The USGBC's announcement comes just a year after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law.
The Recovery Act, which heads the USGBC's Top 10 list for the House, provides for $787 billion in stimulus funds of which $22 billion has been set aside for energy efficiency projects, including $346 million for energy efficient building technologies.
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The organization is lauding Chandler, a Kentucky Democrat, for his work on H.R.3021, 21st Century High-Performing Public School Facilities Act and Maine Republican Snowe for her efforts involving S.1637, the Expanding Building Efficiency Incentives Act of 2009.
In the U.S., 39 percent of CO2 emissions come from buildings, which also account for 40 percent of energy consumption, 13 percent of water use and 15 percent of the GDP annually.
According to the USGBC, increased building efficiency can meet 85 percent of the country's future energy demands, and a nationwide commitment to green building could generate as many as 2.5 million jobs.
Here are the USGBC lists of the legislation that can do the most to advance that proposition:
House Legislation
* The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Public Law
* The American Clean Energy and Security Act, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.)
* The 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act, Chandler (D-Ky.)
* The Expanding Building Efficiency Act, Dave Reichert (R-Wash.)
* The Property Assessed Clean Energy Tax Benefits Act, John Sarbanes (D-Md.)
* Act to Enhance Private Financing for Clean Energy Technology Deployment, Steve Israel (D-N.Y.)
* The Energy Efficiency Modernization Act of 2009, Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Ohio)
* The Water Accountability Tax Efficiency Reinvestment (WATER) Act, Michael Coffman (R-Colo.)
* The Livable Communities Act of 2010, Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.), pending introduction
* The Federal Personnel Training Act of 2010, Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.), pending introduction
Senate Legislation
* The Clean Energy and American Jobs Act, John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)
* The American Clean Energy and Leadership Act, Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)
* Energy Efficiency in Housing Act (EEHA) of 2009, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
* The Livable Communities Act of 2009, Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.)
* The Expanding Building Efficiency Incentives Act of 2009, Snowe (R-Maine)
* The School Building Fairness Act, Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)
* Clean Energy for Homes and Buildings Act of 2009, Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.)
* The Energy Efficiency Modernization Act of 2009, Michael Bennet (D-Colo.)
* The Water Accountability Tax Efficiency Reinvestment (WATER) Act of 2009, Mark Udall (D-Colo.)
* The Federal Agency Energy Efficiency Improvement Act of 2009, Susan Collins (R-Maine)
Tags: green
Executives at a meeting of lobby group the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in London this week reiterated the need to agree a common method for measuring and reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This comes as governments worldwide are introducing emissions legislation and major companies, such as Wal-Mart and Tesco, begin to demand that suppliers report the carbon impact of their products.
Ben Murray, director of Carbon Smart, a London-based sustainability consultancy, said he was aware of at least 30 different guidelines. �There are a couple of dozen general approaches and some relevant to specific activities � but nonetheless it's a mess,� he told Environmental Finance .
The widely used GHG Protocol, developed by the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, is seen as a good basis for measuring, reporting and disclosing emissions, the CBI said, but claimed it is not sufficiently specific to deliver consistent reporting across companies. The CBI is campaigning to develop a common approach.
Murray said the GHG Protocol and the ISO 16064 standard were the de facto references. However, he argued that there is �little merit� in comparing companies against each other, as there are a huge number of factors that can influence carbon footprints. �Doing a comparison within a sector is fraught with difficulty. We are a long way from having data to compare businesses.�
Herman Kok, executive for energy and climate at mining giant Rio Tinto, said the proliferation of guidelines is a �major concern�. He said that reporting of �Scope 3' emissions � those that come from outsourced activities or from purchased materials and fuels � in particular was �a minefield. It needs to be sector specific.�
Under GHG Protocol guidance, Scope 1 covers all direct GHG emissions and Scope 2 covers indirect GHG emissions from consumption of purchased electricity, heat or steam.
Kok added that organisations typically have twice as many people looking at carbon compared with all other environmental issues combined.
