On Friday, May 2, 2014 FossilFreeMIT

( http://www.fossilfreemit.org ) declared a flood zone all around their campus at Hurricane Sandy strength plus projected 2050 sea level rise to publicize their divestment campaign.  It was also a good advertisement for the same weekend’s annual Sustainability Conference focusing on resilience and coastal cities.  Here’s how the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer looks under this climate change scenario.

MyCityGardens.com is up and running for the season.  We’re a local yard sharing website that connects gardeners, mentors, and people with access to space, to neighbors who want to roll up their sleeves and dig in.

If you have extra space in your yard you’d like help cultivating, need a gardening plot this summer or are willing to lend gardening advise to your neighbors, please sign up!

our site: mycitygardens.com

keep up to date on: https://www.facebook.com/MyCityGardens

about: The MCG team is comprised of small group of Boston Area (Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline) students and young professionals who are passionate about building sustainable communities and are developing the site in their spare time. Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@mycitygardens.com if you have any questions or want to get more involved.

HEET Home Energy Efficiency Team, a Cambridge, MA nonprofit which organizes public weatherization parties and barnraisings, is crowd funding a natural gas leak monitoring project in Cambridge and Somerville.  Boston University Professor Nathan Phillips, who drove the streets of Boston last year with a high-precision methane analyzer to find 3,356 natural gas leaks, will loan HEET his methane analyzer and other equipment to drive the roof Cambridge and Somerville roads mapping every leak. Moving at 15 MPH, covering both sides of every street should take about three weeks.   You can learn more about HEET’S Squeaky Leak project and help fund it, if so inclined, at http://www.heetma.com/what-we-…

Professor Phillips will analyze and map the results and HEET will do the driving, following up thusly:

Map of the leaks on the HEET website

Report the leaks to NSTAR to get all Grade 1 leaks fixed

Share the location and amount of leaks with the governments of Somerville and Cambridge so they can work with NSTAR to fix these leaks

Publicize the map to raise awareness about natural gas leaks in order to make sure effective actions are taken on the ground and in our legislature (https://malegislature.gov/Bills/BillHtml/122690?generalCourtId=11) as soon as possible to reduce the leaks not only in Massachusetts, but across the country

Lastly, to compare the amount and number of leaks between Cambridge and Somerville, to see whether Cambridge’s decade-long policy of fining NSTAR heavily for opening any roadway that the City is not already working on, while charging it nothing to repair pipes under the roads the City is about to work on succeeded.  Since NSTAR has not shared with the city any map or information about the current or past gas leaks, Cambridge does not know whether this policy worked or not.  HEET’s and Prof Phillips’ project would provide that data.

Peter Wilson (in a Cambridgewickedlocal with news from the Chronicle and Tab LtE http://cambridge.wickedlocal.c… wrote that “Net zero is not a practical goal in New England” and that may or may not be true.  There are a number of net zero energy single and two family buildings in NE, including in colder climates than Cambridge like Vermont, although the experience with larger and high rise net zero energy buildings is just beginning.  However, there are a few examples that approach net zero, including one in Vienna, Austria, the Raffeisens Bank, a 21 story building built to PassivHaus standards ( http://www.viennareview.net/ne… ).

Whether or not net zero is a practical goal, it is an essential thought experiment we need to run.  By viewing net zero energy as an approachable goal, the way statistical quality control views zero defects on a production line under Total Quality Management, we will assuredly come across many different ways we can reduce our energy needs, perhaps significantly.  

I say we are not going far enough.  We should be thinking not only about net zero energy but also zero emissions throughout our infrastructure.  We know that pollution causes problems, that pollution is waste, and should be smart enough, wise enough to think about reducing the waste we generate to as close to zero as possible.  I like the motto of Zero Waste Europe ( http://www.zerowasteeurope.eu ), “If you are not for zero waste, how much waste are you for?”

If you are not for net zero energy, how much wasted energy are you for?

However, even if we mandate that all new buildings achieve net zero energy, we still have to fix our existing buildings and probably have to start developing district heating and cooling to become a net zero energy community.  This is a hard problem and requires concentrated efforts.  Net zero energy for new buildings, if it is achievable (and I believe it is), is still only a start.

Thanks for your time and your work.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sailing-for-solar-bringing-workshops-to-caribbean-communities

Help empower coastal Caribbean communities with a solar sailboat that will provide workshops and materials for solar electric modules, solar cookers and phone chargers.  Campaign now going on at Indiegogo:  $18,000 over the next 40 days.

This is a project of Dr. Richard Komp, a solar scientist who has worked since 1977 empowering rural communities with solar energy projects around the world, providing both hands-on teaching and renewable resources.