To the after-party

by
Posted live from Greenbuild. Our BuildingGreen after-party starts in about a half-hour, and I'm the designated greeter/bouncer; about 300 people are expected. (It was decided to have our after-party on the first night, which I think was a darned good idea.) So probably no more posts from here tonight (from me anyway) unless I find some active brain cells and wifi. UPDATE - three pics after the jump...
Read more »

You have 61 trees... please don't lose them

by
We humans number about 6.5 billion. How many trees are there? NASA has been taking satellite pictures of the Earth's forests for years and sharing them with ecologists who have figured out an algorithm for calculating worldwide tree totals based on patterns of sunlight. The result of that research is a worldwide tree census, as of 2005, of 400,246,300,201, or 400 billion.
Read more »

Generating Electricity from the Sun

by
The 140 acre array of photovoltaic panels at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada generates 14 megawatts of power..

Almost all of our methods for generating electricity are fundamentally the same. Coal-, nuclear-, and natural-gas-fired power plants boil water to produce high-pressure steam that spins a dynamo in a "steam turbine." The wood-chip-fired combined-heat-and-power (CHP) plant that we want to build in Brattleboro works the same way.

Read more »

SketchUp 7 Released

by
Last Friday a few of us gathered around a phone behind the closed doors of one of the conference rooms here at BuildingGreen and had a chat with John Bacus from Google's team of SketchUp developers, and Aaron Stein, one of their PR folks. The supersecret talk was about the next release of that program — SketchUp 7 — which within the last couple hours has gone public.
Read more »

USGBC, 15 Years Old, Looks Back

by
In honor of itself (hmm... was really the best way for me to kick off this post?), the USGBC has done a kind of a cool thing. A letter released to its membership says,
... when we reflected on how best we could mark our anniversary as a community of leaders called the U.S.
Read more »

Video: Household carbon emissions are... creepy

by

If M. Night Shyamalan did a movie on carbon emissions, it might look something like this. The Alliance for Climate Protection has a video that helps homeowners visualize their carbon emissions. After all, they're colorless, odorless, and come with a nifty time-delay of consequences that can lull a person into thinking that it's all going to be fine. Everything was fine... until someone left the coffeemaker, but who? The bed is made, but no one's home. Whom does the dryer tumble for? The ancestral photo in the hallway?

Read more »