b l a s t u l a reblog++

Posted under reblog art

Posted under reblog art

Fundamental Research Lab’s portal NEST has advanced tools that serve to search and visualize direct and latent relations between people, groups, events, projects, places, institutions and fields of art and culture. These relations are presented and visualized by labeled multi-graphs. Therefore we have different types of links, what permits to build hierarchies and semantics.

Central to NEST is its extensible model of data: Everything in its system is either an entity or a link — a thing or a relationship. This allows the system to grow in any direction, and accommodate as-yet unimagined institutions, organizations, or threats. NEST is a toolkit to explore data, track events, find patterns, and build risk profiles, all in an effort to encourage and motivate action. We like to think of it as a Citizen’s Intelligence Agency, giving people similar tools and technologies to those held by their government.

Genesis of NEST: Counterterrorism programs from Los Alamos and The DARPA program like TIA. TIAa prototype system to provide tools to better detect, classify, and identify potential foreign terrorists with the goal to increase the probability that authorized agencies of the United States could preempt adverse actions. It will link items relating potential terrorist groups or scenarios, and learn patterns of different groups or scenarios to identify new organizations or emerging threats. Analyzing Entities is the ability to search, identify, match, and research entities across aliases and other obfuscating events and tactics.

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo


reBlogged

on Feb 16, 2009, 9:52PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on February 16, 2009, 10:52pm

Posted under reblog art

Theater of Code — with Ursula Endlicher, Adrianne Wortzel, MTAA; Curated by Christiane Paul :: March 3, 2009; 7:30 pm :: Light Industry, 220 36th Street, 5th Floor, Brooklyn, New York.

Theater of Code will present three performance / interventions that explore how computer code, scripting language, and software applications relate to the movement of bodies and the staging and choreography of our lives.

Adrianne Wortzel’s A Re-enactment of The Battle of the Pyramids is a performance installation of reconfigured robotic toys performing military maneuvers in rigid choreographed formations. Clusters of these toys snap to synchronization in response to a call to arms, their movements emulating the rigid and postured fighting strategies of Napoleonic warfare. These strategies, employed in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, were particularly idiosyncratic in Egypt where they were persistently performed without consideration of either the desert environment or the fighting strategies of the enemy. The work is intended as a testimony to the tragic consequences of imperialism and the dangers, follies and sadness of a rationale for blind obedience that makes victims out of warriors.

Ursula Endlicher’s Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited is a ten-part live performance series, which utilizes Web code as choreography. In the performance of facebook on March 3, 2009, at Light Industry, three dancers, the audience, and the artist will shape the course of the performance. The source of the website — its HTML tags — is interpreted live on stage into new dance movements, which are immediately translated into text-based descriptions and then stored online in the html-movement-library. This information is reused on stage as new instruction material. As the data performance progresses, more html-movements are developed, stored and altered by the participants. The user (=the audience) takes an active role in the performance of facebook.com. The inclusion of the html-movement-library on stage enables a simultaneous exchange of instruction and performance, data and movement input and output, and a continuous transfer between Web and body.

MTAA returns to Light Industry with two new performances of code-based art. In the first work — titled $”##’ — MTAA re-stages John Cage’s 4′33″ within a framework of a new media lecture. The second project is a demonstration of Autotrace, a software-generated appropriation and shape creation system. As part of the Autotrace performance, MTAA will use one of the newly generated “Autotraced shapes” to create a ridiculously large, two-dimensional, site-specific work right in front of the audience’s eyes.

Together, the three projects comment on the various levels in which our movements—from military maneuvers to social interaction and the presentation of a lecture—are encoded by technologies.

A Re-enactment of The Battle of the Pyramids by Adrianne Wortzel — Initiated at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in an Artist’s Residency July-December 2009. In continuing development at StudioBlue, New York City College of Technology. Technical Director: Mike Gazes; Team: Nick Wong, Jaymes Dec, Soyoung Park, Saki Sato, Young Jin Chung.

Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited www.facebook.com by Ursula Endlicher — Concept / Stage layout / Video projection / Sound: Ursula Endlicher; Web Programming: Ursula Endlicher, David Farine; Choreography: html-movement-library / live HTML code;
Performers: Melissa Lohman Burke, Irem Calikusu, Yuki Kawahisa; html-movement-library live feed: Ursula Endlicher - and the audience!

