Innovative Green Solutions

@livinglava,

And here I thought the primary purpose of a toilet was to urinate or defecate in it.

and anyway, sturgis and I already said all this at the beginning the of thread.

1 Reply

@chai2,

Are you just being cheeky now, or did you really not understand why I said the primary purpose of a public toilet is to facilitate walking and other non-motorized transportation?

0 Replies

Banks worth $47 trillion adopt new UN-backed climate, sustainability principles
22 September 2019

Economic Development

Banks collectively with more than $47 trillion in assets, or a third of the global industry, signed up on Sunday to new United Nations-backed responsible banking principles in a massive boost for climate action and the shift from “brown to green” models of economic growth.

In the Principles, launched one day ahead of the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, banks commit to strategically align their business with the goals of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and massively scale up their contribution to the achievement of both.

“The UN Principles for Responsible Banking are a guide for the global banking industry to respond to, drive and benefit from a sustainable development economy,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the launch event, adding that they also “create the accountability that can realize responsibility, and the ambition that can drive action.”

By signing up to the Principles, banks said they will among other goals, aim to “increase our positive impacts, while reducing the negative impacts, and managing risks to people and the environment from our products and services.”

“How you, as business leaders, respond can be a defining moment for our global goals. Only public-private cooperation can deliver sustainable development,” Mr. Guterres said.

He challenged the 130 Founding Signatories and over 45 of their CEOs gathered for the event to not only align their business goals with the SDGs, the UN’s blueprint for tackling poverty, protecting the environment and ensuring a fairer world for all, but also to support gender equality, to invest in climate action and to disinvest from fossil fuels and pollution in general.

“We will rely on you to scale up financing to businesses that stimulate green growth,” the Secretary-general said, adding: “Place your bets on the green economy, not the grey economy, because the grey economy will have no future.”

Picking up that thread, Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), told the bankers: “When the financial system shifts its capital away from resource-hungry, brown investments to those that back nature as solution, everybody wins in the long-term.”

The Principles were developed by a core group of 30 Founding Banks through an innovative global partnership between banks and the UNEP Finance Initiative (UNEP FI).

While action on climate change is growing, it is still far short of what is needed to meet the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement. Meanwhile, biodiversity continues to decline at alarming rates and pollution claims millions of lives each year.

Against this background, UNEP says that more ambition, backed by a step change in investment from the private sector, is needed to tackle these challenges and ensure that humanity lives in a way that ensures an equitable share of resources within planetary boundaries.

The banking and private sectors can benefit from the investment they put into backing this transition. It is estimated that addressing the SDGs could unlock $12 trillion in business savings and revenue annually and create 380 million more jobs by 2030.

1 Reply

@neptuneblue,

neptuneblue wrote:

By signing up to the Principles, banks said they will among other goals, aim to “increase our positive impacts, while reducing the negative impacts, and managing risks to people and the environment from our products and services.”

How are banks going to stop people from spending money on cars and driving, which stimulates the pavement and development industries, and sprawl development; all of which maintain the deforestation-development paradigm that industrial-consumerist growth engenders?

Banks fund construction/development projects. They do so to create jobs for contractors and construction workers. They rent bulldozers, cranes, and other expensive equipment. The money they pay out is spent on cars, trucks, and driving, which in turn funds roads and highways. People buy houses as well, which stimulates land-speculation where swaths of land are bought up, more-or-less cleared of CO2-absorbing forests, and turned into subdivisions.

There is no way to stop a growing economy from affording these anti-green economic activities because growth in green industries automatically stimulates other investors to engage in unsustainable projects because doing so produces real-estate that consumers will drive to and spend money there.

Until there's no more demand for driving/sprawl and other unsustainable economic activities in the larger economy, all forms of green investment will just contribute to overall economic growth that funds unsustainable industries.

The power lies with the people/consumers, ultimately. How they spend their money determines how businesses will invest, and government will bend to allow them and their businesses to operate in whatever ways generate GDP growth and thus tax revenues.

Once they shift their perspective to only making green choices, the economy will follow and there will be sustainable prosperity. The status quo is strong in our minds, however, and we don't believe that free individuals can make right choices without government control. Those of us who are optimistic enough to try are drowned out by the realists/pessimists who obstruct positive change by dismissing the reality that individual actions are the foundation of everything that happens at larger scales.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

You're right, banks cannot stop people from spending money on cars & driving. They can, however provide incentives with lower APR's to consumers who purchase a vehicle that is a hybrid or all electric, or other green sources of fuel.

