The third project in the Green Builder VISION House series is taking on some special challenges. Unlike the previous two VISION projects in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and St. Louis, Missouri, this year’s house is being built in a steamy, hurricane-prone environment: Orlando, Florida.

Members of the public will have a chance to check out this latest VISION home toward the end of the International Builders’ Show and nextBUILD, set to be held Feb. 13 through 16 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. The home will be open to National Association of Home Builders members throughout the show, then will welcome the public on Feb. 16 and 17.

Designers of the VISION House ‘08 Orlando say the structure is a unique, high-end custom home that shows “green can be not only glamorous, but also sustainable by considering durability and life safety in an active hurricane zone.”

What makes the Orlando VISION house especially suited to a Florida environment? Features of the structure include:

A focus on water conservation, with cisterns for collecting stormwater runoff, “super-efficient” indoor fixtures and native, drought-resistant landscaping;

Spray Foam insulation, high-performance doors and windows and an energy-efficient heat and air-conditioning system for reduced cooling costs;

Zero-VOC (volatile organic compounds), natural plaster from American Clay both inside and — as a test application of a new exterior stucco product — outside the home. In addition to helping moderate temperatures and control humidity, according to the company, the natural plaster also inhibits mold, a regular concern in Florida’s hot, sticky climate;

Indoor furnishings, materials and finishes designed to minimize offgassing of VOCs.

Climate change and its impact on Florida will take the stage, front and center, when the Florida chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) holds its 2008 statewide meeting later this month.

“As greater awareness of global climate change emerges, each professional involved in planning, designing, managing or governing Florida communities has an obligation to know the facts and potential solutions to this grave threat,” says Rick Hall, chairman of CNU’s Florida chapter.

The Florida chapter meeting, scheduled to be held Jan. 24 and 25 at Rollins College in Winter Park, is aimed at highlighting the message that “New Urbanism is the convenient solution to the inconvenient truth.”

Among those expecting to attend the statewide gathering are Anthony Wayne King of the Carbon-Climate Simulation Science Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who will discuss global climate change; Stephen Adams, lead staff member for Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s Interim Climate and Energy Action Plan; and Lizz Plater-Zyberk, dean at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture and principal of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co.

The concept of New Urbanism holds that “walkable, human-scaled neighborhoods (are) the building blocks of sustainable communities and regions,” according to the national Congress for the New Urbanism.

Image courtesy of the Congress for the New Urbanism, taken by Michael E. Arth

There’s good news for the future of green-collar employment, but it comes with a caveat: maximizing job growth in green industries will require the right public policy support. That means law-makers need to approve measures such as a renewable portfolio standard, incentives for renewable energy, public education programs and adequate funding for research and development.

If such measures are put in place, the U.S. could see as many as one out of every four workers employed by a renewable-energy or energy-efficiency industry by 2030, according to a new report from the American Solar Energy Society (ASES). That’s promising for both U.S. employees and for anyone concerned about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels. But it will happen only, as the ASES report says, under “an aggressive deployment forecast scenario.”

That means we, as citizens and consumers, are going to have to apply strong and steady pressure on legislators — local, state and national — to do the right thing. And that, we all know, isn’t easy.

Still, if — as the saying goes — money walks, green-collar types might see Beltway support grow as green industries expand their economic muscle, which means more dollars for lobbying and campaign financing. And, in that regard, the future looks bright.

In the U.S., renewable-energy and energy-efficiency industries are already generating 8.5 million jobs and nearly $970 billion in annual revenues, according to the ASES report. “To put this in perspective,” the report states, “(t)otal sales for Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil and General Motors in 2006 were $905 billion.”

While companies on the energy-efficiency side — things like better windows, efficient appliances and insulation — are making more of the money right now, the renewables side is growing more rapidly.

The ASES predicts the hottest, fastest-growing industries will involve solar power, wind energy, ethanol and fuel-cell technologies. With the right level of public support, it says, we could see up to 40 million people employed — as everything from accountants and biochemists to engineers, mechanics and truck drivers — in the renewable-energy and energy-efficiency sectors by 2030, with annual green-industry revenues of $4.5 trillion.

Getting there, though, will require much more than a business-as-usual approach, the ASES report warns.