$”##’, a re-staging of John Cage’s 4′33″ and Autotrace by MTAA

Ursula Endlicher’s work resides on the intersection of Internet, performance and multi-media installation. Since the mid-90s the Internet has had an impact on her practice, which bridges the Web and physical reality. She uses the Web’s ‘hidden’ language — its HTML code — to choreograph performances, visualizes HTML in installations, and translates it into sound. Her work was recently shown at Theater am Neumarkt in Zurich, Switzerland; at Quartier21/Museumsquartier, Vienna, Austria; at BM-Suma Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, Turkey; at Woodstreet Galleries, Pittsburgh, PA; at Artists Space, New York, and at the LMCC Swing Space@Seaport in New York. She received commissions from Turbulence.org/New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., and from the Whitney Museum for its artport website. Her work is included in Rhizome’s Art Base, and in the ursula blicke videoarchiv at Kunsthalle Wien, Austria. Endlicher has lectured about her work internationally and has contributed to several publications about net art, performance and interactivity; she discusses these topics on her blog, Curating Netart, which she runs together with Ela Kagel. She was born in Vienna, Austria and lives in New York since 1993.

Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden formed the artist collaboration MTAA (M.River & T.Whid Art Associates) in1996. In New York City, MTAA has presented artworks and performances at The New Museum of Contemporary Art; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; The Whitney Museum of American Art; Postmasters Gallery and Artists Space. Their work has also been shown at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; The Beall Center for Art and Technology in Irvine, CA; The Getty Center in Los Angeles and SFMOMA in San Francisco, CA. International exhibitions include the Seoul Net & Film Festival in Korea, and Videozone2 - The 2nd International Video Art Biennial in Israel. MTAA has received grants and awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, Rhizome.org, Eyebeam and New Radio & Performing Arts, Inc. Both members of MTAA live and work in Brooklyn, New York.

Christiane Paul is the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization dedicated to digital art. She has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally on art and technology. An expanded new edition of her book Digital Art (Thames & Hudson, UK, 2003) was published in spring 2008 and her edited anthology New Media in the White Cube and Beyond - Curatorial Models for Digital Art (UC Press) in December 2008. Upcoming and recent curatorial work includes “Scalable Relations” (Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, and other venues); “SOS 4.8″ (Murcia, Spain, 2008); “Feedback” (Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Asturias, Spain, 2007); and “Profiling” (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2007). Christiane Paul teaches in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Digital+Media Department of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Adrianne Wortzel creates interactive web works, robotic and telerobotic installations and performance productions, which explore historical and cultural perspectives by coupling fact and fiction via use of new technologies in both physical and virtual networked environments. They reflect her immersion in the sciences, sometimes with direct collaboration. The National Science Foundation; Swiss Artists-in-Labs Program; Artificial Intelligence Laboratory-University of Zurich; Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art; PSC-CUNY Research Foundation and Greenwall Foundation have supported recent projects. Recent works include: archipleago.ch, a video in progress depicting a “galapagos” where indigenous creatures are the robots created by researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Eliza Redux, an interactive collaborative work (elizaredux.org) where a physical robot offers virtual psychoanalytic sessions emulating Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA; The Veils of Transference, a video depicting a psychoanalytic session between a human and a robot where their roles become dynamically interchanged. Wortzel’s telerobotic installation Camouflage Town was exhibited in Data Dynamics at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001). Her play Sayonara Diorama, which she wrote and produced, featured human and robotic actors recounting a fictive second Voyage of the Beagle. Adrianne Wortzel is a Professor of Entertainment Technology at New York City College of Technology-CUNY, a member of the doctoral faculty of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo


reBlogged

on Feb 16, 2009, 10:32PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on February 16, 2009, 11:32pm

Posted under reblog art

TeDance - Perspectives on Technologically Expanded Dance; edited by Daniel Tércio. With Sarah Rubidge, Sophia Lycouris, Asa Unander-Scharin, Aylin Kalem, Kirk Woolford, Paula Varanda, Heather Rikes, Martin Époque/Denis Poulin, José Braz, Rudolfo Quintas, Stephan Jürgens and Daniel Tércio. Short video clips and respective synopsis of the installations and performance work presented at the TeDance conference 2007 at Culturgest in Lisbon are included in a DVD.

