Great news from the NESEA membership! Congratulations to Dietz & Company Architects on receiving the LEED Gold Certification for their work on a project with the YWCA! This is especially exiting news because Marc Sternick, VP of Dietz & Co, is on our Board of Directors and the firm is a local, NESEA business member.

The full press release is included here:

Springfield, Mass. – Dietz & Company Architects, Inc. has received LEED for Homes Gold certification from USGBC (the U.S. Green Building Council) for the recently completed units at the YWCA’s Campus of Hope. These new units provide housing that serves to transition women from domestic violence shelters to longer-term living facilities. The 32,000 square foot project is made up of 20 apartments and eight congregate housing units within its walls. This project was part of the larger Campus of Hope initiative
that was started more than 10 years ago for which Dietz & Company Architects was the master planner. Dietz & Company Architects also
designed the first phase of this campus: a 60,000 square foot building that includes administrative offices, meeting and classrooms as well as an on-site shelter.

In the finest tradition of the YWCA, this project features cutting edge technology in Green construction, women-owned partnerships and the
overwhelming support of the community it seeks to serve. The project, originally designed to achieve LEED for Homes Silver certification level, exceeded that level by achieving Gold certification.

Several factors that supported the LEED for Homes Gold Certification include: super-insulated walls and airtight construction, efficient mechanical systems that include roof-mounted photovoltaic panels for electricity, sustainable site design and the use of green construction materials. A healthy indoor environment, pollution reduction and lower utility/maintenance costs are also key elements of this certification. This highly efficient building is expected to reduce water and energy consumption by 20 to 30 percent over typical code compliant construction.

NL Construction was the general contractor for this project and the project was supported by the LEED for Homes Provider, CET. The LEED
(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System™ is a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for
developing high-performance, sustainable buildings.

Join us January 10th, 2012 at the Mitsubishi Training Center
in Southborough, MA.

RSVP here!

Due to overwhelming demand for a more technical session to follow-up our recent NZB meeting at the Mitsubishi facility, Susan Pickett and Rick Nortz from Mitsubishi Electric are offering a presentation to discuss the types of inverter driven heat pump products that can benefit your high performance buildings.

The presentation will include residential, light commercial, and larger commercial solutions for carbon neutral heating and cooling in all climates and they will discuss product attributes, design considerations, energy savings, LEED, and controls.

There will be dinner following the presentation. And guess what… It’s still free!

Here is the essential info:

What: Mitsubishi Technical Follow-Up (to the Net Zero Energy event in the fall)
When: January 10th, 2012  – 3PM – 5PM, dinner to follow
Where: Mitsubishi Training Center, 150 Cordaville Rd. (RT. 85), Southborough, MA 01772
How? RSVP HERE or contact 413.774.6051 ext. 20, or rheldt@nesea.org

Here are the remarks I delivered at the annual meeting on Saturday night, for those of you who weren’t able to join us. It was a great gathering!

“Welcome everybody to the 2011 annual meeting of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association.

It feels really appropriate to me that this year’s annual meeting is happening here, in New York City. Clearly, New York is a hub for sustainable energy practice in the Northeast, and our New York City Chapter, GreenHome NYC is a shining example of that. GreenHomeNYC is one of our most active chapters, and in addition to hosting us for this annual meeting, they have a huge number of events on the docket this fall – including the blow out NEW New York Block Party Shai just described.

Any of you who read the September 2011 edition of Scientific American know that the future of our country – indeed our world – is urban. Projections say that nearly 70 percent of the global population will be urban by 2050. Cities face huge challenges, but they are also engines of the type of innovation that will be necessary for us to create a sustainable future.

Finally, as I’ll share with you later in my remarks, one of NESEA’s key initiatives for 2012 will involve “expanding the choir” – in other words, dramatically increasing the number of people we reach in order to serve our mission, which is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy solutions in the built environment. As an organization with deep roots in Red Sox territory, one of the most logical ways for us to do that is to expand our geographic reach into the southern part of our 10-state region, starting with New York City. And so tonight I am delighted to call myself a Yankees fan, and even more delighted to be here in NYC.

I want to spend a bit of time tonight telling you where we’ve been over the past year, and where we’re headed. But before I do that, a few “thank yous” are in order:

First, I would like to thank the Institute for Sustainable Cities for hosting us. We are delighted to have such a wonderful and centrally located place for our meeting, and are very grateful for your involvement. I would also like to thank Green Mountain Energy for their sponsorship of this event. Sponsorship for our annual meeting is a relatively new thing, and we greatly appreciate your support, as well as that of our other sponsors throughout the year.

Most of all, thank you to GreenHomeNYC – and in particular to Lifetime NESEA member Andy Padian, NESEA Board Member Steven Lenard, and GreenHome Executive Director Shai Lauros for the phenomenal job you have done putting together this amazing annual meeting on a shoestring budget, and a day’s worth of activities to make it worth any NESEA member’s while to travel here to the meeting. I have a small gift for each of you as a token of our appreciation.

Now, a quick review of the past year. At last year’s annual meeting I shared with you that we had just adopted a strategic plan. Just a year later, we have implemented almost all of what was in that plan. Here’s a brief snapshot of what’s happened within the past year.

We spent much of the past year focused on new partnerships. As many of you probably know, NESEA’s mission is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy solutions in the built environment. But nobody ever said that we needed to accomplish this mission alone. We have adopted a philosophy of “coopetition” – one of my favorite made-up words – under which we have actively sought out like-minded organizations, and in some cases competitors, to help us meet our goals. We identified several organizations that share parts of our mission, and that can help us spread the word to meet it more effectively.

For example, within the past few months we have struck a deal with the Boston Society of Architects to deliver a track of seminars at their Build Boston conference in November. It’s a great opportunity for us to get the good work of the NESEA community in front of a broader audience, and for that audience, which is clamoring for more information on sustainability, to sample some very high quality sessions.

