Here is an amazing talk about the energy revolutions happening throughout the planet. Paul Hawken’s talks about an energy movement without a name, lead by no one, that is the largest in recorded history, and is analogous to the complexity and function of our body’s natural immune system. He relates the ground swell of organizations addressing issues that benefit mankind and the planet and tries to connect the dots. He cites his new book “Natural Capitalism” which has received much attention. He speaks about everything to do with our connection to the earth and each other. From small community outreach groups to the formation of large NGO and Non-Profits. Including how the LEED certification program from USGBC is changing the way we interact and live in our buildings and cities.

In a recent 2009 Commencement speech Hawken’s said:
“The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.”

The video may be long, but it is well worth it.

Ban Ki Moon
Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Amid the pressures of the global financial crisis, some ask how we can afford to tackle climate change. The better question is: Can we afford not to?

Put aside the familiar arguments - that the science is clear, that climate change represents an indisputable existential threat to the planet, and that every day we do not act the problem grows worse. Instead, let us make the case purely on bread-and-butter economics.

At a time when the global economy is sputtering, we need growth. At a time when unemployment in many nations is rising, we need new jobs. At a time when poverty threatens to overtake hundreds of millions of people, especially in the least developed world, we need the promise of prosperity. This possibility is at our fingertips.

Economists at the United Nations call for a Green New Deal - a deliberate echo of the energizing vision of President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thus the U.N. Environment Programme has launched a plan for reviving the global economy while dealing simultaneously with the defining challenge of our era - climate change. It urges world business and political leaders, including President-elect Barack Obama, to help redirect resources away from the speculative financial engineering at the root of today’s market crisis and into more productive, growth-generating and job-creating investments for the future.

This new “Green Economy Initiative,” backed by Germany, Norway and the European Commission, arises from the insight that the most pressing problems we face are interrelated. Rising energy and commodity prices helped create the global food crisis, which fed the financial crisis. This in turn reflects global economic and population growth, with resulting shortages of critical resources - fuel, food, clean air and water. The commingled problems of climate change, economic growth and the environment suggest their own solution. Only sustainable development - a global embrace of green growth - offers the world, rich nations as well as poor, an enduring prospect of long-term social well-being and prosperity.

The good news is that we are awakening to this reality. We have experienced great economic transformations throughout history: the industrial revolution, the technology revolution, the era of globalization. We’re now on the threshold of another - the age of green economics.

Visiting Silicon Valley last year, I saw how investment has been pouring into new renewable energy and fuel efficiency technologies. The venture capital firm that underwrote Google and Amazon, among other archetypal entrepreneurial successes, directed more than $100 million into new alternative energy companies in 2006 alone.

In China, green capital investment is expected to grow from $170 million in 2005 to more than $720 million in 2008. (In just a few short years, China has become a world leader in wind and solar power, employing more than a million people.) Globally, the U.N. Environment Programme estimates that investment in low-greenhouse energy will reach $1.9 trillion by 2020. The financial crisis may slow this trend. But capital will continue to flow into green ventures despite harder economic times. I think of it as seed money for a wholesale reconfiguration of global industry.

We can already see its practical expression. More than 2 million people in the advanced industrial nations today find work in renewable energy. Brazil’s biofuels sector has been creating nearly a million jobs annually. Economists say that India, Nigeria and Venezuela, among many others, could do much the same. In Germany, environmental technology is expected to quadruple over the coming years, reaching 16 percent of manufacturing output by 2030 and employing more people than the auto industry. Mexico already employs 1.5 million people to plant and manage the nation’s forests.

Governments have a huge role. With the right policies and a global framework, we can generate economic growth and steer it in a low-carbon direction, not unlike Roosevelt’s original New Deal. Handled properly, our efforts to cope with the financial crisis can reinforce our efforts to combat climate change. In today’s crisis lies tomorrow’s opportunity - economic opportunity, measured in jobs and growth. Most global CEOs know this. That’s one reason why businesspeople in so many parts of the world are demanding clear and consistent environmental policies from their leaders. It is also the reason that global companies like General Electric or Siemens are betting their future on green. But it is important that the global public recognizes this fact, perhaps nowhere more so than the United States. When Obama takes office, voters and elected officials alike should be reassured by studies showing the United States can fight climate change by cutting emissions - at low or even no cost, using only existing technologies.

As secretary-general of the United Nations, I have a special duty - shared by all - to give voice to the voiceless, and to defend the defenseless. We know that those most vulnerable to climate change are poorest of the world’s poor. They are also most vulnerable to the shocks of the financial crisis. As world leaders, we are morally bound to ensure that solutions to the global financial crisis protect the interests of all peoples, not just the citizens of wealthier nations.

Those left behind by the previous boom - the so-called “bottom billion,” living on less than $1 a day - must be brought into the next economic era. Again, a solution to poverty is also a solution for climate change: green growth. For the world’s poor, it is a key to sustainable development. For the wealthy, it is the way of the future.

Ban Ki Moon is the secretary-general of the United Nations.
This article appeared on page B - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Happy International Eco-Giving Thanks Day!

Vrede,
Bruce

Source: Greentechmedia

By:Michael Kanellos

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Tom Siebel, who made a big pile of money in the ’90s by founding Siebel Systems, is trying to squeeze into green.
Siebel is trying to put together a contest that will encourage companies to come up with HVAC systems and other technologies for relatively affordable, zero-energy homes. “They will be grid connected, but after 365 days the meter should read zero,” he said during the Global Technology Leadership Conference taking place at UC Berkeley today.
The contest, which is still under construction, will come with a few rules. For one thing, the homes have to be something the average American would want to live in. “You can’t solve the problem by sitting in the dark and freezing to death,” he said.
Second, they have to be cheap. Green homes now are generally bought by rich people in communities like Woodside, California. “They cost $1,000 a square foot” and are generally huge, he argued. Builders have also been reluctant to get into the market although that has been changing. (In a conference earlier this month, for instance, I learned that Webcor, the largest builder in California, earned more revenue from LEED buildings in its most recent quarter than traditional construction. Imagine that.)

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Full article

This wonderful article talks to how we can rethink our buildings and the way we thrive in them. Can your home be a Green castle that not only improves your health, but also gives back to the environment? Here are a couple of excerpts and the link.

In-joy,

Bruce

Structures so green they give back to the environment
By Lisa Selin Davis, Plenty Magazine

Forget simply cutting a building’s footprint. A new wave or architectural thinkers wants to create buildings that help regenerate the planet like living organisms.

“The building sector is really the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the country and the world,” says Edward Mazria, founder of Architecture 2030, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing greenhouse gas emissions produced by new construction. Today, buildings consume up to 76 percent of the United States’ total electricity and emit 43 percent of our greenhouse gases. And the same mistakes are repeated in the 5 billion square feet of built space created nationwide every year.

Illustration credit to June Key Delta house

But now, the next phase in the history of green building is underway. A band of visionary architects, designers, engineers, and builders have recognized how far we’ve strayed from the principles that informed our earliest architecture. They’re harnessing both advanced and ancient technologies to dream up structures that make even the current standard of responsible building—the US Green Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system—pale in comparison. While LEED certification measures and rewards a reduction in energy use, for instance, the architects behind the next-generation, beyond-LEED structures, called “carbon neutral” or “regenerative,” are aiming for designs that use no energy at all—to be energy positive or net-zero. The green building of the future doesn’t just do less harm to the environment; it improves it. It won’t just use less water; it will collect and treat it. It won’t just force air; it will filter it. And it won’t just save energy; it will create it. Buildings are not only about to breathe like people—they’ll also give back like good Samaritans.

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