This article is reproduced with kind permission of Environmental Finance magazine.
For more news and articles visit www.environmental-finance.com or
subscribe to Environmental Finance.
Tags: green
Bay Area architecture and planning firms have a new stream of work coming from China: pollution cleanup.
As the building boom in China has slowed, local architects have turned to the environmental challenges faced by the Asian superpower, which just released a report showing pollution in the country is far worse than previously believed. San Francisco architecture, engineering and landscaping firms are already knee-deep in development projects that focus on pollution cleanup in China. And they believe the new report is likely to open up a flood of new opportunities.
"Every mayor is looking to improve his or her city," said Michael Duncan, director at the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM).
San Francisco firms such as Heller Manus, SOM, CB Richard Ellis, Hargreaves Associates and SWA Group are working on two plans to redevelop and cleanup the industrial city of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, at the tail end of the Pearl River. Guangzhou's Mayor Zhang Guangning is spending $11.7 billion on projects across the city to redevelop it and clean it up, that includes 55 million yuan - or $8 million - a week to clean up the river ahead of the 2010 Asian Games to be held in October in his city.
China's pollution report showed that agriculture was a main contributor to the polluted rivers and lakes, and San Francisco-based landscape architect SWA Group is working on a project with Heller Manus Architects to restore a 60,000-acre swath of an agricultural area of Guangzhou.
"As a part of that project and specific to this report, we'll be removing agriculture doing a tremendous amount of damage to the Pearl River and replacing it with mangroves" once native to the area that naturally filter pollution, said SWA Managing Principal Rene Bihan.
Architect Ellen Lou of SOM is designing a master plan to redevelop an area within Guangzhou that is one-third the size of San Francisco. Lou said the report will likely push other cities to take similar actions to Guangzhou.
"If the report is pushed out and becomes part of the public discussion, that's a clear indicator that a solution will be put forward," Lou said.
And much of the technical expertise to solve the pollution problem will come from the Bay Area, said representatives of SOM and SWA Group. They expect Guangzhou's redevelopment to be a model for other redevelopment projects in areas with pollution problems.
Duncan said China already has begun a cultural shift where society now values preservation and public space and is less tolerant of pollution.
About 40 percent of SOM's current projects are in China, and about half of SWA Group's San Francisco office projects are there. Firm representatives said the pollution report validates the work they're already doing in the country and will mean there's plenty more to be done for years to come.
"Our service, our contribution is showing them how to turn development from a negative to a positive," said SWA's Bihan. "By taking the right strategy, you can improve the quality of life not just financially, but ecologically and socially."
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2010/02/22/story11.html?b=1266814800^2909801
Tags: green
Over the past couple of years the venture capital arm of chip giant Intel, Intel Capital, has been investing small sums into promising cleantech firms, from solar manufacturing startups, to companies building energy efficiency technology for semiconductors. Today Intel Capital indicated that it will continue that strategy, and announced $10 million worth of investments into five cleantech startups that it finds promising and will likely help its core business of selling communications chips.
Four out of the five investments were follow-on investments and one was a new investment. Here's Intel's lineup:
1). CPower: CPower is one of the largest demand-response providers in the country, and it helps utilities avoid outages and control the grid by reducing energy users' electricity demand at critical times. Utilities pay for the unused megawatts, and energy customers get a cut of the cash. CPower targets large commercial, industrial and institutional power users, as well as some residential clients, in New England, New York, the mid-Atlantic region, Texas, California and Ontario, Canada. In April CPower announced that it had raised $10.7 million in its second round of venture funding to expand into new geographies and market segments, including some energy-efficiency programs beyond demand response.
This was Intel Capital's first investment in CPower, and it's a little bit outside of their comfort zone. But Steve Eichenlaub, managing director of platform technologies, cleantech and digital health for Intel Capital, said in a statement that Intel's investments are "focused on accelerating adoption of Smart Grid technologies" - a bigger smart grid tech market will only boost Intel's ability to sell its communication chips to utilities and smart grid vendors.
