A Hi Green Building Market Overview "Hi Must & Hi Recommended Read!."

A Hi Green Building Market Overview "Hi Must & Hi Recommended Read!."

Green building is going to be a massive, but it’s not as easy to understand as other markets.

MICHAEL KANELLOS: JUNE 8, 2009

Most Read Article Of Its Kind To Date!

Hi Clients Are Increasingly Demanding the right to Certified Sustainable Products For Green Building Projects & Markets. Basic Requirements include High Performance at a low running cost and reduced energy consumption with minimal Environmental Impact effecting our living standards.

The Green Market future Vs demand as overviewed in the following article:

If you want to get a sense of the scale of the opportunity in green building, look around.

If you're reading this while inside a U.S. office building, there is an 85 percent chance you're under or near a fluorescent tube bulb. General Electric and Westinghouse began selling them in 1938. They were a big hit, along with the television and an IBM typewriter, at the World's Fair a year later.

Modern drywall? 1916. Joseph Aspdin invented Portland cement, which is still the world standard today, in 1824. The cement is made by crushing rock and cooking it to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. With the right tools, the Flintstones could have figured that one out. Electric air conditioning? Willis Carrier invented it in 1902. And you can thank Albert Butz for the devising the thermostat in 1885.

And if you think about it, you could probably take care of your cooling and lighting needs if you could only open your office window.

It's that handsome combination of IOU (inefficient, old and ubiquitous) technology, the potential for inexpensive solutions and the "wow" factor that green design techniques lend buildings like the California Academy of Sciences that lay at the heart of the market. Building hasn't been as popular with VCs as solar or biofuels -- but many believe we are on the verge of a two-decade boom in retrofits and new types of construction. (It's why we are holding our Green Building Summit next week on June 11.)

Besides, if the economics won't drive it, legislation will. In California, new homes will likely have to meet net-zero energy standards by 2020 and commercial buildings will have to hit it by 2030. An estimated $21.65 billion is baked into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And to get grants in other parts of the program, applicants have to show they are "shovel ready."

But it's also a more complex market with more moving parts than solar or biofuels. We've broken it down into five segments.

1. Construction and Design;

If you talk to contractors and architects, they claim that most energy savings can be accomplished through proper design and construction. While that point can be debated, green construction has clearly become commercially attractive. Various studies report that LEED-certified or LEED-like buildings generate higher rentals and property values. Employers claim environmental construction reduces sick days and serves as a recruiting tool. A much-touted retrofit of the Empire State Building dropped energy consumption by 38 percent.

In China, A skyscraper being erected in Shanghai will have municipal parks on most floors while buildings by upscale developer Shui On Land can rent for 1.5 times that of competing properties, according to sources.  Retrofitting or building green also does not necessarily add costs.

_{Source: Department of Energy}

Limbach Energy Solutions, a large HVAC contractor in Pittsburgh, has begun to take a program developed in Ohio for cash-flow neutral energy retrofits. In the commercial market, large builders like Webcor and Weitz already gain a substantial portion of their revenue from LEED. A few startups like Project Frog, which builds energy efficient schools, have also emerged.

The consumer space has moved slower than commercial or government. Prior to the economic downturn, mass home builders such as Lennar reported fairly strong sales of homes equipped with solar panels. Since then, it's been tough to sell homes. Michelle Kaufmann Designs, one of the early modular home builders, recently went under while others such as Living Homes and Zeta Communities are in startup mode.

Hi Climate change already affecting US.

HI Climate change already affecting US.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When it came time to deliver a new federal report detailing what global warming is doing to America and the dire forecast for the future, President Barack Obama turned to the pros who regularly deliver the bad news about wild weather: TV meteorologists.

'We want to emphasize to the public, this is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now,' Obama told 'Today' show weathercaster Al Roker. 'Whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to drought, more severe wildfires - all these things are having an impact on Americans as we speak.'

Climate change's assorted harms 'are expected to become increasingly disruptive across the nation throughout this century and beyond,' the National Climate Assessment concluded, emphasizing the impact of too-wild weather as well as simple warming.