“This scenario requires appropriate, aggressive, sustained public policies at the federal and state level during next two decades,” it states. Getting decision-makers to come on board might take oil shortages, fossil-fuel price increases, growing security concerns or a greater awareness of the impact of climate change. The fear of suffering economically at a global level might also be a motivator.

“If we fail to invest in (renewable energy and energy efficiency), the United States runs the risk of losing ground to international … programs and industries,” the report concludes. “For the United States to be competitive in a carbon-constrained world, the (renewable energy and energy efficiency) industry will be a critical economic driver.”

Can better energy efficiency help us reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and curb our greenhouse gas emissions? Maybe not as much as some hope.

While some people tout better and more energy-efficient technology as one solution to our current fuel and climate challenges, their expectations might be overblown. A new study from the UK Energy Research Centre, for example, finds that improved efficiency sometimes creates a tendency to use more energy, or to engage in other activities that counteract the efficiency gains. It’s called the “rebound effect,” and it can work either directly or indirectly to reduce expected energy savings from improved efficiency.

Rebounds occur, for example, when someone who buys a more fuel-efficient car decides to take the occasional longer day trip because, “Hey, I’m not spending as much on gas anymore.” They can also happen when someone who’s improved his home insulation uses the money saved on heating and cooling to pay for a plane trip to Orlando.

Then there’s “backfire,” also known, somewhat bizarrely, as the Khazzoon-Brookes postulate. That’s the even worse effect that can occur when a new energy-efficient technology actually causes overall energy use to increase. It happened, for instance, after the steam engine came onto the scene. Nineteenth-Century Scotland saw its total coal consumption increase tenfold thanks to the steam engine, which made it possible to mine coal at a lower cost, which made it cheaper to produce iron, when then lowered the cost of steam engines and drove the development of the railway industry.

While backfires are uncommon, rebounds are not. A recent report from the InterAcademy Council noted that technology improvements over the past 20 years have helped drive a small decline in the world’s energy intensity — which compares energy consumption to economic output — but not in its overall energy consumption. And the United National Environmental Programme’s latest “Global Environmental Outlook” (GEO-4) warns that, while technology can help defend against environmental stresses, it’s sometimes important to look beyond the “technology-centred development paradigm.”

The UK rebound report concludes we could be overestimating our savings from improved effiency by anywhere from 10 to 50-plus percent. It adds that policy-makers need to start taking rebounds into effect now if they want to enact energy- and carbon-reducing measures that actually work.

Talking with an elected official about how to get climate change legislation with teeth on the books conjures up the quote from Otto von Bismarck: "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

That’s how I felt, anyway, after getting off the phone following a conference call between Sen. John Kerry (D, MA) and environmental bloggers today. Kerry demonstrates a full and deep understanding of the challenges posed by global warming, but also makes it clear — without actually having to say it — how slowly and painstakingly the legislative process moves to address those challenges.

Kerry expressed confidence in the prospects of the current Lieberman-Warner proposal for a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions. He indicated cautious optimism that the next administration will enable law-makers to enact even stronger measures aimed at curbing climate change. He placed a lot of hope on the abilities of science, technology and business to develop solutions to challenges such as developing carbon capture and storage so we can burn coal cleanly.

Kerry also noted he and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D, CA) will be taking a delegation to Bali next month — for talks to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol — "to make sure the U.S. is properly represented. We’re not going to let the stonewalling of this administration dominate." And he urged us to put steady, ongoing pressure on other legislators, especially moderates and those in states likely to feel the greatest impact of climate change, to make the right decisions.

It’s encouraging we’re taking steps toward addressing climate change. It’s also good to see we’re taking more and more of those steps each day, and speeding up our stride little by little. But still I’m left with a lingering concern that, despite all the well-informed and properly motivated leaders like Kerry, the gears of government are grinding too slowly to make meaningful action possible in the immediate future.

Kerry is more optimistic, and I hope he proves my fears unfounded.

"I think basically we’re on the brink of a very exciting era," he said. "We’re going to get some of these projects (such as carbon capture and storage) rolling. There are some very exciting concepts out there."

The demand for solar energy is expanding rapidly, but one of the industry’s obstacles to even faster growth has always been the difficulty of getting enough silicon to make photovoltaic cells for solar panels.