2). Grid Net: Like CPower, Grid Net is another way for Intel to invest in smart grid tech. Intel Capital invested in Grid Net back in 2006 and the funding announced today is Intel Capital's third follow-on investment. Grid Net builds smart meter software based off of the wireless network standard WiMAX - Intel has supplied Grid Net with WiMAX-based chips and GE has developed a WiMAX-based smart meter. If Grid Net is able to get utilities to embrace WiMAX, it could create a massive market for Intel's WiMAX chipsets. Grid Net's founder and CEO Ray Bell says that Grid Net's ecosystem is one of the first truly open-standards based approaches to building a meter.
Intel Capital is just one of the investors in Grid Net's Series C funding. Braemar Energy Ventures led the round which also included Catamount Ventures, and GE Energy Financial Services.
3). Convey Computer: Convey Computer makes something called "hybrid-core computing," which is software and hardware that helps high performance computers run faster with less energy. Intel likes the technology because it comes integrated with an Intel multi-core processor. Intel Capital's investment was its second funding of Convey and was part of Convey's $24.15 million Series B round, which also included Braemar Energy Ventures, CenterPoint Ventures, InterWest Partners, Rho Ventures and Xilinx.
4). iControl: iControl makes a home monitoring and energy management product. Earlier this month the company announced that it has raised $23 million in a series C round from Intel Capital, Cisco, Comcast Interactive Capital, GE Security, Tyco International's ADT Security Services, Charles River Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' iFund. This was a follow-on investment from Intel Capital. While selling chips for "the digital home" (connecting entertainment, media, communications and work via screens and networks in the home) has been a hot space for years for Intel, the addition of energy management to the package could be a significant way to make the connected home a reality.
5). Powervation: Last but not least is the company I know least about. Perhaps because they're based in Limerick, Ireland. The company is three years old and makes technology that helps electronic manufacturers create computing gear with better power performance and energy efficiency. Back in 2007 the company raised a Series A round of $10 million from Scottish Equity Partners, Intel Capital, Venture Tech Alliance, 4th Level Ventures and Enterprise Ireland. This latest funding was Intel Capital's follow-on round.
CNano proprietary manufacturing technology enables large scale production at a lower cost structure than other commercial nanotube manufacturing processes. The growing list of commercial applications for carbon nanotubes includes conductive plastics for electronics and automotive, structural composites for sporting goods and aerospace, conductive coatings for displays and aerospace and electrodes for batteries and super capacitors among others.
"CNano has achieved a truly significant milestone. The company has broken through a
barrier that has existed in this market up until now. CNano can now bring mass
produced nano materials to market at the right price. They have successfully scaled the manufacturing process for making carbon nanotubes. This now makes their unique
combination of elevated mechanical properties and low electrical resistivity available at the low cost necessary for adoption in large consumer markets," said Tom Baruch, founder and managing director of CMEA Capital, who serves as chairman of CNano.
"CNano's management has brought high quality US-style manufacturing into China,
tapping the best from both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Through its large scale
production of carbon nanotubes, we expect to see more applications that will be feasible that leverage the highly unique properties of this material," said Peter Liu, Chairman of WI Harper.
URL:
http://www.cnanotechnology.com/en/energy.html
Last October, Wal-Mart Stores' (WMT) then-CEO, H. Lee Scott Jr., stood at a podium in Beijing's swank Shangri-La Hotel and politely unleashed a litany of demands on the crowd. For the more than 1,000 suppliers gathered in the ballroom, the dynamic was familiar. After all, Wal-Mart became the world's biggest retailer in part by obsessively pressuring its suppliers to cut prices.
But this time the message was different. Rather than hammering on the importance of cutting costs, Scott spent half an hour building a case for why Wal-Mart's vast network of partners-from components makers to factories and shippers-had to go green. "Our goal is for supplier factories to meet or exceed all social and environmental laws and regulations," said Scott. Meeting these standards "is not optional."
