If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
- Auto Costs Versus Bike Costs — Including Hidden and Indirect Automobile Costs – A good exposition on the costs of bikes and cars, both direct and indirect, transparent and hidden
- RealClimate: Introduction to feedbacks – A decent introductory discussion of some of the feedbacks inherent in the climate system… all except the moist adiabatic lapse rate. Nobody's going to understand that unless they've taken an atmospheric physics class.
- In Passive-House Standards, a Brighter Shade of Green – Getting a Passive House built in North America is still unfortunately a pain in the ass, despite its clearly being the Right Thing To Do. How can we be this blind and behind?
- 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
not to be a knee jerk critic – but I am a bit dismayed that it was a 2000 sf passivhaus in the woods. Seems to me the price tag would have been much more swallowable if it were a row of townhouse passivhausen (insert appropriate plural here – ich habe alle meine deutsch vergessen or something like that) in the city…just sayin’.
I totally agree — their site choice is pretty antithetical to the PassivHaus idea. However, I’m still glad to see some kind of mention of the standard in the US mainstream media. It irritated me that they talked up the “additional cost” so much, when it allows you to avoid capital costs like a furnace and all the ductwork, and over the lifetime of the house, the additional 10% in construction costs will certainly be made back, especially in the Northeast. At the same time, if it’s this hard in a rural location for a single driven individual to get a Passive House built, can you imagine the bureaucratic nightmare that a large development in a city would create? I suspect we still need a bunch of individuals like this to push the envelope before any sane developer will try in a more appropriate setting…. though the Brooklyn, NY Co-housing group was talking about doing their building to PassivHaus standards. It looks like they’ve stalled out unfortunately.