Building tomorrow brick by brick

Global warming and other environmental issues are often seen seen as political and policy questions. And while that's a main element, taking concrete steps on environmental problems really comes down to practical steps, to different ways of doing things.

And that's the focus of two pieces in the New York Times. The first one ran in the Sunday Magazine. It details work by Mike Strizki, whose New Jersey house uses a combination of solar power, geothermal temperature regulation, an electrolyzer and hydrogen storage tanks to provide its energy run his car and produce surplus energy that can be put back into the local grid. The piece is also instructive because of what the skeptics about Strizki's achievement have to say about the possibility of replicating his protoype on a broad scale. There's also some fascinating history showing that similar skeptical opposition was raised when petroleum started supplanting coal and steam, and when natural gas enetered the picture.

The other story is in Monday's paper. In a similar vein, it looks at the disparity between European ecological architectural standards and those in the United States (which can be extrapolated for Canada too). One of the sources quoted in the story maintains any significant change in sustainable design and construction will be driven by developers rather than politicians.