To spur these changes, Scott offered both a carrot and a stick. Wal-Mart pledged to work with its top suppliers to help improve their operations, teaching them how to increase energy efficiency and how to cut the amount of raw materials they use. The threat: By 2012, Wal-Mart would pull its orders from companies not meeting the new standards.
Tracking Energy Use a Must
Because of Wal-Mart's size and scale, Scott's pledge rippled across a vast swath of China's manufacturing sector. The company buys some $9 billion worth of goods every year from some 20,000 vendors.
The scope of Wal-Mart's green goals is also without parallel. The mandate requires Chinese factories to track great volumes of data on energy use and to make it available for audits. Wal-Mart's top 200 factories have to become 20% more energy-efficient by 2012. "Many Western companies can't track their own energy consumption," says Andrew Winston, consultant and author of the book Green to Gold, who attended the meeting. "Getting Chinese companies to track these kinds of operations data takes [Wal-Mart] many steps forward."
The results already are beginning to trickle in. With Wal-Mart's help, Jiangsu Redbud Dyeing Technology in Changshu City, Jiangsu Province, has cut coal consumption by one-tenth and is aiming to bring toxic emissions down to zero. The company has accelerated new product innovation: Redbud Dyeing has garnered more than 150 patents for its line of environment-friendly jute-based textiles.
Keeping a Focus On Price
Wal-Mart's fast-growing network of 144 Chinese stores is playing a part, too. Adapting green building technologies developed in the U.S., Wal-Mart China is opening stores that use 40% less energy than its older stores. In existing sites, it plans retrofits that will reduce energy use by about one-third by 2010. Water is another focus. Over the next two years, Wal-Mart China aims to halve water use by installing water-conservation fixtures in bathrooms, kitchens, and maintenance closets.
Smart tactics spread quickly among factories, says Andrew Hutson, a supply chain expert at the Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S.-based nonprofit environmental group, who has been advising Wal-Mart without receiving compensation. As a rule of thumb, buyers such as Wal-Mart try to divvy up a given order among at least eight factories. Manufacturers, in turn, follow a similar rule: Typically they won't book more than an eighth of the required capacity with a single customer. When a factory accepts Wal-Mart's standards, the plant's other customers are likely to benefit from any efficiency gains. "This is ultimately about making the supply chain more efficient," says Hutson. "If Wal-Mart can help do that, the factories will carry through these practices to all their customers."
It's fair to ask whether managers who are concentrating on going green will still be able to keep a laser-like focus on bringing prices down. Hutson argues that an eco-focus ultimately serves the company's low-price goals. By helping its suppliers cut waste and reduce spending on energy, Wal-Mart fully expects to see those savings passed on in lower prices. "Lowest cost doesn't have to come from past method-the squeeze-'em-till-they-bleed approach. If anything, that approach leads to environmental degradation." he says.
URL:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_21/b4132044814736.htm?chan=magazine+channel_in+depth
If you live in San Francisco, you have yet another reason to pat yourself on the back: according to a recent survey of 3,750 people living in the 25 largest U.S. cities, San Franciscans are the least-wasteful people in the country.
Findings comes in the form of a study, sponsored by Nalgene as part of its America's Least Wasteful Cities campaign (ALWC), timed to coincide with "Earth Month," the increasingly long run-up to Earth Day, and aims to raise awareness of just how far we've come as a country to adopting green behaviors.
(A much-needed caveat: if we were to revisit my per capita trash post from earlier in March, we'd see that being the least-wasteful U.S. city, compared to waste levels in European countries as just one example, is about as proud an accomplishment as being the greenest mountaintop-removal coal-mining company.)
Caveats aside, the survey offers an interesting look at self-reported environmental behavior. The research firm Greenfield Online polled at least 150 residents of each of the biggest 25 cities in the country about their shopping, recycling, transportation, lifestyle and environmental outlook to gauge just how green these cities actually are.
Not surprisingly, San Francisco takes the cake, with an overall score of 1,025.45 points. New York City lands second prize with 1,004.01 points, and Portland, Ore., was the only other city to break the 1,000-point barrier, with 1,001.66 points.
