Venting Green
June 20th, 2008 by Wadical WeftI’m not a big believer that we can consume our way to a better environment. By that I mean buying a brand new Prius hybrid car to “save energy and be green” is worse for the environment than buying a 3 year old Hummer; however, here is an interesting idea to retrofit existing buildings with something that could generate significant amounts of electricity. Suspicious of adding something new in order to conserve, I’m not sure there is any net energy gain when including the energy required to create Nano Vent Skin:
“Everybody is green or trying to be nowadays. Because it’s trendy, because it’s real, because there’s no other way.
It seems that in order to be greener you have to build the most pharaonic building with the biggest wind turbine on top (Maglev wind turbine, Lighthouse, Bahrain world trade center, etc.); the biggest solar power plant (Mojave desert, Solana Arizona, etc) or build a new city (Rak Gateway, Masdar carbon neutral city, etc.) because the ones we already live in are not green enough.
Why don’t we start thinking on a smaller scale and apply it to existing buildings, houses and structures (tunnels, road barriers, etc) to generate energy.” Full Slice
June 28th, 2008 at 8:12 am
My strategy for being greener is to wait until some TRV* driver (e.g. gas-guzzling pollution factories like SUVs and Hummers) complains about high gas prices, then saying “poor you” and mentioning the fact that “sympathy” can be found between “shit” and “syphilis” in the dictionary. Depending on how the conversation was going, I might be tempted to use the term “dumbass,” but that’s not a given.
I must say that I find a great deal of (legitimate) sympathy with the point of view of hating the idea that green only comes from new construction; kind of defeats the purpose. “You have cancer, sir. Here’s the cure: a different, more efficient cancer! That’ll keep the first one from killing you!”
But, joke aside, I haven’t seen anything convincing either way about driving Hummers for 20 years vs. driving a Prius for only 5 (or whatever: numbers made up by me to illustrate the point, not make a specific claim). The unconvincing arguments I’ve heard contain unstated assumptions I may not agree with. My ‘95 Saturn, which I drive 9 miles a day, gets 25mpg for those urban trips (goes down to 22 in winter; ~33-34 on long highway trips, ~40 coming down out of the Rockies with a tailwind). My gut thermodynamic feel is that driving it until it is junk is greener than getting a hybrid. First, my feeling is simply that the total carbon burned will be less, cradle to cradle; Second, in 13 years hybrids may be even better, and maybe I will be living somewhere where having a car is a liability. Third (joke!), it’s a manual transmission: automatic theft-reduction device. Hybrids don’t have that kind of transmission.
Finally, has anybody seen (again: convincing?) arguments detailing how much carbon is burned to build and to manufacture fuel for the nuclear power plants that will somehow “save” us from carbon? Again, I’ve heard this both ways; each argument having holes that any honest** person could drive a Hummer through.
*Terrorist Recruitment Vehicle
**Honest and misinformed or honest and evil: Informed, good, honest people do not drive Hummers.
June 29th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
And then there are those who believe that “Green” equals “lower carbon footprint.”
Fools! There are many shades of gray within green.
June 30th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Those Nanoventskin mini-turbine arrays look pretty cool, although I do wonder about how mini-turbulence might affect buildings. I’ll guess mostly benignly, occasionally disastrously.