Open Source Content Management

The Olympic Stadium, London, under construction. Photo by tompagenet . 

I listened to Peter Bonfield, the chief executive of the Building Research Establishment, talking in Dublin last year about sustainability at the now-under-construction Olympic park in London. He was speaking at the annual conference of the BRE's Irish arm, and two aspects in particular impressed me: the amount of material being recycled, and the genuine efforts being made to ensure the facilities will benefit local communities in the long term - social sustainability, you might call it. For example, the upper half of the main stadium (above) is a temporary structure that will be removed after the games, ensuring it's not out of place in the surrounding community and that local people will feel comfortable using it.

Which brings me to an interesting video from the Guardian on the sustainable features of the Olympic park facilities.

If you want an alternative take on the social impact of the Olympics, read George Monbiot here and here .

In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world’s energy infrastructure involves “an enormous front-load of fossil fuels”, which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest. This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people “to make short term, radical sacrifices”, cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years. There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale.

 Astyk's essay can be found here.
 
Re-reading Monbiot's piece recently, it got me thinking about how much carbon would be emitted by a massive national insulation and retrofitting effort here in Ireland - by the manufacture and transport of the materials, the vans on the road etc. I'm not for a second suggesting this work shouldn't be done - it should and must.

 It's the only way to future-proof our buildings against energy insecurity and to help ensure they are responsible for producing as little carbon dioxide as possible - I'd much rather rely on a highly energy efficient building to keep energy use low than on consumer behaviour. And besides, there's an important comfort argument to be made here too - everyone would prefer a well insulated, warm home to having to reduce energy use even further in a draughty energy inefficient home.
 
But the question is, how do we keep the carbon footprint of retrofitting itself to a minimum? Is the key using as many locally produced, low embodied energy materials as possible? Or perhaps to ensuring batches of houses are done at the same time to ensure transport efficiency? As far as I can tell, nobody has really attempted to answer the question of how to minimise the carbon footprint of retrofitting, or done a thorough carbon audit of retrofitting work. Anyone?