The most-wasteful cities in the country is apparently Atlanta, with 857.51 points, with Dallas, Indianapolis and Houston bringing up the rear. Some of SF's proud accomplishments:
San Francisco's high rankings:SF fell short in just one category: for limiting showers to less than 5 minutes, the City by the Bay came in 12th.
- Recycling - 1st
- Reusing wrapping paper - 1st
- Turning off the water while brushing teeth - 1st
- Avoiding driving for trips that are less than 2 miles from home- 1st
- Using reusable containers in place of single-serve bottles of water/soda or other beverages - 2nd
- Reusing zip-lock bags and tin foil - 2nd
- Participating in their city's sustainability/environmental programs - 2nd
- Using energy efficient light bulbs - 2nd
- Saving leftovers and meals to eat again - 2nd
- Buying bulk food to avoid extra packaging - 2nd
- Taking public transportation - 2nd
For Atlanta, not a lot of notable successes; the city's residents came in fifth in composting and eighth in using rain barrels, but got a lot of last-place finishes as well:
Atlanta's low rankings:• Using reusable containers in place of single-serve disposable containers (zip lock bags, tin foil, etc.) - 23rd
- Throwing away less than 2 bags of trash a week - 25th
- Participating in city sustainability/environmental programs - 25th
- Recycling - 25th
- Using energy efficient light bulbs - 25th
- Borrowing books from the library - 25th
- Avoiding buying bottled water - 24th
- Using reusable bottles in place of single-serve, disposable plastic water bottles - 24th
- Saving leftovers to eat again - 23rd
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the U.S. West scored higher on average -- five cities ranked in the top: SF, Portland, Seattle, L.A. and Denver -- while the South and Midwest (which I just serendipitously typed "Midwaste") scored the lowest: Atlanta, Dallas, Indianapolis, Houston and St. Louis make up the bottom five cities.
Because these are all self-reported figures, they should be taken with a grain of salt, but there is an interesting inversion of the green halo that usually arises from these surveys (see Joel Makower's post, "Green Consumers' Irrational Exuberance," for more on this). But even though survey respondents in the more wasteful states overall ranked themselves lower, there remains a kind of green optimism throughout: one of the questions asked respondents if they planned to be more environmentally conscious in the next year. Who's going to respond no to that? In SF: only 9 percent didn't say yes (presumably because they're already green enough...); in New York City only 14 percent didn't say yes, and at the bottom of the charts 80 percent of Atlanta residents said they planned to do better next year.
In fact, only two cities' residents broke the 80 percent mark when asked if they planned to try harder: Houston (77 percent) and Phoenix (79 percent) were the least ambitious of the green cities.
The full rankings are on the next page; details about the survey and a handy map are online at LeastWastefulCities.com.
To provide a better gauge of wastefulness or non-wastefulness, questions were then weighted, reasoning that some actions are have a higher influence on waste or overall impact on the environment. Each question was assigned a value of 1, 5, 10 or 25 by which the unweighted score was multiplied, providing the final, weighted score:
1 = Low impact behavior (e.g. Reusing wrapping paper)
5 = Moderate impact (e.g. Turning water off when brushing teeth)
10 = High impact (e.g. Recycling)
25 = Extremely high impact (e.g. Taking public transportation)
Scoring Range
The ALWC Index is based on a scoring system with a potential individual high score of 1930 (all answers value "10" x weighting multipliers) and a low individual score of 193 (all answers value "1" x weighting multipliers).