We also collaborated with the German Consulate and the Upper Austria Trade Commission to bring BE conference attendees cutting-edge products and information from Europe. We hope to expand this relationship and to invite other countries to participate in BE, to make it an international hub for networking and learning about best practices in sustainable energy in the Northeast.

Closely related to these types of partnerships, we also spent time last year shoring up relationships with longtime NESEA supporters and sponsors, and cultivating new ones. We attracted support from 14 new sponsors in 2011. Although we continue to operate in an extremely challenging economic environment, we are optimistic that we will be able to work closely with these organizations to provide them with the value they need to justify deepening their support of (and involvement with) NESEA.

We also spent a lot of time last year figuring out how chapters could best help us meet our mission, and what we could offer them in return. We invited NESEA chapters to work with us to develop a new chapter structure, and seven agreed to do so. We will be working with these chapters in the coming year to provide clearer, more consistent branding and programming that advances our mutual missions.

BuildingEnergy11 received rave reviews. We tried a lot of new things, including a full day educators’ summit, which attracted 100 people, and a second plenary session, the Women of Green, which was one of the high points of the conference. We held our own with respect to attendance in an economic climate in which other conferences were hemorrhaging – attracting nearly 4,000 professionals and 150 exhibitors to the conference.

Our Green Buildings Open House program held its own as well, attracting nearly 500 host sites and 12,000 visitors to learn about sustainable energy solutions in a variety of residential and commercial buildings, both new and retrofitted. Just last week, I heard an incredibly inspiring story from one of our hosts, Max Horn, who lives in Hull, MA. Max attended the tour for several years, and was finally inspired to build his own high performance home a few years ago. And now it’s his mission to educate others to do the same, with all that he’s learned from the NESEA community. Talk about a program with real world impact!

So what’s next for NESEA? I alluded to it before.

For more than 30 years the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) has been a membership organization that has appealed to a relatively small audience of professionals and consumers interested in promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency through varying means – advocacy, consumer education, professional development, and networking chief among them.

Over time, as the sustainable energy field has become more saturated, we have narrowed our mission and our focus. Our mission is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment, and we meet it primarily by connecting professionals to each other, to ideas and to consumers.

With only 1,000 members, and 4,000 BuildingEnergy Conference attendees each year, we have been preaching to a small choir, given the huge need for sustainable energy solutions in the Northeastern United States.

It’s time to expand the choir dramatically. We need to expand geographically, by doing a better job of serving our community outside of New England. We need to expand from a generational perspective, making sure we’re welcoming the next generation of practitioners into the fold, and learning from them. And, perhaps most importantly, we need to expand to reach audiences who may not yet “get” that sustainability is a business imperative.

How will we do that?

First, through an increased focus on our current members and our potential members. We’ve been surveying our community to see what’s important to them in a membership organization. And frankly, there aren’t a lot of surprises in their answers. Turns out that what they value in NESEA is real, vetted solutions, access to multidisciplinary professionals, and chances to interact and share with one another in person. So we’ll be working to create more such opportunities, largely by providing better support to our chapters. Within the next year, we’ll work with our most active chapters to develop and promote at least 6 local programs that help them serve NESEA members at the local level. The first of these is already scheduled for Nov. 10th in Southborough MA, and will be hosted by NESEA business member Mitsubishi. It will be NESEA’s first ever joint chapter networking meeting, and will feature an information session on “getting to zero” and on NESEA’s Zero Net Energy Building Award. We hope to draw members from Springfield and Boston, MA, the Cape, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.

We will also be working to create an infrastructure for collaboration. One of the primary tools for this will be the NESEA website. Yes, we’ve heard your feedback over the years, and we know it sucks. I am happy to report that I’ve just been given the board’s blessing to replace it with a cleaner, easier-to-use website that will better help you, as members of our community, find each other, show your good work, and find the resources you need to do more sustainable energy work better.

Finally, we’ll be working this year to expand BE beyond three days per year in Boston. For starters, we are testing a BE Masters Series of online courses, taught by BuildingEnergy presenters, to take fuller advantage of the wonderful content generated at BE year round and to allow those who might be geographically challenged to participate. We also plan to create a speakers bureau of BE presenters who are willing to deliver their seminars in various locations throughout NESEA territory, in conjunction with chapter meetings or other events. Ultimately – and this may be part of the multi-year plan – we hope to create a year-round on-line BE community, moderated by BE planning committee members to encourage continuous learning and connection – and possibly a BE South Conference, to be held somewhere in the NYC area.

As you can see, we have some very ambitious plans. But at its root, NESEA is a member-driven community. All of this must happen for the members, and be driven largely by the members. So if any of what you have heard resonates with you, I invite you to get involved. If you’re not already a member, join NESEA. If you are a member, attend the Building Energy Conference, exhibit there, sponsor. Even better, help shape our content by joining the planning committee for the BuildingEnergy Conference or the BE Masters Series. Register your most recent project for our Green Buildings Open House tour each year in October. Enter your best work in NESEA’s Zero Net Energy Building Award to compete for our annual $10,000 prize. Submit an article for publication in our Northeast Sun magazine. Make this organization a true reflection of the excellent work you are doing to advance sustainable energy practices in the built environment.

I hope you’ve gotten a good feel for where we’ve been over the past year, and for where we’re headed. In a few minutes I’m going to call NESEA board chair, James Petersen to the stage. James has been a huge champion of our work to “expand the choir,” and has supported these efforts personally by being a NESEA evangelist within his own professional network. James will share his thoughts with you on how to get involved with NESEA, and why it’s imperative that you do so.

But before I call James to the stage, I’d like to close with a short video, in which some of our members themselves make a compelling case for why membership matters. This video was shot and produced for us, pro bono, at BE11 by Roger Sorkin, of Sorkin Productions, to whom we are incredibly grateful.

Thank you again for your time!”

