Some of the other as-it-happened Greenbuild 2007 coverage around the web

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  • One of the posts at the gb.07 Journal (written by USGBC staffers Lauren Kuritz and Doug Smeath) is about the ASID / USGBC collaboration, ReGreen, "a collection of tools to help you focus your renovation projects toward sustainability, durability, comfort and style." Peter Yost, Jennifer Atlee (best researcher I know), Alex Wilson, Amie Walter, and Julia Jandrisits of BuildingGreen all spent long hours finishing up the initial draft of the
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Who's Driving?

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I had an interesting conversation while waiting for Robert Murray's presentation on the construction outlook. A senior associate from one of the leading architectural firms pointed out that the concept of integrating sustainable design into a plan has, until now, been initiated largely by the designer/architect. One client of theirs, a box store, required a payback of three years or less, and that's what's held them back. Tough, I would imagine.

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Robert Murray at Build Boston

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A very interesting lunchtime presentation at Build Boston by Robert Murray, Vice President, Economic Affairs at McGraw-Hill. Some notes of interest related to the sustainable building, green building, and building trends/predictions in general:
  • Green building as a part of construction trends is starting to effect the macroeconomic picture. This earned a few slides in the Powerpoint. Great to hear!
  • He noted that the Energy Policy Act of 2005 has had an effect on conservation efforts.
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Thoughts From Chicago

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I haven't yet posted from Greenbuild, mostly because this was my first time at the conference, and it took most of my mental energy just to sort through the experience of 22,000 people and all of the information I was taking in. Not posting, however, has given me some space to start thinking about some of the big-picture themes of the conference. The most striking is the influence of social justice and social movements on green building, and vice versa. Social justice is, of course, the third leg of the triple-bottom-line stool.

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Alex Wilson on Water Conservation at Greenbuild

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While there were lots of highlights at Greenbuild, the only way I can really be productive at such a big conference is to narrow my focus. I'm researching water conservation and water efficiency for an upcoming EBN feature article, and I made great progress on that in Chicago. First, there was doubtless lots of water saved here by not having drinking water readily available.

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Does Wind Power Increase Carbon Emissions?

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I wrote earlier today about grumbling at a Greenbuild session on life-cycle assessment, and I assigned the blame to bad news delivered by Stanley Rhodes of Scientific Certification Systems. The biggest shocker might have been Stanley's analysis that a given unit of electricity produced by wind resulted in increased greenhouse gas emissions compared with a unit of electricity produced by traditional fossil fuels (unfortunately he did not name t
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