Back in August I came close to posting a blog “Enough of the Empire State Building Already” but that one faded away. In case you never read anything about energy savings and sustainability, the building is undergoing a $20 million renovation to improve energy efficiency. The project would shave the facility’s $11 million energy bill (a cool $4 per square foot) by 38%. Johnson Control ran ads in every trade magazine I get and various publications, including major newspapers, ran articles by the dozens. Coming in a close second to the Empire State Building was the Northland Pines High School…
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I was going to talk about sane solutions for ground transportation this week and I was going to lead with a tidbit, but that snowballed into the entire rant of its own. Last week I was reading The Wall Street Journal on my 1994 organic cotton-stuffed futon when I had a “Ha! You scheming, scamming, shysters!” moment. In Law of Gravity Repealed, I accused for-profit corporations who are in favor of carbon caps of essentially getting in bed with the political hacks in Washington to form the rules of the game such that they come out ahead of their competitors. …
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“Green jobs” have been all the buzz for quite some time, probably before Barack Obama was elected president, but I don’t know for sure. What the heck is a green job anyway? Some real answers include those like we have at Michaels Engineering with 20+ engineers working full time on real energy-saving projects. Another example is the guy who operates the humongous crane that helps erect humongous wind turbines. But politicians and academic eggheads aren’t talking about jobs like we have at Michaels, although they probably do agree the crane driver has a green job, but it goes far beyond…
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Yay! I’m outside working on my computer for the first time this year. Alright, who cares? Every week I plow through news-clipping services to see what is going on, to build my topic list, which is piling up faster than the weeks pass. This week I had to shelve 4-5 great topics to again take on the recently arisen climate bill. Many huge utilities and other giant energy users and associations are lauding the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill. These institutions include the American Wind Association, Duke Energy, Dow Chemical, Florida Power and Light, T. Boone Pickens, National Resources Defense Council, Steelworkers Union,…
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Carbon taxes or cap and trade seem to have been a foregone conclusion in our industry of energy efficiency. I’m not so sure. I, like many other engineers in the energy efficiency business have always been cynical about global warming, which for some reason is now known as climate change. I would argue that a relatively small portion of anti-carbon people are true believers, that carbon is having or will have a significant effect on the climate and I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the vast majority of people and organizations who…
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Hypothetical: Our company has about 40 employees. We’re going to split into 4 teams and have a tournament. What’s the game? We have cyclists, runners, a guy who thinks he can play golf, a guy who throws hammer but not when I’m around, skiers, people who fish, people who hunt, play cards, Sudoku, video games, Frisbee golf, and play board games. We’ve played softball games (poorly) when the economy was good. We have people who were born when I was in college. We have people who were in college before I was in the first grade. Female, male, burley, squirrelly,…
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