Susan Murcott, Bob Lange, and Richard Komp are three grassroots environmental activists who are changing lives all around the world.  Susan is a water researcher whose work on simple water filters has benefitted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala to Ghana.  Her latest project is building a block of toilets for a school in a village in Ghana, the second project of this kind she has been involved with.  Bob is a physics professor who has been doing science education in Africa for many years, an activity that morphed into installing small solar systems for villages in Tanzania and now into designing, building, and installing efficient cookstoves with the Maasai people.  This year, his work is expanding into Uganda.  Richard is a solar expert who has worked on everything from the physics of solar electricity to building solar stoves from scrap.   He has been teaching people all around the world how to do solar as a cottage industry for about three decades now.  His latest idea is to outfit a sailboat as a floating solar workshop that can teach people throughout the Caribbean how to better their lives with simple solar technologies. You can read his reports on his international work at http://www.mainesolar.org/Komp…

I consider myself immensely privileged to know all three of these remarkable and remarkably effective people.

Cambridge, MA has been debating a net zero energy and/or emissions standard ( http://www.netzerocambridge.org ) for new buildings over 25,000 square feet since the Spring of 2013, partially because of an ecodistrict plan with MIT and others on a large parcel in East Cambridge (a plan MIT refused to make net zero even though they are rumored to be building a net zero project with some of the same partners in Basel, Switzerland).

The City Manager (Cambridge has a city manager form of municipal government, along with proportionate representation so city politics get weird fast) has established a “Getting to Net Zero” Task Force to study the issue.  Cambridge Community Development Department produced a fine overview of the state of the art in larger buildings for zero net emissions at (pdf alert) http://www.cambridgema.gov/~/m…

As the national Ecodistrict Summit was in town recently, the Community Development Department and Sustainable Performance Institute ( http://www.sustainable-perform… ) hosted experts from Integral Group ( http://www.integralgroup.com/ ), a deep green engineering firm to present lessons from the more than 40 net zero buildings they’ve worked on.

I publish a weekly listing of Energy (and Other) Events at the colleges, universities, and in the community around Cambridge, MA ( http://hubevents.blogspot.com ) and have been doing it consistently since the end of January, 2010 ( http://hubevents.blogspot.com/… ).  This is the second iteration of the idea as I published a similar listings service plus reviews and articles from February, 1995 to February, 1998, “A List of Environmental and Telecommunications Events and Issues” or “AList….” for short ( http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AL… ) {The issues from April 1997 to February 1998 are available at http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AL… but you have to click on the weekly issue heading first before you can read any of the articles.}

My original idea was to have a searchable calendar of all the public lecture information at all the colleges and universities around the Boston area, something like 70 of them, so that anyone could take the opportunity to gather in all the free learning they want.  Imagine the resource for anyone from high school kids to retired people.  I’d been availing myself of the privilege for a number of years already, meeting in small seminar rooms with distinguished experts and famous names that normally you’d only see on TV.  And I even got to ask them questions.  What a gift!  As an experienced autodidact, I took notes at the events I went to, when something of actual note occurred, and thought that the next step would be to invite others to contribute their notes from the events they went to that I couldn’t attend so that all that wealth of information could be captured, a community commonplace book.

Recently, I’ve noticed there has been a shift from talking about mitigation to adaptation to resilience when dealing with climate change.  From my perspective, this is not a bad development as resilience focuses on practical preparedness for immediate hazards.  This can partition change into small increments that are readily understandable and remove the polarized politics of climate change from the discussion.  If you’re talking about measures to prevent system failure because of a weather emergency, it tends not to matter what your position is on greenhouse gases because everybody remembers the last hurricane, flood, or blizzard.  In addition, resilience measures can also be adaptation and, even in some cases, mitigation strategies for climate change as well.  At least, this is what I’m observing here in the Boston area and what I’ve heard out of post-Sandy New York and other areas.

This week I attended a discussion at the Boston Society of Architects about a new report, Building Resilience in Boston

pdf alert:  http://www.greenribboncommissi…  

Before the meeting, I spent some time scanning the document and found it to be superlative work, a great introduction to the concepts of urban design for resilience and emergency preparedness and, most especially, a fine literature search of the state of the art all around the world.  If you want to begin the process in your own city or town, this document will give you plenty of useful ideas and show you where to get more.  It is useful not only for cities like Boston, London, and New York but also towns like Chula Vista, CA and Keene, NH.

Another indication of growing seriousness on these issues I noticed is that the dangers from temperature extremes are entering the picture, especially since there has been a 2,300% increase in casualties from heat waves and 189% increase from cold snaps in the 2001 to 2010 decade (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/16/1224282/-World-Meteorological-Organization-Heatwave-Decade).

According to Christina Figueres of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, whom I also saw this week, there are over 300 cities around the world which are actively working on mitigation, adaptation, and resilience in the face of climate change.  So while international organizations are struggling to find actionable agreements and individual countries are fighting to avoid responsibility, municipalities around the world are taking practical steps.

