Outfitting School Buildings For Extreme Heat ‘Not That Hard,’ Says Expert
September 14th, 2023
Via Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, commentary on the need to retrofit schools for extreme heat: Near-triple-digit temperatures during the first week of the new school year led some districts in the U.S. to ether close or dismiss students early. According to healthy buildings expert Joseph Allen, the extreme heat was “entirely predictable”—and fixing the […]
Read more »The Future of Urban Housing is Energy-Efficient Refrigerators
September 13th, 2023
Via MIT’s Technology Review, an article on how adapting old, energy-inefficient buildings is less sexy but far greener than many high-tech solutions: The scars and pockmarks of the aging apartments and housing units under the purview of the New York City Housing Authority don’t immediately communicate the idea of innovation. The largest landlord in the […]
Read more »Decarbonization Case Study: Mixed Use Building Retrofit
September 12th, 2023
Via Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health, an interesting financial analysis of mixed use building retrofitting and BPS compliance: Our first fictional use case concerns a Boston building owner who manages a four-story commercial building, consisting of apartments, offices, a bank, and a grocery store. This building owner is interested in retrofitting her building, particularly […]
Read more »Los Angeles’ Green Streets Replenishing Aquifers
September 12th, 2023
Via Blue and Green Cities, an article on Los Angeles’ green infrastructure: In California, the Southern California Water Replenishment District estimates that in a single year alone, Los Angeles loses 58 trillion gallons of water to the ocean. To collect some of this excess water off the city’s impervious surfaces, the city is designing and […]
Read more »Every Office Should Have An Electric Car Charger
September 12th, 2023
Via HeatMap, commentary on how it would be a gamechanger for EV adoption — and for the electric grid too – if every office had an electric car charger: The United States now has thousands of fast-charging stations lining its interstates and major highways, making most of the country accessible to electric vehicle drivers. We have slower […]
Read more »Pumping Up The Heat Pump
September 10th, 2023
Via The Economist, a look at how propane-powered heat pumps are greener and easier to install in leaky old buildings: Electricity can be made from the sun, the wind or the atom rather than by burning fossil fuels. Cars, buses and perhaps even lorries can be powered by batteries rather than petrol or diesel. But […]
Read more »'Black Swans' are highly improbable events that come as a surprise, have major disruptive effects, and that are often rationalized after the fact as if they had been predictable to begin with. In our rapidly warming world, such events are occurring ever more frequently and include wildfires, floods, extreme heat, and drought.
'Green Shoots' is a term used to describe signs of economic recovery or positive data during a downturn. It references a period of growth and recovery, when plants start to show signs of health and life, and, therefore, has been employed as a metaphor for a recovering economy.
It is my hope that Black Swans / Green Shoots will help readers understand both climate-activated risk and opportunity so that you may invest in, advise, or lead organizations in the context of increasing pressures of global urbanization, resource scarcity, and perils relating to climate change. I believe that the tools of business and finance can help individuals, businesses, and global society make informed choices about who and what to protect, and I hope that this blog provides some insight into the policy and private sector tools used to assess investments in resilient reinforcement, response, or recovery.