Alviston Blog

When it comes to designing and building a house and picking out the things that go in it, the two main ingredients are energy efficiency and durability. You can buy a super efficient AC unit but it may be expensive and will be more costly to repair. So while something may be more energy efficient, they may not be cost effective.

We need to find the balance between all these: cost, durability and energy efficiency. This balance is what we call sustainability.

Achieving this, unfortunately, requires complexity. And when things are complicated, people usually respond with hesitancy. New technologies, even though they may be cheaper and better, often take time to take hold.

Lucky for us that a lot of the materials, systems and designs used in “green” construction are actually not new. They are proven, time tested systems that have simply not been cost effective. Until now.  Faced with the issue of a warming planet and the costs to remediate CO2, technologies like solar power, insulated concrete forms, structural insulated panels and much more, are starting to gain momentum. PV and wind power are leading the charge, but soon people will learn that it is much cheaper to find ways to reduce the use of electricity and petro-fuels.

Alviston exists to raise the comfort level of people in transition who want to learn to be more sustainable.

I don’t know why there aren’t way more news stories about this issue. Stories about the commitments companies are making in leading the way to a more sustainable future. Macys, WalMart, Del Monte have all put up huge photovoltaic systems over the past few months, but I’ve barely seen one story on it.

Right now, solar power is booming. But this is just the beginning. PV will soon become obligatory, and building much more efficiently will become the norm as well.

It’s not that we don’t know how to do it. It’s that we know right now it costs more to do. We have to go against our instincts that want instant results. Some of the things we are doing in green building will take several years to bear fruit. But once they do they will make some very tasty treats, like no electric bills, and greatly reduced pollution.

It will take some foresight and determination, but we can do it. We already are.

Mark Alvis

One of the issues we face today is the compression of so many tasks into our hectic days.

In the movie, “The 11^th Hour,” one of the speakers states that, “Things are thieves of time.” Our belief that we need to have these “things” means we have to spend a great deal of our lives and time earning the money with which to buy them.

As we buy more and more stuff, we have less and less time.

One of the big losses here is our ability to educate ourselves, since education also takes time. We rely instead on experts to form our opinions for us. This puts us in the precarious position of not really knowing something we claim to believe in. We’ve been spun.

To really get a handle on what global warming is, you need to understand quite a bit about science. If you don’t take the time to understand, the result is vulnerability. And since we would rather believe something that benefits us, rather than forces us to change, our own lack of knowledge leads us to erroneous conclusions.

The only answer is to learn, either with first hand knowledge, which is difficult to obtain, or to read. Saying, “But I just don’t have time,” is a pretty flimsy argument, when we are looking at the results of our unwillingness to learn.

Here are three books that I have found very helpful:

“The Weather Makers” by Tom Flannery

“How to Stop the Planet from Burning,” by George Monbiot

“The Clean Tech Revolution,” by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder

Mark Alvis