Looking Ahead: The Next 10 Years of Green Building
(Page 6 of 10)
May/June 2009
By Eric Corey Freed
There's a book by Glenn Croston, 75 Green Businesses You Can Start, that is an absolute must to help define what you can do.
RELATED CONTENT
DAVID ORR: Those things are all related. Energy is central to all of the others, and central to the prospect of rapid climate change. With the energy subsides, we have to shift them from fossil fuels, from coal, nuclear and natural gas, to level the playing field to favor of solar and wind and efficiency. The challenge right now for Obama is to make this very careful calibration between stimulating the economy and starting the new green economy.
The problem is that we're riding two deficits. One is the climate deficit and deficit in natural resources, placing 5.7 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. Second is the financial hole we've dug. Obama's challenge is to solve the second, but in a way that doesn't compound the first. That would be a disaster and provide only short-term relief, but it wouldn't solve the longer term problem.
So we need to prioritize those things and make the transition to higher energy costs and to a renewable energy economy. Here in Ohio, we're no longer going to import food from California in the age of high costs of fossil fuels, which we can no longer burn with impunity anyway. We might have to rediscover agriculture here in Ohio. At one time there were 300,000 farms in Ohio; we're down to 70,000. We need to rebuild local food capability.
To do that we need to focus on water. A recent book by Jim Powell entitled Dead Pool talks about climate change and the Southwest. One of the challenges for people in the Southwest is probably not solvable. In the current climate change scenarios, that area becomes dead pools without water and the water to generate electricity. People will be forced to leave that valley similarly to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. People will have to move where water is; it's pretty difficult to move water around.
SERGIO PALLERONI: I'm a firm believe that water is the biggest issue we have, but I travel from the developing world back to the developed world where we seem to have an abundance of water. We really need to think of water as this resource that is worldwide, and that permeates, transpires and is shared worldwide. That is a huge challenge; a United Nations-level challenge. How do we deal with water resources around the globe when we're so good at polluting it?
The energy crisis is one of trying to figure out transitional strategies until we can figure out the bigger energy issues. We are big consumers, so how do we come up with a strategy between that allows us to not muck everything up, while we figure out the big solutions. Solar power, wind energy, clean technologies need to work in a way that is long term and sustainable. The intermediate solutions worry me. The long-term solutions are there, but can we survive in time between the long term solutions and where we are now?
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
Next >>