Banks don't necessarily fund construction/building projects, municipalities tend to issue bonds for capital. Some of those municipal improvements are for mass transit and also for upkeep on existing road surfaces.

People tend to live in a space that includes a roof, sides, an entry way, living space, a place to eat, sleep, take a shower and to entertain friends and family. For you to insinuate that humans do not have a right to purchase some sort of shelter is pure ridiculousness. However, those abodes can be made from/with sustainable materials and using renewable resources to heat/cool their home.

Now, if you'd like to do your part in a greener existence, you personally could stop purchasing your electric to fuel your internet capability and go off grid. Your choice to help the economy by using electric means to feed your bandwidth could be altered to a minuscule level. You first.

1 Reply

@neptuneblue,

neptuneblue wrote:

You're right, banks cannot stop people from spending money on cars & driving. They can, however provide incentives with lower APR's to consumers who purchase a vehicle that is a hybrid or all electric, or other green sources of fuel.

I don't think replacing all the cars currently in use with electric vehicles is sufficient. Pavement, sprawl, and development are the big problem because the land that once absorbed carbon as trees and other biomass gets cleared and paved-over.

Public transit reduces the number of vehicles per person, which means you can narrow roads and/or reforest them by planting trees in unused lanes. Parking lots are also a problem, though many have trees growing in them.

Retail shopping centers and offices are also designed wrong for the most part. Some college campuses design their buildings to incorporate trees and greenspace in courtyards, etc. between narrower-footprint buildings, but most commercial developments are the farthest thing you can imagine from being forested. Banks finance such developments because people go spend money and work there.

Unless ALL banks stop funding unsustainable developments, transportation, infrastructure, etc. those that do restrict themselves to funding green/sustainable projects will just fund economic growth that will lead to other banks financing unsustainability. E.g. you can pay people to create transit and green developments, but unless you stop other people from selling them cars, houses in the suburbs, and retail/office spaces to shop and work by driving, the status quo is just going to continue while a certain subset of people develop small islands of sustainability within the larger sea of unsustainability.

Quote:

Banks don't necessarily fund construction/building projects, municipalities tend to issue bonds for capital. Some of those municipal improvements are for mass transit and also for upkeep on existing road surfaces.

Same difference. It's all finance.

Quote:

People tend to live in a space that includes a roof, sides, an entry way, living space, a place to eat, sleep, take a shower and to entertain friends and family. For you to insinuate that humans do not have a right to purchase some sort of shelter is pure ridiculousness. However, those abodes can be made from/with sustainable materials and using renewable resources to heat/cool their home.

Not at all. Residential housing should just be built in a way that fits between full-canopied trees; as should other types of buildings and pavements. Reforestation can occur everywhere if everything humans build is carefully designed to allow trees/forest to flourish as part of human geography.

Most people don't grasp what it means to fully restore natural climate yet.

Quote:

Now, if you'd like to do your part in a greener existence, you personally could stop purchasing your electric to fuel your internet capability and go off grid. Your choice to help the economy by using electric means to feed your bandwidth could be altered to a minuscule level. You first.

Computers and flatscreens use very little electricity. I could go off grid with just a few solar panels because I know how to conserve energy. Heating and cooling are the most power-hungry appliances, followed by clothes dryers, and water heaters. You can run your computer w/ flatscreen monitor and energy-efficient lighting quite a lot before you waste the gains you can make by line drying laundry, switching off your water heater until you're ready to shower, washing clothes in cold water, using fans instead of A/C, and wearing warm clothes indoors in the winter, while only heating certain well-insulated rooms instead of the entire house.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

You are more than welcome to add innovative green solutions of your own. But it seems to me that you'd rather tell everyone else how to live but exclude yourself. The only thing you're managed to say is that you could conserve energy, but you won't.

1 Reply

@neptuneblue,

neptuneblue wrote:

You are more than welcome to add innovative green solutions of your own. But it seems to me that you'd rather tell everyone else how to live but exclude yourself. The only thing you're managed to say is that you could conserve energy, but you won't.

I use the minimum energy necessary.

Who else can say that they eliminate/forego every significant form of energy use that isn't necessary?

You mentioned the computer, but that is just not a significant energy use.

Your computer might use a few 100 watt-hours per day, while things like air-conditioning and heating use multiple KILOwatt-hours per day and drive up monthly usage in most households far above 500kwh, if not over 1000kwh.