This week, though, IBM announced a new potential source for much-needed silicon: waste silicon wafers used to make semiconductor chips for computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices. By erasing the layers of intellectual property that previously prevented those chips from being sold for other uses, IBM can now sell its scrap silicon wafers directly to companies that manufacture solar panels.

IBM and other companies in the industry use silicon wafers to imprint the patterns on semiconductor chips. Once scrapped, these product silicon wafers have typically been crushed and sent to landfills, or melted down for resale. That’s because the proprietary information encoded on the wafers has prevented them from being resold.

Using a process developed by engineer Eric White, though, IBM has found a way to erase the intellectual property from wafers so they can be reused or resold. IBM has introduced the process to turn old product wafers into monitor wafers to help manage the chip-manufacturing process. Wafers of either kind that reach the end of their lives can now be marketed to solar cell makers rather than being trashed.

IBM says up to 3.3 percent of the new silicon wafers made in the industry each day are currently scrapped. While that might not sound like much, when you consider that, worldwide, semiconductor manufacturers create 250,000 new wafers per day, the numbers start adding up. Using stats from the Semiconductor Industry Association, IBM estimates that could mean annual waste of up to three million silicon wafers — enough, according to IBM, to cover an area of 22.5 acres, or to provide solar power to 6,000 homes.

IBM says the new reclamation process helped it save more than a half-million dollars at its Burlingont, Vermont, facility last year; it expects to save nearly $1.5 million this year. It says it’s also getting ready to use the process at its plant in East Fishkill, New York, and will provide working details to others in the semiconductor-making industry.

ReneSola, one of China’s fastest-growing solar energy companies, has already begun to use the reclaimed silicon wafers to make its solar panels. And the IBM process recently won the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable’s "2007 Most Valuable Pollution Prevention Award."

Pretty big props for something that starts out so small.

The city of New York is the latest government considering restrictions on plastic shopping bags, with a proposal in the works to require large stores to offer in-house recycling and reusable bags for sale. But is action like that enough to stop the plastic bag scourge?

From Africa to Canada, Australia to Ireland, and in the oceans in between, plastic bag trash has become a pestilence seemingly without end. And everyone has taken a different approach to try and curb it. In Burkina Faso, women who discovered the ubiquitous trash was killing their livestock have developed a cottage industry that spins plastic trash into hand-crocheted dolls. Ireland, on the other hand, has managed to reduce plastic bag use 90 percent by charging a tax on the totes, and some places in Australia ban the bags outright.

Even though I always carry along a reusable string tote, I’m guilty of letting baggers at the grocery pack my purchases in plastic when I’m in a hurry, or I’m buying too much to fit in a single bag. I’m sure others do the same. And the problem is convenience: it’s just easier to go with plastic sometimes and say you’ll recycle later.

So maybe it’s time to put an end to convenience. A measure like the one being eyed in New York City probably won’t do much to stop plastic bag use by hordes of shoppers who — like me — just want to get their stuff and go. But a tax or a ban? That would have an impact. The bottom line is: does anybody really ever need to use a plastic bag again? Why not end their use now?

We tend to associate the problem of chronic poverty in many parts of the world with a lack of basic resources like food and water. But another essential resource — energy — also plays a key role.

"Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future," a report released by the InterAcademy Council (a global association of national science academies) this week, points out that access to basic energy services can help halve extreme poverty, reduce hunger, improve access to potable drinking water and enable basic health and education services that can help poor people become self-sustainable.

"In brief, substantial inequalities in access to energy services now exist, not only between countries but between populations within the same country and even between households within the same town or village," the report stated. "In many developing countries, a small elite uses energy in much the same way as in the industrialized world, while most of the rest of the population relies on traditional, often poor-quality and highly polluting forms of energy."

Basic energy services as a solution to poverty makes sense when you consider the numbers: 1.6 billion of the world’s 6.6 billion people — almost one out of every four people — live without access to electricity. And a total of 2.4 billion — about 36 percent of the world’s population — relies on fuels like dung, charcoal, firewood and crop waste to cook their daily meals.

Compared to the benefits that would come from providing basic energy to the world’s poor, the overall global energy investment wouldn’t be overwhelming, according to the InterAcademy Council.

