Whole Travel Blog

In New Orleans, Louisiana, there will eventually be a 100% Cradle to Cradle Flow House. The design plans were unveiled by William McDonough & Partners last week, the first in a series of duplexes that hopefully revitalize the Lower 9th area of New Orleans that was devastated during Hurricane Katrina.

Cradle to Cradle Design: The Flow House in New Orleans

The entire philosophy behind Cradle to Cradle design is that the materials can be reused for other projects or recycled into the environment if and when the current structure completes its useful life. The local community in the Lower 9th provided substantial input during the duplex’s design to make sure it reflects the true need and desires of the local culture. There is ample daylighting and passive ventilation to keep energy needs low, and photovoltaic panels on the roof can hopefully completely power the structure and put power back into the grid.

If you’re in Long Beach, California, check out the M/V Auriga Leader. It’s docked at the Port of Long Beach and hosts an amazing 328 solar panels that provide up to 10% of the ship’s power.

Auriga Leader: powered by the sun

The ship is part of a demonstration by Toyota and Japan’s NYK Line, and it directs solar power into the ship’s main electrical grid, helping to power the thrusters, hydraulics and steering, and provide 10% of the ship’s electricity. While 10% may seem nominal, supertankers can require enough energy to power 5,500 homes while at port, so even small percentage improvements are huge savings for the earth.

The San Francisco-based design firm Mike and Maaike, which designed Google’s G1 phone, has come up with the Autonomobile, a concept for a self-driving, low-speed electric car of the future. They acknowledge that this car will probably never be built - especially considering the years of skepticism and months of anticipation before the G1 was launched - but they hope to at least provide some inspiration for the future of ground transportation.

Who needs a steering wheel? Give me a couch!

The design by Mike and Maaike takes the opposite approach to Tesla Motors, which is working to spur interest in electric vehicles by making them sporty and fun to drive. So instead of all the bells and whistles of a sports car, the Autonomobile’s design is all about quality time while in transit. A lounge area with no steering wheel, accelerator or rear-view mirror allows comfortable seating for 7, whether working on computers, watching television or just relaxing and conversing. Technology has a long way to go before it can provide this type of experience, but hopefully this provides inspiration for the designers of our future transports.

In 2006, the house was still in its planning stages: a house built with more than 600,000 lbs of construction materials recycled from the Big Dig highway project in Boston. The “Big Dig” is the unofficial name of the Central Artery/Tunnel Project, the chief highway through the heart of Boston and the most expensive highway project in the United States. The Big Dig House is literally made from much of the waste materials from I-93 overcrossings.

The Big Dig House - don't drive here anymore

The final cost was approximately $150 per square foot, with most of the materials provided only for the cost of shipping. Single Speed Design used this project to prove the point that infrastructure materials can be salvaged and reused to create amazing structures. Most of the materials were used as-is from the I-93 teardown, so they created a structure significantly stronger than necessary for a residence. As such, the house features an amazing garage-top garden. Not too shabby!

Park your car and walk upstairs!

The Obama administration released a report last week that outlines anticipated temperature, rainfall, sea level and other environmental changes for the rest of the century. Not only does the report cover the usual agricultural and food production problems, it discusses heat-related illnesses and deaths, weather patterns, wildfires, and flooding. What is currently predicted as a 100-year storm will likely occur every 10 years, significantly overcoming our engineering safety designs. One section reads:

“Escalating exposures to catastrophic weather events, coupled with private insurers’ withdrawal from various markets, are placing the federal government at increased financial risk as insurer of last resort.”

Every 10 years instead of every 100??

With all the political noise-making recently about global climate change, let’s hope the world gets a plan in place to help mitigate these risks and potential impacts. You can download the entire report here.

Thursday, Continental Airlines announced the results of its January 7 biofuel demonstration flight. Not only was the flight successful, the biofuel showed approximately 1.1% greater fuel efficiency over traditional jet fuel. So, not only was the fuel made from renewable sources, it actually beat traditional fuel outright. This type of fuel is estimated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80% as well.

Flying the greener skies

“We look forward to working with our partners as biofuels go through the certification process, and we hope to see these fuels proceed into commercial quantities in the near future,” said Leah Raney, Continental’s managing director of global environmental affairs. Hopefully it’s not long until we see all jet fuel from sustainable sources.

Top officials at the United Nations announced last Friday that the world is on track to produce a new global climate treaty by December. After 12 days of talks in Bonn, Germany, more than 100 delegates issued a 200-page document as a starting point for upcoming negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, this December. The goal of this treaty would be to go beyond the Kyoto Protocol, which was never even ratified by the United States.

Bonn, Germany at night

The document outlines ways to cut carbon emissions by rich countries and limiting their growth in developing nations. There are also economic incentives for developing countries to help them cope with warmer temperatures. Many environmental advocates still argue that the process is moving too slowly, but most are encouraged by the strong participation of many nations, including the United States and China - which combined produce 40% of the world’s carbon emissions. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s good to see this at the forefront of the UN’s agenda for 2009.

The United States Global Change Research Program, a joint venture of 13 federal agencies and the White House, released a study this week confirming that even if the nation takes significant measures to reduce carbon emissions, the impact of global warming is expected to become more severe in upcoming years. Some of the impacts expected are already being seen, including more powerful tropical storms and erosion of ocean coastlines.

Where's my iceberg?

Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), stated, “What we would want to have people take away is that climate change is happening now, and it’s actually beginning to affect our lives.” He did continue to say that if we implement controls and measures to reduce our environmental footprint these effects could be significantly smaller.

The study is posted here: http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts. We encourage everyone to give it a browse if you have time - it’s 188 pages but has good summaries of the effects we’re having on our planet.

General Electric and the Idaho National Laboratory announced last week that they have received $2 million from the Department of Energy to further research and develop a technology that converts heat from industrial engines into electricity, potentially making engines 20-40% more efficient and reducing carbon emissions.

Don't waste that waste heat!

Researchers in Germany and New York have been working to improve the Organic Rankine Cycle so that they may effectively capture and convert waste heat, but technology to date has not been cost competitive. By using an evaporator instead of a working fluid, GE’s new design can capture heat from relatively small sources and convert it to electricity for a wide range of applications.

As reported by the Associated Press a few days ago, the wind seems to be dying down across the United States. The cause of this apparent slowing of our winds is still very speculative, as scientists disagree as to whether it’s even happening on a significant scale. But this study does suggest that average and peak winds have been on the decline since 1973, with some stations in the Midwest reporting >10% drops over the course of a decade.

Wind turbines near Mount Carmel, Iowa, stand still in December 2008.

There are enough questions that even the authors won’t say definitively whether the trend is real or not. But, with wind energy as a potential solution to part of the global warming crisis, it’s concerning that the solution might become useless by the problem.