Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 this morning.

From the Nobel Foundation’s statement:

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

And the response from the Gores:

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis – a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

Well, after a tremendous year of accomplishments and honors (an Emmy for Current TV, an Oscar for Inconvenient Truth, the Live Earth global concert over the summer), this is the final benchmark for Gore; if he doesn’t run for president in 2008 now, then he definitely ain’t runnin’ …

While it’s easy to smile at stories of people changing their lightbulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescents, or choosing to ride to work on a bike over driving a car, it takes more than anecdotal blips at the grass roots level to feel confident that a sea change in attitudes and behaviors is happening in the face of our looming environmental crisis. Sometimes it takes knowing that Big Capital is playing on the same team — a dicey proposition however you cut it, given that powerful corporations are the worst offenders and their political influence and financial machinations ensure that their loyal politicians sit out badly needed regulatory measures to keep those very corporations in heed.

All of which is why stories, such as this one in Vanity Fair about General Electric and its young and dynamic CEO Jeffrey Immelt, seem so encouraging. When the second largest company in the world, after Wal-Mart (which too has recently embraced sustainability). His emphasis, for better or worse, is not ‘about being trendy or moral. It’s about accelerating economic growth.’ Green must beget green, in other words. Schmarmy as that may seem, it is realpolitik; for a shift in the environmental practices of major corporations can’t be catalyzed unless they are convinced of that shift’s benefits in terms of the bottom line.

 

The inaugural issue of Wholphin (McSweeney’s DVD media arm) includes a gem of a mini-doc of Al Gore in 1999, shot and directed by Spike Jonze. It’s a warm and intimate look at a day in the life of then-presidential candidate, chilling in Carthage, Tennessee, and at a vacation spot in North Carolina, with Tipper and his daughter Karenna.

The film was made for the Democratic Convention of 2000, but was never more widely released. The liner notes (which includes a short interview with Jonze) suggest the possibility that a larger airing of this short may have offset the media portrayal of Gore as a stiff and uncharismatic candidate. Indeed, watching this relaxed, witty and completely amiable man putz around the house with his family leaves you aching, knowing that he would soon lose to the privileged, unprincipled fratboy failure who has now occupied the White House for two craptastic terms. Little did Al Gore or Spike Jonze know that this tiny film would be viewed, in 2006, as a tragedy. Watching this film is a little like peering back through the looking glass to a brighter time and place, before we were all plunged into this collective nightmarish alternate reality …

View the 15-minute piece on the Wholphin site, or on Video Google.

[via BoingBoing]

*** 

Lastly, I leave you with this (rhetorical) question: why should we draft Al Gore?

Yet another sad episode in the United States’ continued slow motion self-lobotomization:  

From 2002 until this year, NASA’s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.”

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” deleted. In this year’s budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”

David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.

The full article, from the New York Times, is here.

Greenpeace UK released a brilliantly acidic ad (part of their What Does Your Car Say About You? campaign) that tucks anti-SUV sentiment neatly within the metaphor of all-too-familiar intra-office relations.

This video tells me two things about the British: that 1) they are (still) obsessed with The Office, and 2) they are much further along culturally in their rejection of the irresponsible fuel-hogging behemoths known as Sports Utility Vehicles. The message of this piece would simply not fly in the US. For Americans, the social pariah in the commercial is less likely to be the douche with the SUV than the sensible person with the gall to argue in favor of a gasoline tax or carbon trade caps on our vehicular and industrial emissions. Sigh …

But I do think things are changing. If the increase of ad hominem attacks on specific car-types and drivers indicates a larger and more ingrained shift in our attitudes, then sites such as FUH2 (a user-generated photo submission site with its guns trained unflinchingly on the H2 line of Hummers) are encouraging. Sometimes you must be hater to be a lover!

Check out our submission of June 14, 2004:

[via Treehugger]

On the sustainable energy front, two new technologies to be tweaked by …

Brown energy is the polite term being bandied about to describe new methods of capturing the methane gas (a chief component of natural gas, as well as a principle greenhouse gas, more potent in its heat-capturing effects than carbon dioxide) generated by cattle. Polite because it euphemizes the process of collecting gas from thousands of cows and pigs farting and shitting their way to their own annihilation.

But its scatological characteristics aside, it’s impossible not to recognize a certain elegance to the operation, both ecologically: 

… More utilities are thinking of buying the gas outright. Pacific Gas and Electric has agreed to transport gas from a big digester that Microgy, a digester manufacturer, is building in California. Right now Microgy plans to sell the gas on the open market, but Robert Howard, vice president for gas transmission and distribution, said P.G.& E. may buy some gas itself. “This technology provides pipeline-quality gas and reduces carbon emissions, so of course we’re in favor it,” he said.

The environmental boons are many. According to Agstar, digesters are already keeping 66,000 tons of methane from escaping each year into the atmosphere, while generating enough energy to power more than 20,000 homes.

and economically:

The potential market is huge. Agstar officials say that at least 70,000 dairy and swine farms are big enough to support a commercial digester and could collectively provide enough energy to power more than 560,000 homes, while keeping more than 1.4 million tons of methane out of the atmosphere.