America needs a new answer regarding energy, economics and the environment.  Our current systems are failing and the solutions currently on the table won’t work.  And everybody knows it.

We also need to rethink how we fund our government. The current tax system discourages work, productivity, free enterprise, job creation and almost every other goal and value our economy is purported to be based upon. The anger growing across America is in large part inspired by the complexity and irrationality of our tax system.

It is increasingly obvious that it isn’t enough trying to address the massive challenges that confront our nation by making minor adjustments to the sclerotic patchwork of contradictory public policies that has emerged over the decades. And recent efforts at government micromanagement of the entire econ0my are clearly not going to work. It is pretty clear from the polls that most Americans are fed up with Congress, the federal government and with politicians from both parties.

But one real solution to address many of our most fundamental challenges is astoundingly simple, clear and bold. It is a solution that can be strongly supported by people across the entire political spectrum of America – once we overcome our profound fear of sensible change.

I propose that it is time that we replace 100% of our federal government revenues with an energy tax and in doing so completely unleash our society  from the burdens and distortions of our current counterproductive tax system.

That sounds completely impossible at first thought, but as shown below, the numbers work. It is actually a far more realistic proposal than all counterproductive pseudo-solutions to the daunting problems our country faces that make their way through Congress these days.

After the failures of the Copenhagen Climate Conference and the Cap and Trade corporate welfare scheme in the Senate, the environmental and clean energy communities are regrouping to figure out what’s next.

Many environmentalists are now jumping on board with the Breakthrough Institute and others who are calling for massive new government research and development for clean energy solutions on the order of the Manhattan Project or NASA’s mission of the 1960’s to put a man on the moon. Surely better technology will be welcome. But after all the recent waste our federal government has been involved in and the massive deficits we already face, it is highly doubtful that Congressional or public support for such a huge government effort will be forthcoming.

Others have long argued that if we are serious about reducing pollution from our wasteful energy system, making renewable energy cost competitive, spurring the growth of dynamic new energy industries, creating bountiful new job opportunities, reducing our dependence on foreign oil, improving our balance of trade deficit and all sorts of other notable goals – then we clearly need to raise the price of petroleum. And we should do it simply and completely transparently through an oil tax. But up until now everyone, including me, has been talking about timid energy tax solutions that are unlikely to be enough to either do the job or garner adequate public support.

Upon reflection, I’ve come to realize conventional solutions aren’t nearly enough. Neither a modest energy tax or  significantly increased public investment in clean energy technology,  while infinitely better than corrupt proposals like Cap and Trade, are bold enough solutions. Facing continuing economic stagnation, as we pass the crest of the era of peak oil production, it’s time to completely re-imagine political possibilities and get serious about  transforming our economy and restoring our nation’s economic productivity.

Replacing 100% of our federal government revenues with an energy tax is a transformative proposal that can inspire the American people and appeal across the political spectrum, while igniting an unprecedented era of economic prosperity.

Look at the numbers:

According to the US Energy Information Agency, our country currently consumes 19,498,000 barrels of petroleum a day, which is the equivalent of 298,904,340,000 gallons of petroleum a year.

All federal revenues for fiscal year 2010 are projected to be about $2,165,000,000,000. That includes all individual income tax, corporate income tax, investment taxes, social security tax, disability insurance, hospital insurance, unemployment insurance, excise taxes, fees, energy and transportation taxes, and every other form of federal government revenue other than debt.

So doing the math, if we were to replace every single source of government revenue with a tax on petroleum, that tax would only be $7.24 per gallon. And if you add in the full recent cost of gasoline of about $2.60 a gallon nationally, not even discounting for the federal and state taxes already built into that price, the total price on gasoline and other petroleum based fuels would be $9.84 a gallon.

According to the US Energy Information Agency, that isn’t significantly more than average European gas prices in March of this year: Belgium-$7.18, France-$6.98, Germany-$7.12, Italy-$7.06, Netherlands-$7.68. And those countries are burdened with massive taxes on top of high energy prices.

On average according to the US Energy Information Agency, along with paying far more for petroleum, Europeans paid about twice what Americans paid for natural gas and coal in 2009. So if we added to the energy sources being taxed to offset current federal revenues both the over one billion short tons of coal consumed each year in the US, along with the 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas we consume annually, the overall level of fuel taxes could be around the same as  European energy prices, while completely replacing all other forms of federal taxation and government revenue.

Most sensible people would jump at the opportunity to trade a European level of energy prices in exchange for no IRS, no income taxes, no payroll taxes, no business taxes, no inheritance taxes, no government fees and no government interference with our personal lives and business revenues.

For those who will inevitably scream this level of energy taxation will make American industry uncompetitive, the one other revenue source the feds should have is a tariff on goods from countries that don’t implement similar levels of taxation on energy. That unilateral action will do far more to spur other countries toward responsible energy policy than complicated well intentioned, but unenforceable climate treaties. At the same time it could further reduce our energy taxes, or perhaps help offset the federal budget deficit.

Of course change this profound couldn’t happen overnight and would need to be phased in. And inevitably in the transition, the winners and losers will all be lobbying madly in Washington to turn a simple idea into the inevitable compromised and complicated sausage making that is all Congress seems able to produce. But if we insist that simplicity and transparency are fundamental to success, perhaps a bold proposition like this could gain enough public support to overcome the corrupting influence of lobbyists.

Is this whole idea completely crazy? …..  Maybe.

Or maybe its so obvious and simple that the only reason not to consider it is all the special interests that will be completely upended by the elimination of our current corrupt and senseless tax system. Lets face it, this kind of change would impact every single American in a major way and will scare the hell out of many. But in the end, anyone honest will recognize that it would be a far more rational and sensible way to fund our government than the increasingly untenable ways we do so today.

