Summer Time

On the top of the Solaire in Battery Park City in New York. (Photo Copyright © birdw0rks/Simon Bird and the Albanese Organization.

This summer I'm working on two projects: surveying people's thermal comfort with LEED coordinator Emma Leonard and designing green roofs with Leon Glicksman from Building Technology (Yang organized the BPP this spring and he was one of the speakers!). I'm excited, I get to put some test beds up on building 1 and tentatively I'll be monitoring things like temperature and moisture differences. I get calculate 2.005 like heat transfer problems since the plants act as insulation. The survey is for the new grad dorm N35 so it can get certified as environmentally sustainable by the US Green Building Council. Leon Glicksman said there were plans in the past to make every new dorm have green roofs, but that plan seems to have fallen through. I get to find out how practical green roofs are and in what situations. Some of the advantages of green roofs are stormwater management and reduction of urban islands and heating loads. hooray!

Goals

after talking to jenny hu some more, i realized i should elaborate more on what the purpose of the sustainable lecture is, who exactly am i looking for to speak, and what i want them to talk about.

I'm most interested in getting the bigger picture on global sustainable development. China and India combined have a population of more than 2 billion people. Most of these people are not living at first world living conditions. For example, only around 10% of the population in China have living standards comparable to the rest of the developed world. That is, they have refrigerators, computers, air conditioning, gadgets, mattresses, washers, dryers, etc. The exponential demand on energy needs to be addressed and I think it's the next crucial challenge for the human race. I would like the speakers to comment on what needs to be done in their respective fields to sustain this demand. I'm not so interested in having scientists in to talk about the technical details of their research. I am very interested in economists, business-people, and policy makers because they are crucial to the bigger picture.

The two main trains of thought I want to chip away at are
1. Only people who are particularly caring or otherwise do-gooders go into sustainability careers.
2. The main obstacle to sustainability is lack of clean energy technology, and there's not a lot we can do until we get that.

In order to effectively tackle the energy and sustainability problem, it needs to be an attack on all fronts.

My target audience is primarily undergrads or generally people who have not yet decided on their career. Thus, I am looking for influential speakers, preferably someone who runs an undergrad course that is well-liked. The course itself doesn't have to have anything to do with sustainability. It's just so they have name-recognition, and students who respect them and like the way they speak. however, sustainability should be an important issue to them and it's something they're working on in their research.

Sustainable Lecture

so the vision is to make the pursuit of sustainability jobs mainstream. i'm investigating the possibility of having a panel discussion on sustainability, the need, the projects, the business, the industry. we'd like to get one person from each major to talk about their part and how it relates to the bigger picture.

if you guys know anyone who would be good, that would be awesome

amy smith - d-lab
1 - david marks, environ/civil
3 - material science - sadaway (fuel cell)
4 - architecture
5 - chemistry
6 - ee/cs - leeb (power electronics)
10 - chem e - tester
11 - urban studies/planning
12 - earth planetary sciences - (geothermal heating/cooling systems)
14 - economics banerjee and duflo
15 - management/business (s-lab)
17 - political science
20 - bio engineering
22 - nuch e

tell me who to get!