Still, it's not too late to prevent the worst of climate change, says the 840-page report, which the Obama administration is highlighting as it tries to jump-start often-stalled efforts to curb heat-trapping gases. Said White House science adviser John Holdren, 'It's a good-news story about the many opportunities to take cost-effective actions to reduce the damage.'

Release of the report, the third edition of a congressionally mandated study, gives Obama an opportunity to ground his campaign against climate change in science and numbers, endeavoring to blunt the arguments of those who question the idea and human contributions to such changes. Later this summer, the administration plans to propose new regulations restricting gases that come from existing coal-fired power plants.

Not everyone is convinced.

Some fossil energy groups, conservative think tanks and Republican senators immediately assailed the report as 'alarmist.' Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Obama was likely to 'use the platform to renew his call for a national energy tax. And I'm sure he'll get loud cheers from liberal elites - from the kind of people who leave a giant carbon footprint and then lecture everybody else about low-flow toilets.'

Since taking office, Obama has not proposed a specific tax on fossil fuel emissions. He has proposed a system that caps emissions and allows companies to trade carbon pollution credits, but it has failed in Congress.

Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana said the report was supposed to be scientific but 'it's more of a political one used to justify government overreach.' And leaders in the fossil fuel industry, which is responsible for a large amount of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide, said their energy is needed and America can't afford to cut back.

'Whether you agree or disagree with the report, the question is: What are you going to do about it? To us that is a major question,' said Charlie Drevna, president of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. He called the report 'overblown.'

The report - it's full of figures, charts and other research-generated graphics - includes 3,096 footnotes referring to other mostly peer-reviewed research. It was written by more than 250 scientists and government officials, starting in 2012. A draft was released in January 2013, but this version has been reviewed by more scientists, including twice by the National Academy of Sciences, which called it 'reasonable' and 'a valuable resource.'

Environmental groups praised the report. 'If we don't slam the brakes on the carbon pollution driving climate change, we're dooming ourselves and our children to more intense heat waves, destructive floods and storms and surging sea levels,' said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Scientists and the White House called it the most detailed and U.S.-focused scientific report on global warming.

The report looks at regional and state-level effects of global warming, compared with recent reports from the United Nations that lumped all of North America together.

'All Americans will find things that matter to them in this report,' said scientist Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory, who chaired the science committee that wrote it. 'For decades we've been collecting the dots about climate change; now we're connecting those dots.'

In a White House conference call with reporters, National Climatic Data Center Director Tom Karl said his two biggest concerns were flooding from sea level rise on the U.S. coastlines - especially for the low-lying cities of Miami; Norfolk, Virginia; and Portsmouth, New Hampshire - and drought, heat waves and prolonged fire seasons in the Southwest.

Even though the nation's average temperature has risen by between 1.3 and 1.9 degrees since record-keeping began in 1895, it's in the big, wild weather where the average person feels climate change the most, said co-author Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University climate scientist. Extreme weather hits us in the pocketbook and can be seen with our own eyes, she said.

The report says the intensity, frequency and duration of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes have increased since the early 1980s, but it is still uncertain how much of that is from man-made warming. Winter storms have increased in frequency and intensity and have shifted northward since the 1950s, it says. Also, heavy downpours are increasing - by 71 percent in the Northeast. Heat waves, such as those in Texas in 2011 and the Midwest in 2012, are projected to intensify nationwide. Droughts in the Southwest are expected to get stronger. Sea level has risen 8 inches since 1880 and is projected to rise between 1 foot and 4 feet by 2100.

Climate data center chief Karl highlighted the increase in downpours. He said last week's drenching, when Pensacola, Florida, got up to 2 feet of rain in one storm and parts of the East had 3 inches in one day, is what he's talking about.

The report says 'climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways.' Those include smoke-filled air from wildfires, smoggy air from pollution, and more diseases from tainted food, water, mosquitoes and ticks. And the ragweed pollen season has lengthened.

Flooding alone may cost $325 billion by the year 2100 in one of the worst-case scenarios, with $130 billion of that in Florida, the report says. Already the droughts and heat waves of 2011 and 2012 have added about $10 billion to farm costs, the report says.