One of the contemporary performance’s features definitely entails the blurring of conventional geographic boundaries as well as the reconfiguring of the relation between centre and periphery. While the centre/ periphery relationship has represented a recurrent problematic within the history of art and performance studies’ research (leading, for example, to essays on the rise and fall and fragmentation of art centres), the present state puts one before an expanded reality, as if the centre was indeed an expanded, or expanding, centre on a planetary scale.

The recent information technologies should be credited with most of the responsibility for this process. At the same time, one may recognise distinct accents and trends within this expanded centre. When preparing this paper, I have started attempting to identify a Portuguese accent. In order to do so, I have chronologically listed dance pieces exhibited in Portugal by Portuguese, or Portugal-based, choreographers, where intersections with new technologies were portrayed. Soon I was to face a curious dilemma: how would one distinguish ‘new technologies’? And above all, how would one identify those artworks where the authors take up technology not only as devices or resources but as dramaturgically purposeful? — “Dance and Technology with Portuguese accent at the crossroads” excerpt, by Daniel Tércio.

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo


reBlogged

on Feb 16, 2009, 10:46PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on February 16, 2009, 11:46pm

Posted under reblog art

Winter Camp 09 Introduction by Geert Lovink (and a response by Shannon Clark via nettime):

“If we take network technologies seriously, we have to ask ourselves: What’s next after the initial excitement? What happens after we have linked up, found old classmates, become friends and even meet up? Will networking be seen as an additional loose level of social interaction or will the ties become more serious? What do networks do to our culture in the long term? Will we constantly move from one platform to the next initiative, following the global swarm? Do we really wish to carry our social network with us, wherever we go? How do you cope with Web 2.0 hype? Are the constant requests to be linked a plague, and should we see those sites as a modern telephone book or rather as something that fosters new forms of cooperation? Will we return to our busy everyday life after the fashion is over or go for a deep commitment to the virtual? As artists, researchers and cultural workers are drawn into the network paradigm, it seems pertinent to collectively inquire into what happens when networks become driving forces. How can networks maintain their critical edge while aiming for professional status? Doesn’t everyone want to get paid for their ‘free labour’?

When a network settles down, and is suddenly not so new anymore, it can be quite a challenge to maintain the level of initial activity. Should a network then transform into a so-called ‘organized network’? Organizing a network does not mean canceling spontaneity and making way for rules and hierarchy: it can provide a place for sustainable knowledge sharing and production. As Ned Rossiter argues in his book Organized Networks (2006), face-to face meetings are crucial ‘if the network is to maintain momentum, revitalize energy, consolidate old friendships and discover new ones, recast ideas, undertake further planning activities, and so on’. This event is therefore meant for those networks and (potential) network members that cry for support to gather in real life, conspire, discuss and make the necessary steps forward. Winter Camp does not have an (academic) educational or training component, even if there is a lot to learn.

The political concept of organized networks is clear: the invention of new institutional forms immanent to the logic of networks. The Winter Camp is an exploration in how to do that, what such institutions might looks like, what they might do, how they might operate in different geopolitical contexts, how they are financed, speculate and reassess what their relation is to other institutions and each other, etc. As a meta-network, the event aims to produce an overview of network strategies that hold a combinatory potential for trans-network collaborations. This is the scalar dimension of organizing networks: how can we scale and keep-up, not become introverted and not only invent and innovate but, in the end, use the network form in the implementation of changes that we envision on a society-wide level?

With the Winter Camp, the Institute of Network Cultures intends to facilitate this transformation for a dozen existing and new networks around the topic of new media, art and culture. Some have emerged within the context of the INC, such as Video Vortex and MyCreativity, others have existed beforehand (Incommunicado) or are on the verge of becoming a network (Bricolabs). The format is a mix of a conference and workshop with the emphasis on getting things done. We hope to find a balance between intense sessions of groups, plenary sessions, mid- size meetings and lots of possibilities for informal gatherings.

The Winter Camp is mainly focused on theorists, artists, producers, researchers, curators, activists and other new media experts and interested people.