For the last few years, I’ve been publishing a weekly listing service on Energy (and Other) Events (http://hubevents.blogspot.com) that happen around Cambridge, MA in the colleges, universities, and the community.  This week, I noticed that there is a lot of practical activity around energy and the churches.  From now until Thanksgiving, there will be three energy upgrade parties at three different churches in three different neighborhoods of Boston and two “sustainable house of worship” workshops, one in the suburbs and one in the city.  

The energy upgrade parties are organized by the Home Energy Efficiency Team or HEET (http://www.heetma.com/) which for years now has been  teaching volunteers hands-on skills in lowering their energy bills and carbon emissions while making the building they’re in more energy efficient.

The workshops are organized by Massachusetts Interfaith Power & Light (http://www.mipandl.org) which has been helping houses of worship reduce energy costs through energy efficiency and a heating oil buying club through MA Energy Consumers Alliance.  One of the workshops will be happening in conjunction with a HEET energy upgrade party.

I’ve always thought that this is how energy organizing should be done: practical efforts that increase end use efficiency, save people money while making them more comfortable in their own neighborhoods, and speed the transition to renewables.  Solar barnraisings, energy upgrade work parties, we should be building our energy future now, as an act of protest against the status quo and a mechanism of liberation from it.  

Power to the people, as an actual practice.

http://www.sierraclub.org/sier…

7 of the 162 Sierra Club “Green Schools” were in MA, in order of standing:

Harvard 16

UMass Amherst 27

BU 88

Hampshire 89

Mount Holyoke 124

Worcester Polytechnic 125

Suffolk University 148

It was the seventh year the Sierra Club has asked colleges and universities to fill out their questionnaire.  According to one source, MIT didn’t participate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

How Many Solar Devices Can You Make from a Plastic Bottle?

A clear PET plastic bottle can help disinfect water.

6 hours of sunlight’s UV-radiation kills diarrhoea-causing pathogens in water making it safer to drink.

A clear bottle full of water and a little bleach can become a solar skylight, providing the equivalent of a 50w incandescent light to a windowless shack.

Cut the bottom off a clear plastic bottle to make a mini-greenhouse, a hot cap, to protect seedlings from frost.

Surround that bottle hot cap with a circle of other bottles full of water for solar heat storage to extend the growing season.

Here’s a bottle inside a bottle inside a bottle to heat water in the innermost bottle

and a variation of this design using a clear bottle, a dark can full of water, and a set of reflectors.

They illustrate the essentials of solar thermal energy:

light reflects

dark gets hot

clear keeps the wind out

With that knowledge you can move, concentrate, and store energy.

This clear plastic water heater is much larger and more practical for household use. It is made almost entirely from recycled packaging waste.

You can make a window out of plastic bottles, too,

and a south-facing window is already a solar collector.

But that’s another story.

previously published at http://solarray.blogspot.com/2…

The World Meteorological Organization recently released their Global Climate Report:  Decade of Extremes ( pdf alert:  http://library.wmo.int/pmb_ged… and video at http://youtu.be/qSz7U0C0bsY ) looking at general weather patterns decade by decade from 1881 to 2010.

“…it is worth noting the very large increase (more than 2 000 per cent) in the loss of life from heatwaves, particularly during the unprecedented extreme heat events that affected Europe in the summer of 2003 and the Russian Federation in the summer of 2010. On the other hand, there were fewer deaths due to storms and floods in 2001-2010 compared to 1991-2000, with decreases of 16 per cent and 43 per cent, respectively, thanks, in good part, to better early warning systems and increased preparedness.”

2,300% increase in casualties from heatwaves

189% increase from cold snaps

in the 2001 to 2010 decade.

On June 25, the world’s largest solar ship, the MS Tûranor PlanetSolar (http://www.planetsolar.org), was docked in Boston and hosted a symposium on water and climate change, “From the Alps to the Atlantic.” This 35 meter by 23 meter catamaran is currently on the DeepWater expedition, harvesting data from the Gulf Stream after a maiden voyage around the world on the equator.  From Boston she is bound for St John’s, Newfoundland, Reykjavik, Iceland and finally Bergen, Norway.  After the transatlantic DeepWater expedition, the PlanetSolar will work with the Waste Free Oceans Foundation (http://www.wastefreeoceans.eu) to clean up European waters.  The research team from University of Geneva is headed by Professor Martin Beniston and consists of climatologists, physicists, and biologists.  

The PlanetSolar has 512m2 of PV cells and the largest civilian mobile battery in the world providing 20 kW of electricity, 17kW for two 60kW electric motors,  with 3 kW for life on board, for an average speed of 5 knots and a maximum speed of 14 knots.  The PlanetSolar is a traveling experiment laboratory and sampling station working on water issues around the world with room for a crew of nine.

The symposium included talks on the global water cycle including river systems (http://www.globalrivers.org), glaciers and mountain water resources (http://www.acqwa.ch), ocean ecology, acidification, phytoplankton and zooplankton biology, and other issues.