size of a football fields hold and distribute solar and wind farm’s excess energy. These farms will follow our freeways from coast to coast, while our desserts lay claim to hundreds of square miles of mirrors and tubes squeezing the sun’s energy into steam to run generators. Our coal plants become breeders of algae, soaking in all that carbon and squirting out oils we can run our transportation on.

Why is this bad news? Well you can’t be a part of it. You have to sit around and wait for someone else to figure it all out. You as useful as a dodo bird when the Europeans show up. Oh yes, you may also have a while to wait.

Now the good news…..

Technology will not save us. Every time we get clever and implement some great new idea we simply make more problems to solve. Come to think of it, maybe our economy is not based so much on consumerism but more on solving all the problems we created in the first place.

The good news is that right now your involvement and participation in reducing your harmful environmental impact is right in front of you. It’s your house (but you knew I’d say that). Remember 40% of ALL emissions are from buildings. It is relatively easy to cut you homes emissions in half. Even a new hybrid car can’t even come close to the environmental impact of an efficient house. As an engineer friend of mine says, think nega-watts. You are now the center of the solution, not waiting for the wizard behind the curtain pull a few levers and fill the sky with mirrors.