Winter Camp 09 will be a week-long program of workspaces/workgroups and plenary presentations, in which 12 groups can work on specific current topics. The maximum capacity is 150 participants. Experiences with temporary media labs go back to the 1990s (for instance Hybrid WorkSpace/Documenta X and Temp Media Lab/Kiasma). The Wintercamp 09 format was inspired by the special card box architecture, built by Paco Gonzalez for the 10th edition of the Zemos98 festival in Sevilla, Spain, in March 2008. Here, unlike the Hybrid WorkSpace, where groups showed up one after the other during a three months period, in Sevilla 10 groups worked for 5 days in groups of 10 participants under the guidance of a ‘professor’ (workshop leader) on contemporary web 2.0/ new media topics, accompanied by a plenary program.

The Winter Camp is framed around parallel workshops that convene once a day for (public) lectures and debates. The outcomes will vary from code and interfaces to research proposals and manifestoes. Plenary sessions will be held during this working conference as contextualization as well as a dialogue or debate about the limits and possibilities of the networks at hand. For the moment it is not completely clear what that will be like. The program will probably end with a public session where results of the workgroups will be presented, varying from wikis to maps and interventions, and from radio stations to performances.

Crucial to the concept of the Winter Camp is the intention of ‘antagonistic encounters’. Existing and emerging networks will be challenged and interrupted by polemic contributions from outsiders, either online or in real-life. Self-referential ghettoization is the last thing that has to happen. The preparation and programming stage of this event will develop a collaborative database that adopts negation and difference as a productive principle. In this way, we begin to contour the borders of networks and in so doing establish the materiality of collaborative potentials. There is no single model for networks to become sustainable. To get all the options on the table is a first necessary step in order to move to the next step. Networks, Get Organized!

Given the constraints of participation – limited numbers – the format of the Winter Camp places an immediate organizational challenge upon networks: who participates? The issue of ‘governance’ and openness is one that each network at some stage has to address. The process of building a network of networks thus begins well before the time of the Winter Camp meeting, and will be incorporated into the discussions before, during and after the event.

Along with a great curiosity about how networks do what they do, one of our key motivations in putting this event together has been the question of institutions. Whether we like it or not, institutions are part of our daily life. Just as economic globalization has massively transformed the world on a seemingly annual basis, so too have institutions as we usually understand them – those whose foundations are built from concrete and steel, bricks and mortar – been subject to considerable change in the age of electronic networks. While many primary institutions of social and political life (the state, firms, unions, universities) have struggled to adapt to changing circumstances, they have nonetheless made recognizable and frequently substantive changes. Indeed, many have reinvented themselves as ‘networked organizations’.

Having said that, the prime focus of Winter Camp 09 is not on those established organizations and how networks are used to increase, and optimize, inter-institutional exchanges. While it could be said that such institutions have undergone a crisis – both in terms of legitimacy and ontology – it would be a serious mistake to suggest their hegemony has diminished. Counter-sites of power are needed to contest the assumption that once a dominant institution becomes networked it somehow operates in a more soft, benign mode. Network surveillance through data-mining and user-profiling is only becoming more sophisticated as a biopolitical technology of control.

At the same time, and particularly with the advent of the neoliberal state over the past 30 or so years, space has been created for new institutional players. Witness the renewed role of religious organizations in the management and provision of social services, or the rise of NGOs and community organizations. Civil society has not so much ‘withered’, as Michael Hardt once put it, but rather proliferated due, in part, to the economic logic of outsourcing.

Where, then, does all this leave the culture of networks? This, in many ways, is one of the guiding questions that has shaped the organization of this event. It seems perfectly sensible and strategic to us that the organization of networks is a process of instituting new social-technical relations that have unique and special capacities to do things in the world, to effect change and transform subjectivities. How might networks take advantage of this new institutional condition, retaining their strengths – which include the culture of free distribution and sharing – while securing (or, more likely, inventing) the possibility of real sustainability of social and economic life?

Organized networks move between informality and structure, and it is this yet unexplored terrain that Winter Camp would like to investigate. There could be events that are totally ‘structure’ free but for us that would defeat a central purpose of this meeting, namely the cross-pollination of ideas and practices across the various networks, most of whom do not know each other, and who the organizers also do not know. The study of network cultures is, as the name already indicates, the core business of the Institute of Network Cultures, the initiator and organizer of Winter Camp 09. It is in this light that we would like to gather both practical and conceptual knowledge from networks themselves, document these ideas and make them accessible to an ever-growing range of groups and individuals that have started to work under the ‘network condition’.

