Smart Energy

Do household cleaners contain ingredients linked to asthma, nerve damage and other health effects? Manufacturers aren’t telling, but Earthjustice attorney Keri Powell may have uncovered the key to their pursed lips.

While investigating a potential legal strategy, Keri found buried in the pages of a book of New York State statutes a long-forgotten law authorizing the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to require household cleaning product manufacturers to disclose their chemical ingredients and information about the health risks they pose. In other words, pay dirt.

State regulations issued in 1976 made these disclosures mandatory. Such laws are practically nonexistent in the United States, and the New York law has been altogether overlooked.

via Getting the Dirt on Household Cleaners | unEARTHED, the Earthjustice blog.

Just based on the fact that the Earthjustice attorney uncovered the law, some manufacturers have come clean and ponied up info about what’s in their products. But

Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Church and Dwight, and Reckitt-Bensicker stonewalled, and thus found themselves a few weeks ago across from Keri and her colleagues in a Manhattan courtroom as defendants in this first-of-its-kind lawsuit. They made it clear that their lips are sealed until authorities pry them open. As Health Campaigner Kathleen Sutcliffe wryly remarked last week, Mr. Clean went to court and pled the fifth.

What we need is a database of chemicals in products associated with health concerns, much like the open source database of chemicals in building materials published recently by Perkins + Will.

It’s amazing that professional cleaning services haven’t been clamoring for this information. I suspect the reason why not may have to do with issues of race and class: employees of such companies are hired on a piece-work basis and are poorly paid.

Climate is not weather and the group that seizes the story first is bound to control it best and longest. A sad but true rule of PR.

A panel of eminent U.S. and European scientists has confirmed the widespread scientific consensus that the Earth's climate is warming due to human activities, but said they and their colleagues should have responded more quickly and effectively to news of an error in a major climate report and hacked researcher e-mails.

In a symposium Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement Science, AAAS, the scientific leaders acknowledged errors in a 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and possibly impolitic email exchanges by East Anglian University climate researchers.

But they expressed shock at the political effects of the disclosures and said the impact was far out of proportion to the overwhelming evidence that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate.

via Top Scientists Affirm Consensus on Global Warming.

They expressed shock? Shock!? Sheeze…. Scientists and children….

Brian gives "Lipstick Traces" four out of five stars

“The music came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then again a yes:” and then the drums kicked in and “nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false. If nothing is true, everything is possible.” (9)

Welcome to Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus’s collage-o-phonic booklike substance that rings with voices in a thousand registers.

“As I tried to follow this story [the one he perceives running through chapters filled with medieval heretics, Dadaists, Situationists, and the Sex Pistols: “I am an anti-christ,” sang Johnny Rotten]–the characters changing into each other’s clothes until I gave up trying to make them hold still–what appealed to me were its gaps. and those moments when the story that has lost its voice somehow recovers it, and what happens then…. [quoting an ad for Potlatch he found in a “slick-paper, Belgian neo-surrealist review” dated 1954:] ” ‘Everywhere, youth (as it calls itself) discovers a few blunted knives, a few defused bombs, under thirty years of dust and debris; shaking in its shoes, youth hurls them upon the consenting rabble, which salutes it with its oily laugh.’ ” (20)

Situationist gnome, 1963: “The moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” (21) That’s getting personal: I’ve resisted reading this book for twenty years. Now that I have, and since you’ve read this far, I recommend you do, too. So much for the niceties of the book review. What follows is engagement with Lipstick Traces. Read the rest of this entry »

Farber on Film

Manny Farber’s writing sounds like he ran with the Beatniks, smoking, drinking and bopping to jazz rhythms. In Farber on Film, we get the straight, the uncut, the complete writings of Farber on film.

Farber wrote scores of film reviews for The Nation, Time, The New Republic and other publications. But his reviews rarely fit into the “first this, then that, and I liked it because” box that most reviewers cram themselves into. Farber mused on the beauty of images, confronted actors’ choices, challenged directors, and digressed down rarely trod paths in order to introduce pertinent impertinences and relevant social revelations.

Farber was a self-described champion of “termite art”: he loved eccentric virtuosity rather than “white elephants,” conformist monstrosities that “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.” Termite art, in contrast, is “ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” White elephant art was seamless mass in “pursuit of… continuity” and “harmony,” while termite art participated in the world: it is “an act of observing and being in the world” and

goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, like as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. Read the rest of this entry »

Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz

Set in war-torn, German-occupied Poland during World War II, Pornografia is a key text of late modernism — and this is the first edition that is a translation into English from Gombrowicz’s Polish. (The previous edition came into English from a French translation.)

Witold Gombrowicz is a novelist of psychological entanglements, and Pornografia is a novel of erotic entanglement. It is often cruel and sometimes cruelly funny. It is a novel by a man certain that language in some profound way determines ontology, that what we hear and say sculpts the way we are.

