Zerochampion

I had an excellent chinwag with Guy Battle, founder of engineer Battle McCarthy at the Building Sustainability Awards on Tuesday. He’s been getting more interested in online as a form of communication and sharing ideas. I’m glad to report he’s taken the first step by starting a blog, and has immediately jumped into some meaty subject matters. Battle attended the World Economic Forum a couple of weeks back and participated in a sub-group that specifically tackled the Future of Sustainable Construction. He introduces the concept of ‘positive infrastructure’ that came out of the discussion and using biomimicry principles to inspire green practice in the industry. Thought-provoking stuff.

The question about how best to embed green principles into construction - the carrot or the stick - has been an ongoing theme of this blog. It reared its head this week again at two Building magazine events - the first a conference, the second while I was interviewing winners of the Building Sustainability awards on Tuesday night. The case for the stick was put forward by Paul Morrell, ex-senior partner at QS firm Davis Langdon during his opening address at the Economics of Sustainability conference on Monday. He issued what I penned in my notebook as a “rallying call” for the industry to volunteer for regulation and not to shy away from regulation. Continue reading →

Paul King chief executive of the UK Green Building, gave a brief speech at last night’s Building Sustainability Awards. Here it is:

A question on many people’s lips, including journalists from the trade press, recently has been, ‘will sustainability be the next casualty of the credit crunch?’

Life is very tough out there at the moment, and I don’t underestimate the scale of the challenge some people are facing, with some very real threats in the short to medium term. But I wanted to share with you some feedback from a recent poll of UK-GBC members, covered in The Guardian today, at a recent event looking at our response to the financial crisis.
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So BREEAM has now finally made it. If a prominent comedian is making jokes about something then it must be on the right lines. So worry not over at the BRE at the battering you received at the hands of Chris Addison, who spoke at last night’s Building Sustainability Awards. The star of one of my favourite TV shows of recent times, The Thick of It, has been a columnist with Building for over a year now so his material was well advanced of the usual “how long does it take to get a plumber”/”aren’t builders shit” one-liners you expect from the usual host of such events. Continue reading →

Over on a steamed colleague, Dan Stewart’s blog, there’s some RIBA kicking.

The Building architecture correspondent doesn’t think much of the Institute’s plan for using refurbishment to extricate architects for recession, particularly as outlined by Building Design. His criticisms are twofold. Firstly, the idea is ‘at best aspirational and at worst fanstastical.’ Secondly, he says, it has been a longstanding Building idea as laid out in the 99% Campaign and “key RIBA policy for at least as long.” Nothing new there, then.

But the so-called 99% problem is like that; its solution is vital to tackling emissions yet it is seemingly intractable. It is hardly more convincing to use it to solve another pressing issue, that of widespread layoffs within the architectural sector. 

I wonder as well whether expensive architects are the right people to carry out this work, anyway? Or do we need to train a new type of specialist labourers possessing a particular skill set to carry it out?

The International Energy Association (IEA) has said it will be almost impossible to prevent dangerous climate change above 2 degrees without extracting greenhouse gases from the air.

Two further numbers from their annual report featured on Reuters:

$3.6 trillion - the cost of decarbonising all the world’s energy production between 2010 and 2030.
$4.0 trillion - the price paid to shore up the world economy in recent weeks.

Ah, well.

I received a copy of my Home Information Pack yesterday. The results for my EPC are in… and my flat got a C. The current impact is measured as 163 kWh/m2 per year which equals 2.2 tonnes. Potentially I could ease down to 152 or 2 tonnes a year. Not that bad a result. The property is pretty new (built in 2003) so perhaps it’s average on that score - of the features judged the one that stood out was the main heating controls, which were described as poor. Less impressive were the recommendations. There was just one specific one - install low energy lighting. There was then a generic list of “things to do today” further on in the Hip, which included:

• Turn your heating down
• Make sure your hot water isn’t too hot
• Turn off your lights and l don’t leave appliances on standby
• close your curtains
• Use a half load programme on your washing machine if you don’t fill up the drum

More growing pains on the Building forum. Having decided as a team to give a couple of temporary bans to some troublesome users they are back with a vengeance. I’ve just gone back and re-read the really helpful comments from my post of a couple of weeks ago musing on the ethics of moderating and I think we will need to act on some of the very helpful suggestions. The basic problem is down to this - the yawning gap that has emerged between what we as forum creators envisaged it would be and how a certain vocal minority are using it.

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We live in strange times. For the past few weeks we’ve been waking up with some dread, expecting another depressing set of economics news, company results or political/global crises. Then comes this morning. I awoke halfway through John McCain’s concession speech then fired up the TV to watch Obama give what I’m sure will go down in history as one of the great speeches of this century.

There will obviously come the torrent of questions as to whether the incredibly powerful rhetoric of the president elect will convert to the reality of change. But it’s hard not to share the optimism that in dark economic times there is hope for something better. Some inspiration for all of us, whatever we are trying to achieve.

The latest in my haphazard series of random musings on the future state of the globe.

So just how excited can we get at the prospect of the man who likes to say change entering the White House? Let’s hope he gets there in the first place.

I’m somewhat reminded of the heady days of 1997 when we all got very excited about one Tony Blair. It’s probably unfair to tar Obama with this brush before he’s even started. And yesterday he did pledge a green new deal in America, according to the Independent. “We’ll invest $15bn a year over the next decade in renewable energy, creating five million new green jobs that pay well, can’t be outsourced and help end our dependence on foreign oil,” he said. We can all live in hope.

It’s a tough call to make. Should he win, will the complete incompetence of his predecessor hold him back from being ambitious (sorting out economic and foreign policy crisis) and tackling the climate crunch or will it inspire him and his population to act on his watchword?