There are many more questions to ask, critiques to be made, and agendas to be tested. No doubt, this will be the stuff of the Winter Camp and beyond. For now, we just wish to register the connection between the culture of networks and the need for new institutional arrangements in which networks can play a vital role.” Geert Lovink

Shannon Clark: Winter Camp 09: How Would You Organize Your Network?

Geert,

The schedule and format you have outlined for WinterCamp is very much in the spirit of an Open Space (though with some modifications) and in some other ways similar to the ongoing (and very successful & widespread) BarCamp movement - I suspect from the name you chose this is not a coincidence.

I’ve organized, facilitated and otherwise helped out with now dozens of such events - a few suggestions & observations from one event organizer to another.

(I’m sending this to nettime as I hope it may help other event organizers as well)

1. More than any other single factor the absolute most important part of any event held in Open Space (or similar formats) is the invitation. Who you invite - either directly or indirectly via a more open/public invitation - and even more so the frame which you set for the event - who will be there, what will be expected at the event, what goals if any are expected after the event etc. As Nina notes, there is some inherent tension in an event focused on networks and openness which is itself somewhat private & closed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - and indeed it can be a useful tension - but it should be recognized.

2. I describe all events I facilitate as having an “ebb & flow” - the goal with any event where people are breaking up into small group discussions is to as the organizer create an overall structure and schedule such that people return from those small groups and intermingle, flow back together as a group and have the shared experiences which bind a group together (meals are excellent for this
- but likewise shared group activities and experiences).

3. I would caution you about being too rigid with the workshop breakouts - there are many roles which people play at an Open Space or BarCamp style event. One is around the formal sessions - some people run sessions and mostly participate in others. But that is not the only or even most important role. An equally important role is that of “Butterflies” who “flit” between group, perhaps spending a few minutes in one session, then shifting to another, perhaps spending many sessions in ad hoc conversations in the hallways. These people play a vital role in weaving together the group - in cross pollinating ideas, in helping connect with people who find themselves in the hallways instead of in a session.

Whenever possible I prefer to hold these types of events in a single, large, open space. (If the weather permits I love holding entire conferences outside and at least in part in motion). The key aspect of being all together in a single, large space (ideally with minimal furniture - and what furniture there is pushed out to the edges) is that it greatly facilitates people overhearing other discussions, people migrating between discourses and at a minimum having a generalized sense of what else is happening - which conversations are striking a deep chord with the group (and which are not) - and helping each individual find others at the event with shared passions.

The mistake I see countless events (including most BarCamps) make is to have lots of small rooms, scattered throughout a venue, and to have very few shared group experiences so once the event starts everyone ends up with a personalized experience - moving between rooms - but has little overall sense of what the group as a whole is experiencing of thinking about.

I would also highly recommend taking time on the first day to give everyone present a very visceral sense of who else is there - what brought them to the space, what backgrounds or perspectives they are bringing to the event.

I generally do this with a group, physical exercise - plus if the group is small enough some basic introductions.

One favorite is to pick THREE (no more and no less) broad themes related to the event.

For WinterCamp this might be “Networks. Art. Politics” (pick better/more focused ones - but ideally terms which are in tension with each other)

Then you ask the whole group to form a TRIANGLE where each person places themselves along an edge which represents what their specific interests are (i.e. if mostly Art then at that point, if equally Art & Politics then midway between those two points). The point of the exercise being threefold.

1. It forces people to choose since you don’t allow them to break the edges - so they can’t be equally interested in all three.

2. It gets people physically milling and moving about - which as a start to an Open Space/BarCamp style event is vital - it breaks people of the habit of just being passive listeners as they are all to often at most more typical conferences or events.

3. Once formed it gives people a broad perspective on the interests of the crowd PLUS an immediate chance to find fellow travelers who share specific interests (i.e the people immediately around you in the triangle have just identified themselves as sharing your exact interests).

