Recently in Green Building Category

BUMPED: Great project by a Knoxville church:

St. John's Lutheran Church, 544 N. Broadway, is revamping its main parking lot. But there is no paving involved. Instead, the church is using brick "hardscaping," a technique that aims to be pleasing to the eye as well as easy on the environment.

There's no storm water runoff (a pollution problem for big parking lots), and the pavers last decades longer and look better.

Lush trees and flowers, benches and a large open greenspace will create an area for the church and community members to gather outdoors. Outside of church activities, the lot should be mostly empty. "We wanted to create something uplifting instead of another asphalt jungle," said Don Shell, a designing architect for the new parking lot as well as former president of the church's council.

"Uplifting." Amen, brother. [photo credit]

UPDATED: With some local governments charging rain runoff taxes, this type of paving could prove more cost effective in the long run.

ExtremeTech.com (via) sez "Yes, I'd do it again."

The eternal question of price/performance always crops up. Clearly, I'm saving money, but I also sank around $38,000 into the system. At $3,000 per year in savings (which assumes a constant rate for power cost and the same power usage pattern), that's a 12.5 year payback.

But things change. Rates go up. My oldest daughter is heading off to college in September, so that's less laundry, less HDTV usage and one less PC running in the evenings and holidays. My work will be changing, and that will affect power usage, too. I'm betting that payback period will be substantially less than ten years.

There are reasons which have nothing to do with finances. That "green feeling"—the feeling that we're doing something to mitigate energy consumption and climate change on a small level—is pretty strong. Having solar power in the Bay Area either increases our home resale value or at least mitigates the decline—though that's hard to quantify until we actually sell the house.

One last intangible benefit is what home theater enthusiasts, who are mostly men, call the "spousal acceptance factor." When my wife sees the overall power bill, she's quite pleased. And that's almost reason enough by itself.

NY Times:

In San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, Maya Donelson has filled planter boxes with vegetables on a 900-square-foot patch of roof at the Glide Memorial Church. For the past year she has managed the Graze the Roof Project at the church’s Glide Center, a neighborhood social service provider.

The food goes to the center’s volunteers and children in the neighborhood who work in the garden one day a week and learn to cook what they grow.

And in the Wall Street Journal, vegetable oil makes better jet fuel than jet fuel. Does your airplane smell like frenchfries?

Jordan Ballor:

The lesson state officials ought to learn is one about fostering an economic environment that promotes diversification and sustainability through creative liberty, rather than being tied to any one (however hopeful) sector of the economy.

This lesson also has something to teach us about how to truly promote sustainable business. The jobs that are most usually called “green,” like the places that manufacture wind turbines or solar cells, are a tiny part of the economic picture. Instead of “green” jobs, we ought to focus on “greening” jobs, changing the way we do jobs that already exist.

Yep. There's a lot of low hanging fruit out there that is rotting on the tree.

fails its own energy audit. Our country's in the very best of hands.

UPDATE: 'Obama Energy Futurist', call your office...

$900K for an eco-tech house that doesn't work. The comments pretty much cover my thoughts on this.

Cris Bisch reports on a $6.4 billion House bill to green up our schools.

I hope they don't use the same contractor.

Leo Hickman in the Guardian: A poll this week showed that only 34% of America's white evangelical Protestants accepted there is solid evidence that global warming is real and that it is attributable to humans.

Here's his bottom line: 

It's a popular rebuke made by climate change sceptics that environmentalism displays all the traits of a religion (the words "pot", "kettle" and "black", spring to mind for some reason), but I have to say I'm left perplexed when I even attempt to understand the logic of creation care through the prism of evangelicalism.

Many millions of people hold these views so it would be foolish to ignore this huge constituency, but how do you even go about responding to such beliefs?

Scratch, meet itch.  Most frustrating to me are Christians labeling other Christians who haven't completely bought into global warmism as against creation care.  As if.  

Anyway, scan the post's comments for some interesting answers. 

UPDATE: Maybe "unaffiliated" Christians are just more prone to being swayed by global warmist emotionalism; Catholics, the Gospel community and Evangelicals, not so much.  And what are those Hispanic Catholics thinking, I wonder...

UPDATE: Here's another take on "perplexed."

UPDATE: Pete Illyn in Newsweek:

The good and bad with the environmental movement was that Christians were first introduced to environmentalism through climate change. That may have been a bad place to start because there was a lot of skepticism. It may have been too atmospheric, too faith-based, too "Do I believe, or do I not believe?" For the average pastor, that's a problem.

Right on, Pete.  It's also a problem for many in the pews.

UPDATE: Here's a Lifeway poll on pastors. They're split 50/50 on the question. 

By the way, nobody asked me (heh) but I'm with the my Gospel brothers and sisters on this one.  Climate change is largely natural, has been influenced by human CO2 and other pollutants, and there's a big we really don't know what we don't know factor thrown in for good measure. 

Happy Monday to you! I just published a pair of guest posts I thought you and your readers might be interested in.

First is an impassioned, fact-rich and God-oriented case for why houses of worship should practice organic lawn care. Then, 8 tips for how to green that church lawn.

Best,

Holly 

Groovy Green:

It has come to my attention recently that the real estate trust Prologis is developing the rooftops of their existing buildings by contracting to lease the space to power companies to install solar panels.

Want a green house? Try a greenhouse. More great pics at the link.