Think of the business and investment potential it would unleash. Think of the truly free economy unfettered by manipulations of the tax code. Think of the productivity gains when businesses make decisions based on common sense rather than tax consequences. Think of the rebirth of American industrial opportunity when advantages are eliminated for cheap products from China being subsidized by their low cost energy, lack of environmental standards and the low cost of wasting fuel in transport. Think about the jobs created when we no longer impose punishing taxes on working and on productive investment. Think of the jobs restored to this country when we eliminate the insane tax subsidies for shifting industrial productivity overseas and eliminate the payroll tax penalties on hiring people. Think about the time, money and talent it would free up when we no longer have to spend countless hours and dollars reporting our personal business to the IRS. (According to CNS news: The Internal Revenue Service  estimated that about 7.75 billion hours of human labor went into completing all of the 2009 tax forms and that doesn’t begin to count the huge amounts of time and money wasted figuring out how to game the system and avoid taxes).  Think of the personal freedom and productivity regained for everyone when we eliminate the entire irrational tax code.

Many will argue that people will start to conserve energy with high price signals, thus putting government revenues at risk. Radically reducing energy waste and pollution is one of the two fundamental propositions of the whole idea. And yes, significantly reducing the size and scope of the federal government is the other fundamental goal and benefit, one that would be a welcome relief to the vast majority of Americans.

Most Americans fundamentally trust and favor transparent market oriented solutions and don’t want the government meddling in our lives and in our economy.  Watching the sales of fuel efficient cars after the 1973 Oil Embargo, the 1979 Iranian Oil Crisis and the huge spike in gasoline prices in the summer of 2008, as well as the lack of interest in such vehicles when oil prices dropped, nobody should question the reality that unlike government programs, price signals actually  work to inspire the goals clean energy advocates hope to achieve.

This proposal is a real test for environmentalists, as well as political liberals and conservatives alike.

Are environmentalists really concerned about the environment, or as opponents often suggest, are environmental issues merely excuses for increasing the power of elitist bureaucrats to exercise government control over every aspect of our lives?

Are conservatives really interested in political freedom, economic efficiency and free markets, or is all their rhetoric really just a cover for protecting the special privileges and loopholes for increasing the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful corporate oligarchies in our country?

Liberals are bound to hate the idea initially because it removes all the redistributionist “progressive” aspects of our tax code. But based on the accelerating levels of wealth disparity in our country, the impenetrable complexity of the tax code and the hypocritical shenanigans that many prominent liberal politicians get caught using to avoid the tax burdens they want to impose on the rest of us, maybe its time for everyone to just admit that the current system is completely failing to meet those idealistic goals, which are negated by all the special loopholes embodied in the unreadable thousands of pages of the tax code. The reality is that when one includes payroll taxes in the overall calculation, our current tax system is neither progressive, fair or in any way rational.

Rather than everyone just pointing fingers and blaming the other guys for our problems, if we focus on finding solutions simple enough, bold enough and sensible enough to actually garner broad support, maybe maybe there is a possibility of rediscovering consensus in our society.

Lets start taxing waste and pollution instead of using the tax system to punish people for working, creating jobs and making productive investments. Let’s actually try real market based solutions and restore the economic competitiveness our nation enjoyed before every aspect of the economy was micromanaged by the government and manipulated for tax reasons.   Let’s encourage the prudent conservation of our limited fossil fuel reserves so we don’t impoverish our children and grandchildren with our prolifigate waste. And yes less sensibly prune back the over-reaching size and scope of our federal government.

Why single out fossil fuels for taxation? Energy is the lifeblood of a modern economy. The highly concentrated energy available from fossil fuels is a precious resource both for us and for future generations. Unlike metals and other minerals that can be readily recycled in a prudent society, once mined and burned, the concentrated energy in fossil fuels is dissipated and unavailable for future use. Arguably, those concentrated energy resources stored over millions of years shouldn’t be squandered, but rather should be husbanded wisely, as higher price signals would encourage. Balance of trade, foreign policy, pollution and a variety of other reasons which almost everyone is aware of, further contribute to the selection of fossil fuels as the sensible focus for taxation.

Perhaps as this fundamental idea of tax shifting gets refined, we will find consensus to add other wasteful, dangerous or polluting industries to the mix of appropriate consumption taxes, so we can begin to balance our federal budget and pay down our out of control federal debt, while also making our nation a safer, healthier and saner place to live.

But we should start the conversation recognizing how surprisingly affordable it could be to align rational revenue policy with sensible market mechanisms that would encourage economic prosperity, job and business growth, broadly shared environmental and clean energy goals along with the basic principles of freedom and liberty that our country was founded upon.

Let’s fundamentally reform the American economy with a government funding system that no longer undermines the most essential ideals and principles of our national heritage. Let’s support an idea bold enough, simple enough and compelling enough to actually work.

To assure sustainable prosperity, we need the market place to account fairly for the long legacy of subsidy and economic externalities that distort energy markets in favor of incumbent polluting industries. We need to establish public policies that enable such accounting in a direct, transparent and dependable manner.

I have long been an advocate of a tax on incumbent energy resources. There are compelling national security, economic and environmental reasons for a revenue neutral tax that shifts taxation away from productive activities like creating jobs, and instead taxes polluting, non-renewable energy resources. Such a strategy could win broad based support across the political spectrum.

But I believe the focus on climate change, favored by many in the environmental movement, is a significant liability in the political effort to create sensible energy policy. Recently, my apprehensions regarding such focus have been proven well founded.

When it comes to addressing climate issues through public policy, there are a wide spectrum of views which, while not supporting the recent policy orthodoxy of climate politics, are not based on denial of the issue or its potential ramifications. Many people recognize that current politically favored solutions to climate change would not only be ineffective, but could potentially create worse problems then those they are intended to address.

Those advocating for complex convoluted public policy responses to the threats of climate change have seen serious setbacks over the last few months, not the least of which was the failure of the Copenhagen conference to achieve any meaningful results.