I generally start an event with an overview of the logistics (welcoming people, pointing out where facilities are, going over the broad schedule for the day). Then I give a short background about the format, the event (sponsors/organizers etc). Then the group exercise(s). And following that the first day’s breakout sessions. I typically have a grid with eh available spaces for breakouts - and then ask people to come to the center of the group and identify themselves and the session they would like to see happen. (and then select a time for that session - typically only scheduling the first day - leaving the later days to be filled in later)

What usually happens is that other people in the group share similar or related interests - and rather than each convening a separate session usually folks agree to work together on the same session. And the schedule often shifts are people ask for the bigger spaces (or spaces with facilities they need for a session such as a projector) and to balance out the schedule etc.

This process may take some time- but it also serves as a means to introduce a large portion of the group to each other.

Then we go into the breakout sessions.

I would usually also recommend keeping any formal presentations or talks to the EDGES of the schedule - in the mornings BEFORE working sessions or in the late afternoon/evening post-dinner. This allows people to e stay in a “working session” mode for a concentrated period of time. It is, however, good to have a shared group lunch - just don’t also have a speaker at or during lunch - instead people will naturally be continuing conversations started in the workshops and in the hallways.

It is also usually a really good practice to end the day back together as a group - and to at the end of each day get a brief report to the group as a whole about the discussions & progress made in the various sessions during that day (usually to do this means asking each session to have at least someone taking some notes - on paper & perhaps on a wiki) to report back later.

Starting each day as a group and building that day’s sessions and then ending the formal part of the day with reports back to the group usually dramatically accelerates the progress of the group as a whole.

I think your schedule of evening group experiences and events is a really good contrast to the working sessions during the days - shared meals & experiences really help bind people together.

Hope this is helpful and that you have a great and highly productive event!

Shannon

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo


reBlogged

on Feb 17, 2009, 5:24PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on February 17, 2009, 6:24pm

Posted under reblog art, reblog wikinomics

A green design competition turns up some great new ideas

by Pete Davies

I love gadgets, and I’m obsessed with things that help to increase energy efficiency. So when the two come together, I’m a very happy camper.

This will explain why I’m so excited about the second Greener Gadgets Design Competition that is currently running online. You can view the shortlist and vote for your favorites to make the shortlist that will appear for live judging at the Greener Gadgets Conference later this month.

My favorites:

• 

  The Power-Hog

  is basically a mini coin-operated meter that needs feeding before you can turn on the TV or the Wii. A great idea for teaching kids (and adults) to think about the costs of using appliances and gadgets.

Check out the rest of the shortlist and don’t forget to vote!

This piece originally appeared on The TerraPass Footprint

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Emerging Technologies at 12:50 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment, reblog innovation

Minister unveils ‘great British refurb’ to cut household emissions one-third by 2020 with insulation and low-carbon technologies

Millions of British homes will be insulated under government plans. Photograph: Graham Turner

by Alok Jha

All UK households will have a green makeover by 2030 under government plans to reduce carbon emissions and cut energy bills.

Cavity wall and loft insulation will be available for all suitable homes, with plans to retrofit 400,000 homes a year by 2015. Financial incentives for householders will also be available for low-carbon technologies such as solar panels, biomass boilers and ground source heat pumps, paid for by a levy on utility companies.

The government wants a quarter of homes (7m) to benefit from the schemes by 2020, extending to all UK households by 2030.

The strategy could help cut household carbon emissions by a third by 2020, part of its target to reduce overall UK emissions by 80% by 2050. Currently, homes account for 27% of the UK’s carbon emissions through heating and power.

The plans were welcomed in principle by green groups and energy campaigners, though many were still concerned by the lack urgency in the proposals – which might only begin in 2012 – or detail on how the majority of the plans will be funded.

Energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband said: “We need to move from incremental steps forward on household energy efficiency to a comprehensive national plan – the Great British refurb.”

“We know the scale of the challenge: wasted energy is costing families on average £300 a year, and more than a quarter of all our emissions are from our homes. Energy efficiency and low-carbon energy are the fairest routes to curbing emissions, saving money for families, improving our energy security and insulating us from volatile fossil fuel prices.”

Under the proposals, a Renewable Heating Incentive would tax utility companies and then use the money to build up smaller-scale energy networks. A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said the levy, intended to start in 2011, would not affect today’s household bills. “We have to consult on how it will work and, in fact, our proposals would have little impact on prices for many years, apart from cutting billing for those who take up the offer of help.”

In addition, householders could be paid for any electricity they feed into the national grid from their power-generating facilities.

