The government has decided to move towards achieving 100-percent electrification of railways, as part of efforts to curb carbon footprints, Union Minister Piyush Goyal said on Wednesday.
The railways minister also said he has a mission that in next 10 years, Indian Railways will be running on renewable energy.
— The Economic Times
Announcing the plan, India's Union Minister Piyush Goyal said, "We will be the world's first large railway...nearly [75,000 miles] of track, which will be 100-percent electrified. Imagine how much carbon we will reduce from the entire atmosphere." We are aiming to make Indian Railways world's... View full entry
President Trump has instructed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to exempt Alaska’s 16.7-million-acre Tongass National Forest from logging restrictions imposed nearly 20 years ago [...]
The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it to potential logging, energy and mining projects. It would undercut a sweeping Clinton administration policy known as the “roadless rule,” which has survived a decades-long legal assault.
— The Washington Post
The move comes as global awareness over widespread deforestation in the Amazon and other tropical regions around the world intensifies. In Brazil, where land clearance and deforestation have increased rapidly this year under the country's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, smoke from the burning... View full entry
The assembly returns this fall at A+D on September 7, 2019 from 7:00-10:30pm. The recurring event is an unveiling of A+D’s new rotation of exhibitions. This approach to hosting simultaneous exhibition openings is an expression of our mission to join together a diverse community in celebration of... View full entry
Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has introduced a five-step plan to address climate change and to help mitigate its effects in the built environment. To start, Yang lays out the problem of climate change in personal economic terms: "Why have we so far barely made a... View full entry
China may be the biggest consumer of sand right now, but the issue is a global one. A UN report published earlier this year showed that sand extraction is far outstripping the rates at which it is replenished. According to a team of scientists who recently wrote about the topic in Science Magazine ($) and The Conversation, “Sand and gravel are now the most-extracted materials in the world”–measured by weight, they surpass fossil fuels and biomass. — Forbes
Writing in Forbes, Laurie Winkless probes the far-reaching and destructive impacts of skyrocketing global sand consumption as the world's urbanizing cities demand more and more of the substance to fuel new construction. View full entry
Henson Developments, WKK, and IBI Group have unveiled designs for a 60-story Passive House tower slated for downtown Vancouver. If completed as designed, the wavy tower could become the tallest Passive House building in the world. The tower, according to renderings published by Narcity... View full entry
The digital world of video games has changed over time thanks to architects and their expertise in spatial design and designing 3D environments. Digital model building are skillsets architects use everyday, so who better to help design these digital worlds? For landscape architect David... View full entry
For the past few weeks, the media has slowly increased its coverage of the devastating fires being intentionally set in the Amazon rainforest. Besides the politically charged issues and highly questionable leadership in Brazil, matters like this can quickly become headline news that leaves people... View full entry
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has unveiled a transformative Green New Deal climate action plan that aims to eliminate fossil fuel use in the United States entirely by 2050. Labeling the increasingly apparent effects of climate change “a national emergency,” Sanders seeks to... View full entry
In a statement released today the museum shared their goals to becoming the first solar powered art museum. According to ICA LA's deputy directory Samuel Vasquez, "Our audience counts on us to uphold the wellbeing of our community, and once we looked at the numbers and saw that it was possible to... View full entry
Andres Sevtsuk’s Harvard Graduate School of Design studio—examined how LA might maximize the opportunities at stake. The studio sought strategies to creatively optimize investment in public transit in an increasingly hot market for private-sector services. How can technology complement, rather than compete with, public transit? And, as LA reshapes itself, can it improve equity, sustainability, and quality of life as it aggressively redevelops its transit systems? — Harvard GSD
Los Angeles's relationship to public transportation has grown to be a complicated affair. Between public and private organizations, local government, and private-sector technologies hoping to implement their "solutions" to the city's transit problem, where do we draw the line? With this... View full entry
In the height of daytime, the sky suddenly blackened, and day became night in Sao Paulo.
Sure, smog is bad in the Western Hemisphere’s largest city, where traffic jams can stretch for dozens of miles. But not this bad. What was going on? Was the end near?
— The Washington Post
A combination of meteorological events paired with smoke that had traveled hundreds of miles from intense forest fires in remote parts of the Amazon caused a period of sudden midday darkness in the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere on Monday, reports The Washington Post. Meanwhile on... View full entry
U.S. investors are beginning to smell an opportunity in the waste-to-energy market, where livestock dung and food garbage is traded. Interest is being fueled by new state laws and by demand from companies such as UPS Inc.
After a lull in investor interest stretching back a decade, attention to “anaerobic digestion” waste-to-energy is surging in the United States, developers in the sector have said.
— The Los Angeles Times
Earlier this month, the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport announced that it had hit a much-anticipated milestone in becoming the first airfield in the United States powered by 100% solar energy.
The end result of an ambitious project that started seven years ago, the airport's 2.64-megawatt solar farm was completed with about $5 million of funding from the Federal Aviation Administration.
— Forbes
We are concerned that at present our education does not give sufficient weight to the inherently ecological and political basis of architecture, nor to our responsibility to meet our uncertain future with socially and environmentally informed practice.
We appreciate and applaud the efforts of contemporary practitioners, but we ask you to join us in using the freedom and particular responsibility of academic institutions to push our discipline further in this direction.
— Architecture Education Declares
Over 1,663 academics, professors, and administrators, mostly from the United Kingdom, have signed on to an open letter aimed at the architectural community that calls for a "curriculum change" in how architectural educators view their positions relative to the ongoing ecological crisis. The... View full entry