It is also becoming more clear recently that the science of climate change is being heavily influenced by political agendas. But contrary to the concerns of many in the environmental movement that it is “right wing” interests which are corrupting the science, it appears that it is largely those pushing an agenda of climate change alarmism who have had the most significant influence on the scientific reporting.  Crony capitalists have been more than willing to go along as the politics of climate have been co-opted by Wall Street interests and others who stand to benefit immensely from the convoluted economic distortions embedded in solutions to climate change now favored by many politicians.

Especially since the release of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in November, the press and public have become more skeptical on the issue and there have been increasing numbers of questions raised regarding the quality of the UN sponsored 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change.

Respected conventional news outlets of all political persuasions, many of which have in the past been supportive of an aggressive climate policy agenda, have been publishing articles and editorials with titles like: Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation ,  ClimateGate: Was Data Faked? , How Climate-Change Fanatics Corrupted Science , The Death of Global Warming , UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters , Conning the climate: Inside the carbon-trading shell game , Alarmists’ credibility melting , How Wrong Is The IPCC? and What happened to global warming?

Though here in the US the traditional press has been less prone to cover the story than in Britain, Australia, India and elsewhere, there is increasing controversy regarding many of the findings in the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which won its authors the Nobel Prize along with Al Gore. Of most concern in the report are elements of the Summary for Policy Makers.

It has been reported than when asked in advance of publication to review the draft of the summary for Chapter 9  which attributes global warming to man made causes, Dr. Andrew A. Lacis, a climate researcher at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies had this to say:

“There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn’t the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community – instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted.”

Dr. Lacis suggestion was unfortunately rejected. It is now coming out that significant portions of the IPCC report were not based on peer reviewed science at all and several findings of the report have been confirmed to be erroneous.

Public support for action on climate change is waning.  A study from Yale University offers an interesting analysis of attitudes on the subject. The Pew Research Center shows climate change being a very low public priority.

A good friend of mine and passionate advocate for climate change policy action suggested that:

“The surveys and editorials are interesting reflections of public opinion, but they don’t undermine the science.  Don’t forget that a little over half of Americans don’t believe in evolution either.”

But contrary to Al Gore’s proclamations and the views of many people I respect, the science is not settled. Some evidence of that is the Petition Project, which claims the signatures of 31,486 American scientists who have all endorsed a petition that states:

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Dr. Judith Curry, the Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently wrote:

“No one really believes that the “science is settled” or that “the debate is over.” Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.”

Personally I feel absolutely certain that humans must be having some influence on climate, just based on the scale of influence that 6.8 billion people have on everything on the planet. Very few people would disagree with that premise. But clarifying how the many human and natural factors impacting climate will interact, how those factors will manifest themselves in complex climate systems, how significant our human influence will be and whether changes will have positive or negative impacts on agriculture and other critical aspects of human society, are all determinations that unfortunately are outside any clear understanding or real consensus in the scientific community at this time.

Perhaps most significant of the recent clarifications regarding the science of climate change has been the BBC interview with Phil Jones, who was the director of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit.

When asked: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically significant global warming: Dr. Jones answered a qualified “yes”.  In details supporting his answers, he showed that the warming trend from 1995 to 2009 of 0.12 degrees centigrade per decade is matched by the cooling trend of 2002 through 2009 of -0.12 degrees centigrade per decade.

In discussing the warming periods:1860-1880, 1910-1940, 1975-1998 and 1975-2009 Dr Jones states clearly that:

“the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.”

When asked : when scientists say the debate on climate change is over, what exactly do they mean – and what don’t they mean? Dr. Jones answered:

“It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.”

His answer on the so called Medieval Warming Period from 800–1300 AD makes clear that current levels of scientific understanding of historic climate data can’t determine conclusively if warming trends since the industrial revolution are unique or unusual.

Recently, Tom Ward, the publisher of the Valley Breeze, a local newspaper here in Rhode Island, published an editorial entitled Inconvenient truth. In it, he suggested that:

“Climate change, formerly known as ‘global warming,’ is a fraud. The science is junk.”

One member of an environmental organization I am involved with issued a call to respond suggesting:

“Some might say its hopeless to answer such extreme positions, but the far right-wing repeats similar stuff every day on cable, talk radio and the like.”

I pointed out to the group that while his rhetoric is harsh, the important conclusion of his editorial is something we can all largely support when Mr. Ward suggests:

“As Americans, we must embrace energy conservation in the short term, and generate more home-grown nuclear, natural gas and wind power in the longer term, to keep our money here and create tens of thousands of well-paying jobs. With those goals achieved, we can power our cars and trucks with U.S.-made electricity and natural gas, and stop sending $800 billion a year overseas, money that funds our enemies.”

While I strongly disagree with Mr. Ward regarding nuclear power (a subject for another posting), I fully agree with him on conservation, wind energy and on using natural gas as the critical transition fuel on our way to a clean energy future.

If the environmental community embraced the energy independence, national security, economic development, employment and balance of trade arguments that Mr. Ward champions, we could be much further along in addressing the challenges of climate change than we are today.  Instead of condemning them, we should be reaching out to potential strong policy allies like Mr. Ward who, like most Americans, would favor rational energy policy.

As I have suggested here before, everything that Mr. Ward argues for could be achieved through a Pigouvian tax on non-renewable energy resources.  That solution would actually be effective in directly and immediately curbing carbon dioxide emissions, unlike the leading solutions being pushed in Congress. If we all embraced the idea that such tax should be 100% revenue neutral, offsetting payroll taxes and income taxes that discourage job creation and working,  Americans of all political persuasions would support such solutions as prudent economic, jobs  and tax policy.

It is not smart politics to be looking for enemies among our potential friends. Rather than blaming the “right wing” or “a well-funded disinformation machine” for the lack of progress, we should take responsibility for the narrow partisan political strategy of the environmental community on these issues.