Miliband said the challenge to retrofit homes was similar to the UK’s “dash for gas” in the 1960s. “Every cooker, every boiler, every gas fire in the country had to be adjusted. Changing more than 32 million appliances, of 8,000 different makes and models. Each appliance, house by house, visiting more than 14 million homes. And in today’s prices, the cost they estimated for this was almost £6 billion. Why did they do it? Because they thought long-term and realised that the shift that they started before I was even born would still benefit us today. We face the same situation again.”

Paul King, chief executive of the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) said the proposals were suitably ambitious but also needed the Treasury behind them. “As Lord Stern said yesterday, energy efficiency in homes and buildings should be part of a green stimulus. Financial incentives are needed to encourage major green refurbishments – the precedent has already been set with stamp duty rebates for zero-carbon homes.”

According to Greenpeace UK, a programme to upgrade the housing stock alone would require £3.5-£6.5bn per year until 2050. Nathan Argent, head of energy solutions at Greenpeace, said: “Tackling energy efficiency is the fastest way to cut emissions, boost our energy security, revitalise the economy and create tens of thousands of jobs. And, obviously, this will cut household bills too. But this plan needs much more investment right now. The government needs to put their wallet where their mouth is.”

Miliband said that costs of efficiency measures would pay itself back over time in reduced bills. Despite that, he said there should be no upfront cost for consumers and part of today’s consultation will look for ways to finance the strategy - energy companies, local authorities or even private companies might foot the bills for the necessary refurbishments.

Andrew Warren of the Association for the Conservation of Energy was concerned that the government had redefined the meaning of insulation to meet its current insulation targets, set by Gordon Brown last year, of getting 6m homes fully insulated over the next three years.

“Most people think of insulation as the stuff you shove in your loft or put around your walls,” he said. The current DECC definition, he said, can also include draft-proofing of letterboxes or replacing windows. “At the moment, even by the most generous interpretation, you’re not even halfway towards the 6m [target announced by Gordon Brown]..”

Danny Stevens, policy director of the Environmental Industries Commission said that setting targets for energy efficiency was not enough. “All we have today is the launch of yet another consultation. This undermines the urgency of tackling climate change and ignores the huge economic benefits of ambitious environmental protection measures.”

That sentiment was echoed by Philip Sellwood, chief executive of the Energy Saving Trust (EST), who said the time for talking is now over. “We are not short of ideas; we just need action and now. Armed with the knowledge that 70% of our current housing stock will still be around in 2050, we know we need to be bold.”

He added: “If we throw everything at our existing housing stock – based on today’s technologies only – we could reduce household carbon emissions by 50%.”

The EST said there are 7.3m cavity walls that could be filled with insulation, 7m solid walls that could be insulated, and 12.9m lofts which do not have the recommended depth of insulation, and 4.5m G-rated (the least efficient) gas boilers.

Shadow energy and climate change secretary Greg Clark said the government was “delaying rather than getting on and adopting our scheme immediately, when it is desperately needed.”

Last month, the Conservatives proposed giving an allowance of up to £6,500 to every household in the UK for energy efficiency improvements, the same figure announced today by the Lib-Dems to refurbish homes.

In their Warm Homes strategy, the party aims to upgrade more than two million homes a year for 10 years, and would award the contracts to regional building companies rather than large national companies such as Wimpey and Barratt.

Today’s Decc strategy also includes ideas to encourage microgeneration, where homeowners and local communities generate their own heat or power.

This piece originally appeared in The Environment section of The Guardian, for which Alok Jha is a green technology correspondent.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Politics at 11:50 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

Image credit Wikipedia

In regions where pumping and distributing water requires significant electricity use, policies that lead to reduced water consumption could address climate change more efficiently than requiring businesses and households to use less energy, according to water expert Peter Gleick.

“Some of the cheapest greenhouse gas emission reductions available seem to be not energy-efficiency programs, but water-efficiency programs,” said Gleick, president of the California-based Pacific Institute, a global water research center.

Gleick notes, for example, that it may be cheaper for consumers to reduce the overall hot water usage in their homes than to replace their incandescent light bulbs with more energy-efficient alternatives.

The virtues of water efficiency can be found in California and China - regions where water shortages have become emergencies and droughts may worsen with climate change. Conditions may become more severe in the future as consumers turn to water solutions that often require even greater energy supplies.