Set in a country idyll with the war roaring dully in the background, two refugee intellectuals conspire to contrive a liaison between a pair of kids who have grown up together there in the Polish countryside. Pornografia is an unholy little novel, chillingly dark, at times dripping with cynicism, but at its best beset by bracing, high-brow hilarity and jaded, deeply sublimated hysteria. First published in 1966, it’s only recently that readers have begun to talk about Gombrowicz as a Latin American writer rather than a Polish one. The question of influence is good, if ultimately divisive. Division is precisely Gombrowicz’s strength; you imagine he not only enjoys taking the frog apart with a tiny knife, he begins to split the world apart as if it were empirically just an intimately interbleeding network of heartbeats. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Roberts on Grist has this to say about Bill Gates’ recent TED talk:

Gates has burst on to the energy scene with some rather ill-considered thinking. To get a flavor, see his blog post, “Why We Need Innovation, Not Just Insulation.” The idea is that “conservation and behavior change” might get the world to its 2020 or 2030 targets, but to get to 80 percent emissions reductions by 2050 we’ll need fundamental technological innovation. Ergo: we should pay more attention to, and devote more money to, basic science and R&D.

via Why Bill Gates is wrong | Grist.

Roberts goes on and on about why Gates is wrong, and Roberts mostly gets it right. But we can succintly tell you why Gates was wrong:

If you build tight and build right, a building’s energy consumption goes way down.

No innovation required there, just good craftsmanship and a solid work ethic. Alas, those two things are sorely lacking in the U.S. construction trade, and no amount of technological innovation is going to change that.

I think of the Pacific Northwest as being at the forefront of thinking in terms of environmental design in the US. And the Northwest is relatively close–interestingly close–in climate to the UK. We’re pretty close in terms of energy commitments. What we have in the UK that’s different is a much stronger regulatory framework.

via An Interview with Peter Clegg | Rethink Energy and Design.

Architect, author and educator, Peter Clegg, is a senior partner with the London based firm Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. Peter visited the Northwest in late 2009 for Cascadia’s  Transformational Lecture series sponsored by BetterBricks, where he caught up with us to discuss the current challenges and opportunities within sustainable architecture.  The following is a brief excerpt of the conversation.  Read the full interview here.

The Design Conference is held annually in different locations around the world. The Inaugural Design Conference was held at Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London in 2007. The Second Design Conference was held in conjunction with the University of Miami, USA in 2008 The Third Design Conference was held in Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany in 2009 The Fourth International Conference on Design Principles and Practices was held in University of Illinois, Chicago, USA 2010.

The fifth conference is scheduled for Feb. 2 – 4 in Rome.

The Design Conference is a presenter’s conference, comprised of numerous parallel sessions.
The Conference organising committee is inviting proposals to present 30-minute papers, or
60-minute workshops or 90-minute colloquium sessions. These may be:

• Academic or research papers, or
• Presentations describing educational initiatives.

Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal

Conference participants may submit papers to the Design Journal, before the Conference and up until one month after the Conference. Papers submitted for publication will be fully refereed. The publication decision is based on the referees’ reports.

For those unable to attend the Conference in person, a virtual registration will provide participants access to the electronic version of the Journal, as well as the option to submit papers to the Design Journal.

For more information about the Journal please visit the Publish Your Paper page.

Look! It’s a solar-energy harvester. No, it’s a computer storage device. No, it’s Golden Nanosclae System! Ah, the Golden Nano Scale – so much more pleasant to the ear than boring old C major….

Material scientists at the Nano/Bio Interface Center of the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated the transduction of optical radiation to electrical current in a molecular circuit. The system, an array of nano-sized molecules of gold, respond to electromagnetic waves by creating surface plasmons that induce and project electrical current across molecules, similar to that of photovoltaic solar cells.

The results may provide a technological approach for higher efficiency energy harvesting with a nano-sized circuit that can power itself, potentially through sunlight. Recently, surface plasmons have been engineered into a variety of light-activated devices such as biosensors.

It is also possible that the system could be used for computer data storage. While the traditional computer processor represents data in binary form, either on or off, a computer that used such photovoltaic circuits could store data corresponding to wavelengths of light.

via Scientists turn light into electrical current using a golden nanoscale system.

At a TED talk, Bill Gates offered this equation:

Total CO2 = World population x Services x Energy of each service x CO2 per unit of energy

And Mark Frauenfelder comments:

The neat thing about an equation that uses only multiplication is that if any of the four factors can be reduced to zero, then you don't have to worry about the other three factors. The total CO2 output will be zero. So which one can we make zero?

via Boing Boing.

Alas, the equation doesn’t quite get the global picture. Even if the damn breeders stopped breeding and human population were reduced to zero (hey, I can dream, right?), there would still be CO2 production from volcanoes and numerous other sources.

Seems as if Bill Gates’ equation is akin to the Windows operating system: a bit of wishful thinking built upon a false premise.