Neat article on Treehugger showing several wicked-cool examples of buildings that keep cool using stored water, overlay walls and other techniques that used to be common, but have been largely abandoned as air conditioning became more available. These buildings return to their cultural roots while bringing 21st-century green technology into the equation.
I’m impressed—how about you?
I recently discovered that my pages have vanished from the top couple of pages for searches for résumé writing in my local area.
From 1985 to 1995, résumé writing for local clients was the biggest chunk of my business. At this point, it’s a very small percentage of what I do—my focus is far more on marketing consulting and copywriting for authors, publishers, and small businesses (especially those with green products and services).
But even though it’s a tiny fraction of my business, it’s work that I enjoy and am good at, and for local clients, it provides me with some human contact that I don’t get through a lot of my other work. And I do want to be found if people are looking.
For years, Google has brought me an occasional résumé client. I hadn’t noticed any drop off, but the résumé portion is such a small part of the operation these days, that it’s hard to measure real drops.
So, in December, I made a special page, just for resume writing in Western Massachusetts, and crammed it full of place names for cities, towns, and counties around here. And added Like buttons for Google+ and Facebook.
Google is known to “sandbox” new pages: to let them sit outside the index for a while until they determine the page to be legitimate. And a page with this many keywords may be particularly at risk.
You can participate in this experiment at https://www.accuratewriting.com/wmass_resumes.shtml. Please click the two buttons; let’s see how long it takes for Google to notice. I will report back the results, whatever happens.
So far, in the three months since the page went up, Google has sent me one résumé client. I think the page is still in the sandbox. However, if you beleive in the Law of Attraction, here’s some validation: I’ve had a noticeable uptick in résumé work generally, but from other sources.
This Malaysian architect has successfully done skyscrapers with green roofs terracing all the way up to the top of these very tall buildings. Cool!
You may have heard the slogan, “the greenest building is the one that’s already built.”
Think about it: You’re using existing resources, and those resources are already on-site. For the parts of the existing building that you can adapt or fix, you don’t have to mine or cut down anything, you don’t have to transport anything, and you don’t have to clear a new site out of farmland or forest.
Here’s a nice article on TriplePundit about a renovation of a former military barracks in Ft.Carson, Colorado into an office building. The project cost only a quarter of what a new building would have cost, and is green enough to be submitted for LEED silver certification. And that’s particularly interesting, because my understanding is that military barracks were typically built cheaply, quickly, and with little thought for conservation.
Another great example is the Empire State Building—which spent $20 million to achieve annual energy savings of more than $4 million. That works out to better than 20 percent ROI—at a time when you can’t even get 1 percent in a savings account. Not a bad investment!
Very interesting article on Sustainable Brands, “Climate Change – Good For Business” by John Friedman.
Friedman cites Richard Branson on the opportunties in the environmental field:
“I have described the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as one of the greatest threats to the ongoing prosperity and sustainability of life on the planet,” he says. “The good news is that creating businesses that will power our growth, and reduce our carbon output while protecting resources is also the greatest wealth-generating opportunity of our generation.”
And I agree. I have profiled many entrepreneurs over the years who are succeeding with creative green businesses. In many cases, they are creating whole new market sectors—such as an entrepreneur who saves water by selling a spray fluid that largely neutralizes the odor and stain of urine, thus substantially reducing a family’s need to flush.
What is perhaps most interesting about the Friedman article is his historical perspective of energy and transportation not only as wealth-generators, but as environmental problem-solvers for their time:
A high percentage of the wealthiest people in history – excluding despots and conquerors – have made their fortunes in the areas of energy, transportation and construction. The Rockefeller fortune was based on oil (energy), Andrew Carnegie (steel), Cornelius Vanderbilt saw the revolution from wind to steam engines and built an empire in shipping and railroads. Henry Ford took the automobile from the purview of the wealthy to a staple of the average American household by increasing production efficiency, thereby reducing costs for consumers and creating an entire industry that was much of the basis for the American economy for decades…
Indeed many of these changes in industry and transportation have followed the evolution from individual power (feet or paddles), to animal power (horses and horses and buggies) to steam (initially powered in the U.S. by wood and then coal) and finally to internal combustion and electricity. It is important to note that in addition to increasing speed and efficiency, many of these changes were furthered by the desire for more environmentally friendly alternatives [emphasis added]; streetcars and buses in New York were seen as a solution to the manure that was lining the city streets.
Of course, there’s an obvious caution here. The message from the past, viewed through the lens of 2012 and catastrophic climate change, is that sometimes, solutions to old problems cause greater problems. This is a principle that must inform us as we go forward, to avoid blundering into even worse situations as we fix the urgent problems we face.
The good news: we know a lot more about what works and what doesn’t. For instance, we already know that nuclear power is not a solution to climate change and has enormous catastrophic potential. We know that fracking to drill for natural gas not only pollutes water but probably causes earthquakes.
And we also know that we have to be careful to develop solar, wind, hydro, tidal, magnetic, and other clean, renewable energy sources in ways that are both environmentally and economically sustainable.
This is our mission, our duty, our responsibility. Let’s get it done—the right way.
I love arrangements that make clean and renewable energy available to the very poor. Here’s one I found in the very conservative UK magazine, The Economist, where homeowners or tenants get a very small solar system with a $10 initial deposit and then another dollar now and then as they use the power. At $80, they own the unit free and clear (or can upgrade to a larger one).
Tritten is Chairman of the Green Parliamentary Group in the German Bundestag and a former federal environment minister.
The technology to capture energy generated by people working out on exercise equipment has been around for years. I read about eco-pioneers who would bike in order to watch TV, probably at least 20 or 25 years ago.
Yet even in very green-conscious Massachusetts, it’s taken until now for a fitness center to use the power its members generate.
Congrats to Energia, of my own town of Hadley, MA, for being the first partially human-powered fitness center in the state (and one of only 70 in all of North America, to get with the program (pun intended).
Jim Hightower, populist author and entertaining voice for common sense for decades (and a terrific speaker—if you ever get the chance, go hear him!) has a great article on the real agenda of those pushing the Keystone XL gas pipeline from Canada to Texas.
It’s to get that Canadian crude down to oil refineries in the free trade zone at Port Arthur, Texas—where it can be shipped overseas a lot more cheaply.
We Americans get the land takings, the toxic leakage, the interruption of wildlife habitat corridors and all the rest of the “good stuff”; foreign markets get the oil; prices in the US go up. Such a Deal!
Hightower is the former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture and a generally knowledgeable guy. I find him credible, and I trust his analysis.
Thanks but no thanks. Please spread this widely.
In the 1970 movie, “Love Story,” Oliver has the famous line, “Love means never having to say you‘re sorry.” It was bad advice then and it’s still bad advice.
When you do something wrong, the right response is to apologize, sincerely and without a lot of waffly “but” language or excuses. Maybe you even do something to make it up to the wronged party. Unlike Oliver, I apologize to my wife when I’ve been wrong about something or behaved badly, and she does the same to me when she’s the one who screwed up. And I apologize to other people if I’ve done something that inadvertently hurt them.
Will someone please tell Newt Gingrich that this is how mature people, and mature countries, behave? Gingrich is upset that President Obama apologized because the military in Afghanistan accidentally caught up some Korans in a batch of papers they were incinerating.
I’m betting Gingrich would stridently demand an apology if someone of another religion burned copies of the New Testament. Why does’t he see the need for an apology when someone else’s holy book is destroyed.
Or does being Republican now mean “never having to say you’re sorry”?