“The business model of producing energy along with food will transform the economics of rural America,” said Michael T. Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, based in Washington.

Indeed, anaerobic digestion yields not just methane, but leftover liquids that farmers can use or sell as fertilizer, waste heat that can heat their homes and barns, and fibrous solids that make excellent bedding for cows. Farmers also save the costs of controlling odors and treating waste. “Two years ago I couldn’t even convince farmers that digesters work,” said Melissa Dvorak, marketing manager for GHD, a company based in Chilton, Wis., that sells digesters. “Now, all they ask is what the payback will be.”

The full article is in the NYTimes, via Treehugger.

***

Crowd power is an equally interesting (and less messy) attempt at siphoning energy from the otherwise irreversible slide towards entropy. The imaginative idea is based on tapping into the restless, unceasing energy of the city itself; footfalls, vehicle vibrations, the general ambience of a busy day. Unlike Brown Power, this is still in the prototype phase, but it has received a lot of financial investment already. What they have so far:

[Project engineers] Bates and Price are now in the process of developing a joint partnership to make the idea a reality. The architectural team is working with university research groups to finish two vibration-harvesting prototypes by December. The first is a staircase that will contain hydraulic or piezoelectric technology in the risers. The technology will pick up kinetic energy from commuter footfalls and convert it into an electrical current.

Climbing stairs requires more force, which means there’s more energy to be tapped. Engineering experts from the University of Hull hope to develop a system that will convert at least 50% of the six to eight watts each person typically generates while walking. The current will be stored in a battery, which can be used to provide energy for lighting or electronic devices. The second prototype is a wireless lighting system that will use tiny generators with components designed to resonate at the same frequency as surrounding vibrations. The resonance will either move a magnet relative to a coil or put stress on a crystalline structure inside a generator to produce a current. Light-emitting diodes connected to such vibration harvesters could illuminate the underside of arches.

Full article is here. Also via Treehugger.

 

 

Like a great many people have done recently, I saw An Inconvenient Truth tonight and was shattered.

In it slow methodical science takes unusually persuasive and passionate form. It is truth-telling at its noblest and most highly effective. The enormous, planetary threat that Al Gore has been flogging since his college and congressional days (the latter of which was a 17-year tenure he began at age 27) go beyond the politicization that the right has tactically and instinctively — and predictably — resorted to in attacking the film; rather, global warming is, as Gore himself says, not a political issue, but an urgently moral one. That so many people have been packing seats to see it, and that the Republican counterargument is sounding more and more shrill and insane to more and more people by the minute signals, perhaps, that a tipping point in our collective consciousness has finally been reached. Whether or not we can make it past the next century still remains to be seen. If we don’t, will it perhaps be because we’ve reached the Rapture after all? A fossil-fuel-depleted, water-logged, carbon-soaked one albeit? Now that we seem to have eeked past 6/6/06, all bets are off …

I’ve said it before, but just to reiterate … Gore in 2008! We need you ever so desperately now … 

On a lighter, but nevertheless related tip, check out this ingenious and entertaining (and alas, depressing) animation called A Bad Case of the Humans …

Two pieces in today’s Times …

This discusses the green building movement in New York, and features SOM’s recently completed 7 World Trade Center, and Sir Norman Foster’s Hearst Building. When they say ‘green,’ they mean it in more senses than one:

Of course, it isn’t just environmental consciousness that is motivating developers. Because green buildings use from 30 to 70 percent less energy, they can be run for less money — but leased for more, because companies want healthy offices, which several studies have shown lead to increased productivity.

This op-ed by Jamie Lincoln Kitman of Automobile Magazine applies some lucidity to the hype surrounding hybrid cars:

Several bills floating around Congress, for instance, have proposed tax incentives to buyers of hybrid cars, irrespective of their gas mileage. Thus, under one failed but sure to resurface formulation, the suburbanite who buys a hypothetical hybrid Dodge Durango that gets 14 miles per gallon instead of 12 thanks to its second, electric power source would be entitled to a huge tax incentive, while the buyer of a conventional, gasoline-powered Honda Civic that delivers 40 miles per gallon on the open road gets none.

And under some imaginable patchwork of state and local ordinances, the Durango buyer might get a special parking space at the train station and the right to use a high occupancy vehicle lane, despite appalling fuel economy and a car full of empty seats, while the Honda driver will have to walk to the train from a distant parking lot after braving the worst of morning rush hour traffic on the highway just like everybody else.

*** 

Holy hyperlinking! While we are discussing the Times, I was pleasantly surprised when I saved the above article and received this smart, Amazon-style followup — a long-overdue feature, for sure:

 

If you listen hard enough these days, you can hear the trees whispering: Al Gore, Al Gore …

Is he our man? And if he can’t do it, then who out there can? Hillary? Meh, fuggedaboutit. John Kerry? Next. Mark Warner? Only if your glass reads half-full and not half-defensive capitulation. It’s not a field of good options for the Democrats in 2008, and the idea of a McCain presidency, which at one point may have been tolerable, even desirable, seems to be growing more and more gangrenous everyday; at the rate he’s been feeling out the rightwing nutjob fringes, the ’straight-talking’ liberal centrists and moderate Republicans will have to amputate, and soon.