You only use a few hundred kwh per month if you cut out unnecessary energy usage. Do you line-dry laundry, for example? Do you wash clothes in cold water except when you have a specific reason to wash in hot water? Do you turn off your water heater before showering? Do you use a water-saver valve and only use the spray intermittently when rinsing, not while lathering?

Basically, the question is do you put thought and effort into conservation, or do you just promote politics of investing in funding more technological innovations in hopes that technology will save you and everyone else from having to devote thought and effort to reducing usage?

0 Replies

Minnesota to implement low- and zero-emission clean vehicle standards
09/27/2019 under Air quality, Climate Change, Electric Cars, Environment, News0

by Mariecor Agravante

In a move that would make both hybrid and electric car manufacturers see dollar signs, Minnesota announced a new proposal that will require auto manufacturers that sell within the state to deliver more hybrid cars and electric vehicles (EVs) to comply with its new low- and zero-emission initiative. The measure places the Gopher State alongside 13 other states that have implemented clean vehicle emissions standards.

The standards will take a minimum of 18 months for roll-out, due to the rule-making process set by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). Thus, the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” is expected to see more hybrid and electric cars in sales lots starting around the 2023 model year. This roll-out will also allow time for the state to beef up its investments in more public electric-charging stations, while similarly brokering anticipated alternative energy deals with the likes of none other than Tesla, as the latter ramps up its nationwide plant acquisition plans.

Minnesota’s Department of Public Safety currently reports that residents of Minnesota, on average, prefer large pickup trucks, followed by SUVs. Broad capacity recreational vehicles (RVs) are also a Minnesota favorite. Minnesotan loyalty to pickup trucks, SUVs and RVs could make the shift to relatively compact EVs challenging.

However, the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy does offer EV tax credits and incentives that Minnesotans and other U.S. denizens can take advantage of. For instance, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) gives a tax credit “for $2,500 to $7,500 per new EV purchased for use in the U.S.” The tax credit varies depending on the vehicle and its battery capacity, but the incentive is a way to shift more consumers to EVs.

The tax credit is “available until 200,000 qualified EVs have been sold in the United States by each manufacturer, at which point the credit begins to phase out for that manufacturer. Currently, no manufacturers have been phased out yet.” You can learn more about the tax credit here.

Via Consumer Reports

1 Reply

@neptuneblue,

neptuneblue wrote:

Minnesota to implement low- and zero-emission clean vehicle standards
09/27/2019 under Air quality, Climate Change, Electric Cars, Environment, News0

by Mariecor Agravante

In a move that would make both hybrid and electric car manufacturers see dollar signs, Minnesota announced a new proposal that will require auto manufacturers that sell within the state to deliver more hybrid cars and electric vehicles (EVs) to comply with its new low- and zero-emission initiative. The measure places the Gopher State alongside 13 other states that have implemented clean vehicle emissions standards.

The standards will take a minimum of 18 months for roll-out, due to the rule-making process set by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). Thus, the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” is expected to see more hybrid and electric cars in sales lots starting around the 2023 model year. This roll-out will also allow time for the state to beef up its investments in more public electric-charging stations, while similarly brokering anticipated alternative energy deals with the likes of none other than Tesla, as the latter ramps up its nationwide plant acquisition plans.

Minnesota’s Department of Public Safety currently reports that residents of Minnesota, on average, prefer large pickup trucks, followed by SUVs. Broad capacity recreational vehicles (RVs) are also a Minnesota favorite. Minnesotan loyalty to pickup trucks, SUVs and RVs could make the shift to relatively compact EVs challenging.

However, the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy does offer EV tax credits and incentives that Minnesotans and other U.S. denizens can take advantage of. For instance, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) gives a tax credit “for $2,500 to $7,500 per new EV purchased for use in the U.S.” The tax credit varies depending on the vehicle and its battery capacity, but the incentive is a way to shift more consumers to EVs.

The tax credit is “available until 200,000 qualified EVs have been sold in the United States by each manufacturer, at which point the credit begins to phase out for that manufacturer. Currently, no manufacturers have been phased out yet.” You can learn more about the tax credit here.

Via Consumer Reports

EVs are an improvement beyond combustion, but ultimately less vehicles and pavement are better for sustainability than just replacing all current vehicles with EVs.

Increasing transit use while reducing the total number of motor-vehicles and thus pavement/lanes is much better than just increasing EV's as a proportion of current vehicles.

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