If the climate change rhetoric from the environmental community were less extreme, it wouldn’t provide such tempting targets for ridicule and harsh criticism and we wouldn’t see the backlash we have. We don’t need to blow the scariest possible outcomes for climate change out of proportion in order to gain broad based political support for effective measures to curb carbon emissions. In fact, overblown climate rhetoric from the environmental community has significantly set back political prospects for sensible energy and climate policy.

The IPCC  has done significant disservice to those concerned with climate change by becoming an imprudent advocate rather than the professional scientific organization that it was chartered to be.

Environmental scientist, James Lovelock is the author of the original “Gaia Hypothesis”, the theory of how the earth’s interrelated feedback mechanisms act as an integrated single organism. He has been described as “The Prophet of Climate Change” . He offers some important perspective:

“I think you have to accept that the skeptics have kept us sane — some of them, anyway. They have been a breath of fresh air. They have kept us from regarding the science of climate change as a religion. It had gone too far that way. There is a role for skeptics in science. They shouldn’t be brushed aside. It is clear that the angel side wasn’t without sin.”

Phil Jones, Andrew Lacis, Judith Curry, James Lovelock and other reputable climate scientists have come to realize that it is best to clearly and honestly present known facts along with the uncertainties surrounding this very complex science. Its about time the rest the environmental community does too.  We should accept  the political reality that with current levels of actual scientific understanding and consensus, most rational people would be reluctant to totally transform the world economy or create the worlds largest derivatives game for Wall Street in convoluted schemes like Cap, Trade and Offset.

I expect that acknowledging the scientific uncertainties regarding the long held beliefs of many of my friends in the environmental movement may result in some calling my integrity and intentions into question. The best answer I can offer them is that unlike those supporting ineffective convoluted answers currently favored in Washington, I am serious enough in my concern on these issues to advocate for policy solutions like H.R. 2380, The Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act that puts an immediate, real and dependable price on carbon emissions. That bipartisan legislation would also address our economic and unemployment problems as well as our energy and environmental concerns and it wouldn’t add a penny to our monstrous federal debt. That’s the kind of solution the vast majority of Americans would support and that credible politicians should also support if they are really more serious about solving problems than they are about handing out pork to their special interest benefactors.

All the reasons Tom Ward cites in encouraging our nation to move to a clean energy economy have been more than adequate inspiration to spend my career doing green building and renewable energy work for the last three decades. Terrorism funded by our exported petro-dollars, pollution, the economic mess our oil dependency has helped cause, the war in Iraq and our other military adventures to secure oil supplies,  and all the other symptoms of our fossil fuel dependency are plenty of inspiration for good policy.

Effective public policy response to climate change and all those other challenges would be clear, simple and easily understandable by everyone so that everyone participating in the economy can anticipate impacts and respond in rational ways.  All these inter-related issues are too important for the typical corrupt political horse trading between politicians and lobbyists we have come to expect from Washington. We need real leadership at the grass roots level advocating for sensible policy.

Rational climate policy wouldn’t be based on adding vast new convoluted complexities to the economy that are easily vulnerable to the distortions of Wall Street’s financial engineering manipulations. Nor would they be based on legislators and bureaucrats anointing winners and losers in the economy. Instead we need the kind of policy that directly puts a real and dependable price on the “economic externalities” that are currently hidden subsidies for incumbent energy industries – a revenue neutral carbon tax.

Its far past time for everyone concerned with climate change to seek out alliances around sensible energy policy by focusing on the issues that all Americans can readily agree on.  We should align our political agenda with those who are more concerned with other issues like the economy, jobs, trade deficits, national security, terrorism and our government’s unsustainable ballooning levels of debt and unfunded liabilities. Effective solutions to climate concerns can also address all those issues and should be politically framed to do so in a manner that appeals across traditional political boundaries. This shouldn’t be a partisan or politically divisive issue. We need a broad political coalition which will only be achieved by being far less dogmatic about our politics.

The most prudent and sensible advice I have seen regarding the politics of climate policy is from Mother Jones magazine, which quotes a perhaps unexpected ally, Republican pollster Frank Luntz:

“It doesn’t matter whether you call it climate change or global warming,” he said. “The public believes it’s happening, and they believe that humans are playing a part in it.” In fact, Luntz warned that if Republicans continue to dispute climate science it could hurt them politically. Instead, he said, the GOP should be engaging in the debate over how to solve America’s energy problems……….

Luntz suggests less talk of dying polar bears and more emphasis on how legislation will create jobs, make the planet healthier and decrease US dependence on foreign oil. Advocates should emphasize words like “cleaner,” “healthier,” and “safer”;  scrap “green jobs” in favor of “American jobs,” and ditch terms like “sustainability” and “carbon neutral” altogether. “It doesn’t matter if there is or isn’t climate change,” he said. “It’s still in America’s best interest to develop new sources of energy that are clean, reliable, efficient and safe.”

Luntz’s polling suggests  The First Rule of Fighting Climate Change: Don’t Talk About Climate Change.

The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience
By Rob Hopkins
Chelsea Green, 2008
240 pages; $24.95 (Paperback)

Reviewed by Arianna Alexsandra Grindrod, NESEA Education Director

“Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.”

The Transition Handbook is a whole-systems thinking, solutions-focused, inside-out approach on how communities can manage  peak oil and climate change. Providing templates to begin the dialogue, Hopkins makes clear that the solutions must come from within the community. This book serves as a model and a starting point to discussing building local resiliency. The Transition Handbook is comprised of three sections and should be read by people who are interested in facilitating the transition process in their community.

Part 1: “The Head” offers the facts and figures of peak oil and climate change and how both must be dealt with simultaneously. Be prepared to feel deflated and overwhelmed while informed. Move through it; grief and fear is part of the process. Breathe through it and remember you are reading this because you want to DO SOMETHING and be an agent for positive change.

Part 2: “ The Heart” goes through the process of finding inspiration– marketing peak oil as an opportunity for living more sustainably within a community’s means while creating a positive vision of the future and suggesting activities to “power-down” and navigate our way down the other side of the peak oil mountain.