"Extending basic energy services to the billions of people who now lack access to electricity and clean cooking fuels, for example, could be accomplished in ways that would have only minimal impact on current levels of petroleum consumption and carbon dioxide emissions," the council’s report said. "Indeed, closer examination of the relationship between energy consumption and human well-being suggests that a more equitable distribution of access to energy services is entirely compatible with accelerated progress toward addressing energy-security and climate-change risks."

It sounds like a daunting task, but the InterAcademy Council report expressed hope that it could be done … if governments, businesses, NGOs, researchers and the media can all come onto the same page and work together to attack the problem.

"Aggressive changes in policy are… needed to accelerate the deployment of superior technologies," the report stated. "With a combination of such policies at the local, national and international level, it should be possible — both technically and economically — to elevate the living conditions of most of humanity, while simultaneously addressing the risks posed by climate change and other forms of energy-related environmental degradation and reducing the geopolitical tensions and economic vulnerabilities generated by existing patterns of dependence on predominantly fossil-fuel resources."

The biggest challenge, it seems, will be to make the possible probable.

By now, most of us know that leaving our computers on when we’re not using them wastes energy. But exactly how much energy?
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, using the power management functions on your computer properly can cut your electric bill by up to $75 a year. But even more impressive is the greenhouse gas savings we could generate by managing our computers better: according to Carbonfund.org, activating the power management features on 100,000 computers and monitors would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 11 million pounds a year. That’s like burning 13,000 fewer barrels of oil, eliminating 5,000 car trips from Los Angeles to New York or planting 1,000 acres of trees

So why don’t more people set up their computers to be more energy-efficient?

Uncertainty and fear, according to support.com.

A remote tech support company based in Redwood City, California, support.com recently commissioned a survey of 1,000 Americans to learn what they knew about computer power management. The company found out that, while 87 percent of people said they were aware of those functions on their computers, more than half (57 percent) hadn’t activated them. Many of those said it was because they didn’t know how to set the functions, or they were afraid of doing it wrong.

Looking at those results, support.com decided to introduce a new service called "Green Computer." The free service, available as of this week by calling 800-PC-SUPPORT, helps people customize their computer’s power management functions to their personal preferences, walks through ways to make sure those functions are working properly, and suggests other ways to save on computer energy consumption. Each call takes about 10 to 15 minutes.

"In talking with consumers about energy-efficient computer use, we found there was a lot of confusion," said Scott Herring, vice president of marketing for support. com. "Some people weren’t aware of the power management functions, others didn’t know how to activate them, and even more didn’t understand the difference between a ’screensaver’ and putting a computer into ’sleep mode.’ People were surprised to hear that a screensaver is not an energy saver. By offering this free Green Computer service, support.com expects to help a lot of consumers perform a simple but effective act to save energy."

Besides activating your computer’s power management functions, you can cut your desktop’s energy consumption by following these other tips: turn your computer off completely if you know you won’t be using it for a few hours, make sure games and third-party software are shut down before putting your computer into sleep mode (otherwise, they might continue running in the background), disconnect your virtual private network when you’re not using it (again, leaving it connected can prevent your computer from sleeping properly), and close any open Web windows so banners and ads don’t interfere with your PC’s nap.

Oh, and forget the screensaver. Just like it’s best for people to go to bed with the TV off, computers sleep better (more energy-efficiently, anyway) with a blank screen.

If you haven’t heard yet, peak oil is here: the Energy Watch Group released an analysis this week indicating that global oil production peaked last year and is now likely to start dropping by several percent annually.

Ironically, on the same day, the InterAcademy Council announced a new report titled, “Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future.” While that report didn’t include the peak oil news, it did emphasize that the world needs to start moving now to ensure both a dependable energy future and a climate that doesn’t tip dangerously into overdrive.

And here’s where the conundrum comes in: coal, the InterAcademy Council report acknowledged, is the most abundant fossil fuel we’ve got … but also the most potentially damaging. Coal-fired power plants, which are springing up in growing numbers around the globe, could help provide the energy safety net we need if the peak-oil analysis is true. But the emissions from coal-burning plants would only speed up today’s rising greenhouse gas levels.

So what’s the solution? Do we throw everything we’ve got at developing safe and cost-effective ways to capture and store the carbon from coal plants? Or do we “Just say no” to coal and invest like mad in renewables research and development? We need an answer in the near future apparently, but which will it be?