Category: linkstream

A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.

Sprawl at the Gates

Boulder County is slowly being invaded from the southeast and it’s not clear what we can do about it.  Sprawling development is (still) the order of the day in Broomfield, Weld, and Jefferson Counties, and it looks set to generate a lot more trips through Boulder County in the coming decades.  Personally, I’m praying for $8 gasoline.

Hackable Cars

A study of the security (or lack thereof) inherent in today’s highly computerized vehicles.  Not much better than voting machines overall.  We’re connecting dangerous things to our networks much faster than we’re learning how to keep them from blowing up.  Just ask Iran!  Thankfully my bicycle is still unhackable.

Whose Roads?

A summary of research looking at how road infrastructure is funded (PDF) from VTPI.  Only about half of road funding comes from “use” fees like the gas tax and vehicle registration fees.  The other half comes from general tax revenues.  Ultimately this means that non-motorized road users, whose impacts on road infrastructure are very low, overpay significantly and end up subsidizing motorists.

The (HVAC) Elephant in the Room

A look at the difficulties of getting good HVAC design in high performance homes.  Most HVAC professionals are not familiar with the design requirements of very energy efficient homes with tight envelopes.  Most rules of thumb and the very basic modeling that is done in support of sizing the systems implicitly assume a “code” home… which is the least efficient house you can build without getting sued.  Oversized systems cause different problems than undersized ones, but they’re still significant problems.  As high performance homes become more common, more people are running into these issues.  Better contractor, builder, and homeowner education is needed.

Fluid norms or Meta-ideology

Steve Randy Waldman takes Krugman and the US left-of-center more generally to task for their implicit assumption that our national ideological stage is somehow not subject to being shaped over time.  Casino games and sport have fixed rules.  Politics does not.  Somehow, many positions that even Nixon was supportive of in 1970 would now be laughed out of congress as socialist.  Trying to get things done within the apparent current constraints is not necessarily as pragmatic as trying to change the rules over time.

Retrofits pick up the pace

A look at the current state of Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing across the US.  Legislation enabling this financing mechanism has been passed in half the country, and implemented at the city or county level in Berkeley and Boulder among others, but because the Federal Housing Finance Administration (Fannie and Freddie’s boss) chose to treat this particular property assessment as a lien, all the programs have been frozen since last July.  Lawsuits and legislative fixes abound, but in the meantime, people are struggling to find other financing mechanisms for these financially (as well as ecologically) worthwhile investments.  More background available at Pace Now.

Undercover anti-protest cop in UK goes native?

The Guardian is reporting that an undercover police officer who infiltrated the group of protesters that conspired to shut down the Ratcliffe on Soar coal fired power plant may have “gone native” after seven years with the group, taking part in, providing logistical support for, partially financing, and eventually playing a central role in planning their actions.  The prospect of the officer aiding the legal defense of protesters who remain to be tried, or at the least, having the role he played in the organization exposed, has apparently led to the collapse of the case.  The only really surprising part about all this is his apparent remorse.

A life cycle analysis of incandescent, CFL and LED light bulbs

Life cycle analysis of incandescent, CFL, and LED light bulbs – It’s important to make sure when you’re using a new technology that supposedly saves energy, that you haven’t just shifted the energy consumption from the operational to the manufacturing portion of the product’s life cycle.  This study compares three different lighting technologies: incandescent, compact fluorescent, and LED bulbs, and asks what the total energy input is to get ~400 lumens of light for 25,000 hours.  Both CFLs and LEDs save about 80% of the energy over incandescent bulbs.  For all bulb types, the embodied energy of manufacturing is only about 2% of the total energy consumed over the bulb’s life.  CFLs and LEDs were roughly equivalent energetically at the time of this study, but the LEDs produced less in the way of toxic byproducts.  The general expectation is that the efficiency of LED lighting will continue to improve, while CFLs are a pretty mature technology.  The two best LED bulbs on the market today, with warm yellow light, compatible with dimmer switches, and giving about 800 lumens of light output (equivalent to a 60W incandescent bulb), seem to be this 13W one from Lighting Science ($30) and the 12W Philips A19 EnduraLED ($40).  The prices seem high, but as with gas furnaces and boilers, electric motors and pumps, the cost of the electricity or fuel you run through the device ends up dwarfing the capital cost over its lifetime, so paying top dollar for efficiency is worthwhile.

Nationalist accounting tricks

Nationalist accounting tricks – from The Economist:

The only reason to make the within-borders population of a nation-state our analytical touchstone is a prior commitment to the idea that the nation-state is the correct unit of normative evaluation.

You can make your national income distribution whatever you like if you’re willing to ship all your poor people overseas, which is in no small part what the western world has done since the 1970s — not by moving actual people, but rather by relocating those portions of our economies which tend to be occupied by the poor.  Nation state boundaries become more and more irrelevant every year, economically, informationally, environmentally.  What kind jurisdictional authority will replace them?