Part 3:  “The Hands”, walks the reader through the process of starting a Transition Initiative and provides tips for facilitators. This section is not a how-to for the individual. It is a community initiative on taking the time to develop the social “glue” and performing concrete actionables to feel a sense of accomplishment and to foster motivation for sustainability.

Transition Initiatives work towards building “ways of living that are more connected, more enriching, and recognize the biological limits of the planet.” These Transition Initiatives focus on nurturing the ability of a community to live within its means and provide for its basic needs. A community that is able to source a significant portion of its food, clothing, energy, transportation, building materials locally has local resilience and can fare better in coping with economic, political, and natural challenges.

Readers may not like the stipulation that “renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society.” Nor appreciate hearing the view that nuclear and bio-fuels are not sustainable methods to support our unsustainable lifestyles, due to their low EREI (energy returned for energy invested) and high carbon intensity.  The Transition Handbook focuses on the importance of practical training in the skills needed for a post-oil society. Through a visioning exercise in Chapter 8, it is made apparent that our youth (and the population at large) are ill equipped for practical living. Gaining life skills such as cooking, mending, sewing and weaving natural fibers, carpentry, sourcing and administering local medicinal plants, and creating, installing and maintaining sustainable energy systems are all vital. Social skills and psychological training, such as compassionate communication, conflict resolution, stewardship delegation and community leadership are also necessary to cope with a changing world.  According to the author, we need to “reskill” ourselves to be more self-reliant as a community. Using a permaculture model of multi-layered systems working together, communities re-learn how to catch and store energy, produce no waste, apply self-regulation and feedback, creatively use (a.k.a. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”) and respond to change, and maximize beneficial relationships.  Keep in mind again that this is not a how-to book of practical skills but of how to nurture the creation of transition towns.

The Transition movement has harnessed the collective call to action; it is a glue that is mending the torn fabric of our communities. – Cliona O’Conaill (2007)

For those readers ready for the journey down the oil peak mountain here is your homework: “When you think about making practical steps to make your life less oil dependent, what are the obstacles you put in your way of doing that?” Write your responses down. Share them with a friend, neighbor, family member, or colleague. The point of this activity is to get you started in communicating about the issues. Only when you know what your blocks are, can you then take steps to removing them. Once you work with your blocks, your fears, you can dispel their power and get to the core of what steps you can take towards greater sustainability and resiliency.

Editor’s note: Consider attending the annual Building Energy Conference in Boston this March. Tina Clarke, an official Transition Town trainer in Western Massachusetts, Carl Etnier, founding member of Transition Town Montpelier, and Alastair Lough, one of the first official Transition Trainers in the US will be presenting. http://www.nesea.org/buildingenergy/

After 30 years at sites around New England NESEA’s Building Energy Conference arrived at the Boston World Trade Center in 2005. We named that conference “The Practice of Sustainability: Art/Science/Business”. And we said this to the NESEA community:

If you practice sustainability, this is where you belong!

I see sustainability as a principle equivalent to democracy or justice and a practice we are constantly striving toward; imperfect in execution, but aspirationally fundamental. If your practice supports sustainability you belong to the community that shares this principle and we belong together in Boston in March. I want to invite you to consider how important it is for you to join me at Buiding Energy in 2010. This is about the necessity of advancing your practice together with mine.

Narcissism led me to NESEA in the late 80’s. It was then the “Advanced Residential Construction Conference” and I concluded that it was most obviously for me. The moment I arrived I knew that I had found my tribe. This community made it apparent that the foundation of my ethic, to be a “good builder”, must always include an understanding of what it meant to be a “green builder”. I could not be one without being the other. The journey had begun.

Like any good journey, it led to discovery. Over time, and not without some resistance, I came to appreciate that the practice of sustainability required us to understand and operate as connected parts of a whole system. My provincial practice, building, confined my view.

Our good fortune is that NESEA, considering energy as its fundamental currency and sustainability as our aspirational principle, attracts and symbiotically connects a cosmopolitan breadth of practices, of which mine is only one. I came to appreciate and rely on the diversity of experience and ideas that this community continuously challenged me with. And I grew.

On a good day at NESEA I am engaged, informed, and connected. I am engaged by ideas that demand me to think clearly. I am informed by practitioners with an uncompromising commitment to action and measurable results. I am connected to a diverse network of fellow travelers, at every stage of their own journeys, and with whom I can differ as easily as I can agree, without acrimony.

If you practice sustainability this is where you belong, having good days at NESEA with me and the thousands of others who continue to shape what Ambrose Spencer so aptly termed our “confident vision”.

The journey continues again in Boston in March. I can’t imagine finding my way forward without being there, where I belong.

The First Tenet of Sustainability

As I noted last time it was the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission), chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, that provided the classic definition for “sustainability”. Elegant in its simplicity, it states, “meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

Contrary to my own belief, the book well-articulated that the word “sustainability” is not quite as soft or “fuzzy” as many of us would-be practitioners might have thought. Let’s say it does not carry with it the same uncertainty associated with terms such as “hard-core pornography”. (Got your attention, huh?)  Some may recall Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 noted about that term, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced …  but I know it when I see it.” Well, we have to do a lot better than that for sustainability.

