EnvironmentLA - The City's official site for information about projects and programs that are making Los Angeles more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power - LADWP offers environmental Green LA programs, including Trees for a Green LA, Energy Efficiency for a Green LA, Solar Energy for a Green LA, Electric Vehicles for a Green LA, Green Power for a Green LA, Recycling for a Green LA and Educational Services for a Green LA.
Green LA Action Plan - The City's official plan to improve energy conservation, transition to renewable power sources, and change the ways citizens commute to work and school.
US Green Building Council-LA - A resource for agencies, municipalities, professionals and companies interested in sustainable, green buildings.
If you worked a four-day work week, you’d be gearing up to knock off about now, as I write this on a Thursday.
Of course you wouldn’t know I was writing this, because you’d be so darn productive during your four-day work week that you’d never crack a peek at anything on the Internet beyond your work-related reading.
Even if you weren’t loyally plowing away at your desk, you’d still be statistically more likely to read this at home, because you’d be home more. (And if you used your new-found at-home time away from home, well, that’s none of our business now is it?)
Let’s just say that a four-day workweek — whether it was composed of four 8-hour days or four 10-hour days — would provide more leisure time, potentially a very good thing for stressed out Americans with their comparatively higher rates heart disease and health issues. This, in itself, would be enough justification to consider a shorter workweek.
Wherever you turn, someone, somewhere is talking about climate change. And that’s a good thing. But it’s not a happy conversation. Often, the discussion pivots on how much time we have left to reel in our carbon emissions — and among those who consider climate change a real threat (let’s say the majority of us), the realistic answer to that is, less than a decade.
Give or take a month. (I’m kidding.)
So we’ve got to make some real progress, fast.
Here’s some good news, being highlighted by the WorldWatch Institute today. McKinsey & Company says the U.S. could reduce it’s “non-transportation” energy consumption by 23 percent by 2020.
While people scurry to devise new green components for homes, Don Blalock is in the enviable position of launching one that he’s been nursing along for the last six years.
His Aeonian brick will build houses that aresignificantly more energy efficient than conventional homes; help them qualify for LEED platinum certification and withstand hurricane force winds up to 240 mph. They’ll also resist heat, mold, mildew and termites, says Blalock whose goal is to build “the most structurally sound house that’s livable that will last for a very long time.”
Even though we generally subscribe to the Marxist theory of groups — that is, Groucho Marx’s maxim that “I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member”, we started a Facebook page.
While over there constructing the new site, we noticed Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu in the neighborhood. We’re sure this is a comfortable fit for the former Stanford professor, a virtual lectern from which to tutor the masses on energy efficiency and whip up support for alternative power sources.
Anyone who is well traveled knows that white roofs have topped homes and buildings in the Middle East and countries around the Mediterranean for centuries. Virtually every city in tropical climates have white, or light-colored roofs. Even the pharaohs, 5,000 years ago, made the tops of their temples white.
Residents of global hot spots know that white reflects heat and makes a building cooler. It’s so simple and obvious, but it’s been almost overlooked by new energy-saving technologies.
Wouldn’t you just love to pick your house up, turn it this way and that way on the lot, and figure out where it really makes the most sense? The spot where it catches the prevailing breeze, has shade in the summer, sun in the winter, and energy savings year-round?
That’s how houses were placed before air-conditioning, when a family’s comfort inside depended on how well the house functioned. But today, we live in tidy rows on uniform blocks that line up in a way that makes more sense for real estate than anything else. The decision as to which way our doors and windows face was most likely made by a developer putting down dozens of homes at once; the placement of our driveways and patios followed suit.
And if the sun bakes us in the summer, or if our living room is freezing in the winter, we tend to focus on things we can do inside the house to mitigate the problem. We turn the thermostat up or down; we dig out the blankets in winter or the fans in summer.
And we pay for all of it, in comfort and utility bills.
By Paula Minahan
Swimming pools are a big draw in summer, but when it comes to energy consumption, they can be a big drain. Award-winning green architect Peter Pfeiffer shared his own experience on how to reduce “pain at the pump”:
Here’s a great story about building my own home. We installed solar panels on the [...]
You can save money and the earth in the current economy. KVUE’s Jill Cordes explains in our project green report.