| Rank | City | Weighted Score |
| 1 | San Francisco, CA | 1025.45 |
| 2 | New York City, NY | 1004.01 |
| 3 | Portland, OR | 1001.66 |
| 4 | Seattle, WA | 985.03 |
| 5 | Los Angeles, CA | 960.46 |
| 6 | Denver, CO | 943.77 |
| 7 | Minneapolis, MN | 943.17 |
| 8 | Washington, D.C. | 941.81 |
| 9 | Boston, MA | 941.29 |
| 10 | Philadelphia, PA | 932.59 |
| 11 | Chicago, IL | 931.03 |
| 12 | Baltimore, MD | 927.26 |
| 13 | Detroit, MI | 911.59 |
| 14 | Pittsburgh, PA | 909.42 |
| 15 | Orlando, FL | 901.71 |
| 16 | Cleveland, OH | 900.77 |
| 17 | Sacramento, CA | 899.78 |
| 18 | Miami, FL | 898.49 |
| 19 | Tampa, FL | 896.01 |
| 20 | Phoenix, AZ | 887.48 |
| 21 | St. Louis, MO | 883.38 |
| 22 | Houston, TX | 879.16 |
| 23 | Indianapolis, IN | 872.75 |
| 24 | Dallas, TX | 860.60 |
| 25 | Atlanta, GA | 857.51 |
URL:
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2009/03/31/most-wasteful-american-cities
In a recent round table in front of The CSIS Energy and National Security Program and the Asia Society Initiative for U.S.-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate, Peggy Lui and Steve Papermaster spoke about how the Greening of China is an opportunity for US firms.
In the hour and a half of audio (download the MP3 here) a lot of issues were coverered related to JUCCCE, the problems that China faces, and what avenues there are for cooperation.
For those that are not familiar with JUCCCE, the first 15 minutes is dedicated to that as Steve sets the stage for Peggy, who spends the following 15 minutes covering the three topics (my notes included):
3 Focuses of Peggy's presentation
1) Smart Grid -
- only 2 grid companies in China State Grid and Southern Grid, ith State Grid holding 88% of the market.
- only need to reach a few key decision makers to make things happen
- Trememdous opportunity for a equipment sales, economies of scale, and joint learning eercies as the grid go in.
- May 26 JUCCCE Smart Grid forum to help bring together the parties that will work together and hopefully develop the first pilot/ demonstration project
2) Urbanization
- McKinsey puts 12 cities (hub & Spoke model) at more than 30 million people
- Mayors are now "competing with each other", but there are lacking capabilities in implementing the eco-cities
- Need to enable China to leapfrog into energy smart
- Currently putting case studies of other cities/ other solutions to help build knowledge base. Will include solution providers
3) Vocational training for Green jobs
- Why only develop green jobs for US? why not work with Chinese officials to develop green workers in both countries.
- If we were to give everyone in China a free solar panel, they couldn't be installed
- opportunity for Dept of labor/ energy as way to export green laborers from US to China
- need to develop a curriculum
Other programs JUCCCE is thinking about
1) CFL Swap for 10 million light bulbs - to be executed on in next 7 months (wraping up funding now)
2) Green Heroes - consumer advocacy program based in SMS platform (not launched yet)
following Peggy's presentation is a long session of edited (really annoying) Q&A and I would suggest everyone make their way through this hour as some important topics are highlighted - I am not going to bullet point it.
In general though, my thoughts on Peggy's comments are that she is correct in saying that there are opportunities for the US and china to cooperate together in this endevour, and moreover, it is imperative that they do so.
Where I admire JUCCCE's 2 year track record is that Peggy has done a great job of igniting people at many levels to converse and take the first steps. It is a process that I know has not been an easy one, but her conference last year was a testiment to that.
URL:
http://www.cleanergreenerchina.com/2009/04/18/the-greening-of-china-as-opportunity-for-us-firms/
Atlanta Georgia is creating one of the countries first "Zero Waste Zones," in an attempt to keep recyclables out of landfills.
How much of the material that goes into the worlds landfills could have been recycled? An amazing 82%! Much of this "garbage" is things like paper products, food, plastics and glass.
Atlanta Recycles knows this is a problem and has partnered with the Green Foodservice Alliance, and is working in conjunction with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 4 and the Pollution Prevention Assistance Division of the Department of Natural Resources to launch the southeast's first, and one of the nation's first, Zero Waste Zones.
URL:
http://www.twilightearth.com/2009/02/atlanta-zero-waste-zone-one-of-first-in-us/