Surprisingly, the first tenet of sustainability according to Brundtland appears to require “a political system that secures effective citizen participation in decision making.”  While not to overly dwell on this point, this can have a number of meanings.  Too often the participation is limited to groups who are often referred to as “stakeholders” and many times individuals who do not represent groups are conveniently excluded. When it comes to “sustainability,” we are all stakeholders whether we represent a group or not. Maybe some of you have felt excluded or that your input was not fairly considered. We need to become better listeners in a world where the distractions are immense and where individuals and their sometimes different ideas seem to count for less.  I mean when you consider that there has only one statue I can recall commemorating a committee, (The Burghers of Calais by Rodin) maybe it is time to consider that “groupthink” that may exclude outliers may not always offer the best solutions.  Consider too, that in general, a great many of NESEA core ideas have been the outliers until relatively recent times.
The Brundtland Commission continues to detail in numerous places not merely the “narrow notion of physical sustainability” personified by green buildings and installing solar panels but also, more importantly, what other changes must take place in society including changes in the legal field to make us “sustainable”. At one point it says:
“National and international law has traditionally lagged behind events…; and “there is an urgent need:… to establish and apply new norms for state and interstate behavior to achieve sustainable development…”
It more than implies that changes in principles and values are required not only in government but in governance issues at all levels, in all forms of organizations within our culture including civil society which includes groups like Lion’s Clubs, Kiwanis and even professional organizations — like NESEA.  Oddly enough, one think tank that has very well articulated some of the other principles is not a renewable energy organization but the Natural Hazards Center in Boulder, CO. Aside from the participatory process discussed above, which they saw as central hub of a wheel to all the other principles, they likened the spokes of the wheel in their diagram to include:

• Social & Intergenerational Equity

• Environmental Quality

• Quality of Life

• Economic Vitality

Brundtland goes into these as well as a number of other areas to provide a more complete tapestry of understanding. In future blogs we will examine some of these before we get into the other  areas of sustainability including some  more closely associated with what NESEA members try their best to accomplish on a day to day basis.

Well I hate to admit it now in retrospect, but back around 1987 or 88 (and maybe some of the old-timers can recall this more exactly) I was one of the four nasty NESEA Board members who voted against changing the name from the Northeast “Solar” Energy Association to the Northeast “Sustainable” Energy Association. This was not out of any malice to the word “sustainable” or because I’m a cultural laggard, but it was due to the question of how do you explain the word “sustainable” in anything less than a 10 minute conversation? Today, the use of the word has proliferated throughout society and, more pointedly, into the economy along with its twin sister “green”.

On the surface for those of us who have toiled in the organic fields, this is an absolutely great time; what we’ve waited for so long to see, but deeper inspection of how these terms are used and overused, sort of makes me cringe.  Even among our kindred professionals I often see the terms used in a very limited sense, usually tied in with the word “development” but not recognizing the multifaceted nature of what it means in-depth for other changes we must build into our own institutions and society as a whole.

For a number of years we subtitled our Building Energy conferences “The Practice of Sustainability” which I actually like very much but this was mostly attuned to the physical, built environment as our architectural/builder colleagues like to call it. Largely missing have been some of the main attributes of what we call sustainability but envisioned by those who came before us or the use of the actual word itself.  In my own mind I see them as people who were not as distracted by things like CSI Miami, Ghost Whisperer, Dancing with the NFL or other unnamed forms of entertainment that are deemed “must-see”. With deep apologies to Marty Bauman and Stef Komorowski, our own white hat NESEA marketing team, the marketing profession has gotten hold of these words and made them into the most often used adjectives in marketing history. Yes, we ought to be happy about this but when these noble, well-meaning words are not well-understood or their use is bastardized they carry the risk of our believing that we are accomplishing more than we really are. Then, we are actually foisting off onto future generations the hard lifting that is yet to come because there is little more than an inch deep and  mile wide understanding of the totality of what “sustainability” means–and requires. In effect that “foisting” is the very antithesis of what sustainability strives to correct. More on that later.

I don’t mean to sound like I am the godfather of sustainability; I certainly am not but I was fortunate enough to listen weekly to a Yale Professor named Dr. Albert E. Burke who was the Director of the Graduate Studies in Conservation and Resource Use. I was six or seven years old and he had a local television show that was what I can only call enrapturing. He was one of those rare people who even back in the mid-50s was able to connect the dots between our resources and how well we use or abuse them and our freedoms. It is my opinion that the current environmental movement has not yet seen the equal of Dr. Burke. He gave many specific examples of these connections, some of which I will go into in later blogs. Suffice to say for now, in 1962 he warned about growing oil dependence for this nation before nearly anyone else had a clue on this even as our own domestic sources had just begun to dwindle. Then there were the Choctaw..
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Another formative experience came from an old friend in the renewable energy advocacy community who nagged me incessantly to read a book she referred to as the Brundtland Commission Report of 1987. Virginia (Ginny) Judson is one of these incessant, nagging, graying but never old, little ladies whose five feet in height belies her power and persistence that somehow when she corners you, you can no longer refuse to face the music. So after four years of nagging, in 1991 I read the book version titled Our Common Future better known in some circles as the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. I am still waiting for the movie.

It was in reading it that I came across what most people now consider to be the classic and, in my opinion still the best, definition of “sustainability” or “sustainable development”. It reads “meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” Reread that and maybe now you can connect with my dismay on how we foist off on future generations the heavy lifting we refuse to do today that I mentioned just three paragraphs above. Good grief, environmental groups get foundation funding for passing a state law that mandates 80% reductions of CO2 by 2050 but sets few if any intermediate, more granular goals.  How about something like “one lousy percent by two years from now”? Actually, recession might do that.

In some ways, though, the word is still enigmatic and a lot of people think they can improve upon it but often get so lost in specifics, they lose site of it overarching wisdom. They add to it, and embellish it which sometimes does aid in upstanding but more often than not is to the concept’s detriment. When you deeply think about that definition it sort of covers the gamut of how we should be investing our efforts. And yet, many of our “sustainability practitioners” do not integrate that simplicity of meaning into either the built environment or the laws and regulations proposed or passed seeking to make us a more “sustainable” society.

So that is an introduction to this blog where I want to try to convey a deeper meaning to the word sustainability and maybe, just maybe, totally replace the word green with something that has not only a deeper meaning but also some standards to go with it. I am sure I’m going to rankle a lot of good people who will disagree with me, and that is fine too. In the next blog I will try to explore Brundtland more for those very few who may be interested.

Yours in Sustainability [whatever it means]
Joel N. Gordes