In California, where drought is afflicting the land for the third year in a row, the state is reducing water deliveries by 20-30 percent this winter and warns of “the most significant water crisis in its history.” The water shortages are forcing farmers to cut production and lay off employees in an already sour economy.

Meanwhile, water transportation, storage, and treatment account for about 19 percent of the state’s electricity, according to a 2007 California Energy Commission report [PDF]. To reach the rapidly expanding urban clusters in southern California, for instance, water is pumped 2,000 feet (610 meters) over the Tehachapi Mountains north of Los Angeles.

David Zoldoske, director of the Center for Irrigation Technology at California State University-Fresno, has led efforts to educate central California farmers about proper pump maintenance since 2001. With the help of utility company subsidies, the project has helped improve the efficiency of several irrigation pumps, saving 19.4 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually between 2002 and 2005, he said.

But the recent drought may reduce many efficiency gains. Farmers are digging deeper water wells and several counties are exploring plans to build desalination plants. Both measures lead to significant increases in energy use.

“When you’re running out of water, you don’t care about what the energy bill is…and we’re in dire straits here in California,” Zoldoske said. “Where people can use water more efficiently, people will opt for that…. But the availability and reliability of water is more of a concern.”

In China, drought now stretches across the northern wheat belt, and nearly 4 million people are without proper drinking water. After declaring an emergency “rarely seen in history” on Thursday, the government said it plans to send cloud-seeding rockets into the air to encourage rain, and to redirect portions of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers.

Many regions of China fit into Gleick’s definition of “peak water” [PDF] - a term used to describe situations when water is consumed from aquifers or the ground faster than it can be replaced, or when water-use patterns irreversibly damage the local ecology.

“China is an example where [water] problems come together in the worst ways on the planet,” Gleick said during a presentation of his bi-annual report, The World’s Water, at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. last week. “Water resources are over-allocated, over-used, and grossly polluted by human and industrial waste.”

To address the country’s water deficiencies, the Chinese government began plans in 2001 for a South-North Water Diversion project. The $62 billion project hopes to divert water from the Yangtze to the arid north along eastern, central, and western routes. If the project is completed (the western route has yet to begin), a significant amount of energy would be required to pump water across the country.

“It takes a lot of energy to move, treat, clean, and use water. A remarkable amount of water, it turns out,” Gleick said. “So whatever we can do to reduce the energy required to meet our water needs reduces greenhouse gases.”

The Chinese government in 2005 prioritized a 20-percent reduction in “energy intensity” - the amount of fuel needed to generate each dollar of national income - by 2010. Historically, water production and supply have consumed less energy over time. Energy intensity declined about 30 percent between 1997 and 2004, according to a 2008 study in the journal Water Policy [PDF].

But the study predicts that as China follows through on its promise to expand water treatment facilities across the country, energy consumption will rise.

“Reducing urban and other end-user water intensity could conserve both water and energy,…saving households money on water and energy and creating jobs elsewhere in the economy,” said David Roland-Holst, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who co-authored the study.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

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(Posted by Ben Block in Water at 12:00 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Ben Block


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Ben Block from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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Earlier this week, Google.org announced plans to develop a personal energy metering tool that will allow users to monitor their home energy consumption. The PowerMeter “will show consumers their electricity consumption in near real-time in a secure iGoogle Gadget,” according to the organization’s website.

Google believes consumers have a right to detailed information about their home energy use, and that real-time energy information could help people make smarter choices that will save them energy and money:

Our lack of knowledge about our own energy usage is a huge problem, but also a huge opportunity for us all to save money and fight global warming by reducing our power usage. Studies show that people save 5-15% of their energy costs when they have access to information about their energy consumption.

Over the next three years, with support from the Obama Administration’s proposed stimulus package, more than 40 million U.S. homes are set to receive smart meters. But many currently available smart meters do not display information to the consumer, which Google states is “unacceptable:”

We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in a standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see it, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it.

The organization is currently testing the software with Google employees and seeking out utilities and smart energy device makers to partner with. When PowerMeter is released, the tool will be free and is rumored to be based on an open source model.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Emerging Technologies at 12:41 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Sarah Kuck


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Sarah Kuck from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment, reblog innovation