I’ve been talking to friends who have begun getting excited about a possible return for Gore into the fray. In the last six years, freed from the cultural constraints of beltway politesse, Gore has been aggressively outspoken in his views ranging from the Iraq war to the environment to the sorry state of contemporary journalism, and has conveyed a charisma and ferocity that was entirely missing from his milquetoast 2000 run. Now, do his newly forged lefty credentials translate into a viable presidential run? That’s hard to say, but the question is not as opaque as it was in the fall of 2004; since then an unceasing accumulation of Republican-branded bad news has fermented into a thoroughly toxic stew for the GOP that has resonance not just for the 2006 midterms, but quite possibly well beyond. Iraq, Katrina, Abramoff, global warming (and the Bush administration’s reluctance to deal with it), and Bush himself’s southbound approval ratings have created buoyant conditions for an electable Democratic insurgent, a scenario which was unthinkable when Kerry and Edwards took their turns on the sacrificial pyre of ‘domestic insecurity’ and ‘out-of-touch liberal’ two short years ago.

So then the question is: who can stake a liberal position on good faith, who a) doesn’t have a contradictory or ambiguous record having signed on to the Iraqi misadventure in 2002, who b) has the name-recognition and gravitas to not easily get called out on opportunism or so-called coastal liberal detachment, and who c) is actually experienced enough in administration and statecraft to deflect charges of inadequacy and softness? Well, arguably, Al Gore.

This intriguing piece in The American Prospect about the ‘new new Gore’ is a really thoughtful primer for the fanboy and the skeptic alike. I recommend it mightily.

His official line, btw, is that he’s out of the running. His non-official 2008 netroots site is here. And later this summer, Gore’s documentary film about global climate collapse An Inconvenient Truth (produced by the smart and progressive Participant Productions, production company for Good Night, Good Luck and Syriana) will be released.

 

I knew Blaine Brownell from architecture school — I was an undergrad and he was a grad student working on his thesis. He’s in Seattle now, and a Seattle friend of mine, recently sent a link to his blog Transstudio to me. A couple of weeks later, Archinect posted this interview with Blaine in Business Week (be sure look through the slide show section). So in a short amount of time, the Blaine Brownell alarm has been sounding, and thus a closer examination was in order.

It appears that Blaine has just published a book called Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment (a description of the book, published by PAP, can be found here) that documents innovations in materials and their potential uses, aesthetic and practical, in architectural design. It’s not always easy for architecture to get press for innovation; after all, construction methods haven’t significantly changed in thousands of years (the Romans invented concrete, and not much about it has changed about concrete except that we now have big trucks with rotating cylindrical barrels to haul it around in. Oh, and maybe rebar). Architectural ‘innovation’ is invariably of a formal or stylistic nature, and that esoteric criteria — which float above the pablum in an aesthetic cloud-world, populated and described by the crispy, airless, sometimes bloviated phonemes of archispeak – tend to leave most people cold. Compare that to technological innovation, which gives rise to new ontologies with each OS or software launch (how would you explain Google to someone in 1980? Or the internet?) and whose outcomes affect and are immediately recognizable to millions of people – to anyone who has a desktop computer, for instance, who can practically feel the difference between the dreadful OS9 and the elegant OSX kicking them in the head.

That is perhaps the nature of things. But at least the snail’s pace of physical material can now ride the blogosphere at the speed of dsl, thanks to Transstudio. Architects, contractors, fabricators, vendors, interior descecrators and you stingy sheetrock-loving clients, bookmark now.

In any case, let me know if something gets built with transparent concrete anytime soon — the architect in me needs some old school materials porn every once in a while. Oh, and whisper sweet archispeak in my ear while you’re at it.

In somewhat related news (and onto a topic that’s dear to my heart and a bone that can never quite be tickled enough), check out the always-entertaining Peter Hall’s self-evidently named essay Living Skins: Architecture as Interface, published in the Adobe Design Center.

[from Core77]

The politicization of science under the Bush Administration continues, carried out via the insidious silencing of dissenting (indeed, empirical, science-based) views. A 40-year veteran of NASA and an expert on climate science there, Dr. James E. Hansen, has come forth claiming that his increasingly vocal warnings about the dangers of global warming — a message he has been hewing since 1988 — are being muzzled by his politically-minded bosses.

The article gives wiggle room the Bush-appointed PR-flack for NASA (some toolbox named George Deutsch), saying that without a hard record a lot of the accusations are of a he-said/she-said variety, but really now. None of this should come as a revelation. After years of this kind of intimidation, at the NIH, at the EPA, at State, at Defense, within Congress, even within the so-called independent media — why would the suppression of ‘off-message’ information by the Whitehouse be seen anymore as anything but S.O.P.?

‘… Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.

In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA’s mission statement includes the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet.”

He said he was particularly incensed that the directives affecting his statements had come through informal telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.’

…

‘The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth “a different planet.” The administration’s policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.

After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be “dire consequences” if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews.’

Full article here.