A story I wrote for Architectural Record was posted in the last day or two.

It says that AIA and the US Green Building Council have announced an intention to form a strategic alliance, which may or may not lead, eventually, to AIA's endorsing the LEED system for green buildings. The announcement of the alliance raised the prospect that such an endorsement might be in the offing, but reporting it out weakened that impression.

Photo by Rolf Oeser for the New York Times

I wrote in June about the German city of Marburg, whose mayor and council voted to require every building to have solar panels. At the time I applauded it, though as is so often true, there is more to it than I grasped at first.

For more than a year, I've been basing my enthusiasm for Barack Obama — particularly compared with his craven competitors Clinton and McCain — on his potential, and on his potential willingness, to lead.

Now that he has reversed his position on offshore drilling, I get to see if I'm willing to follow. So far, anyway, I'm in.

This is another in a series of posts about the actions we're taking — or not yet taking — to lessen our footprint on earth.

A lot of our lighting is with CFLs. We can't use them in the kitchen ceiling because they're not compatible to the fixtures, and we're in the same situation in the downstairs bathroom. But where we can, we do. A question I've asked before: What to do with all the old bulbs?

What I'd really rather say is, "John Tierney, bonehead," or worse. But I'm going to control myself. Tierney is a New York Times columnist, which is an enviable perch, but Tierney wastes the advantage by relying on old-paradigm thinking. What prompts this criticism is his column "10 things to scratch from your worry list," in which he provides fodder for all those fogies, like himself, who think all this climate talk is a bunch of hooey.

My first story for Design New England magazine is on the newsstands now, in the July/August issue.

Here's what the page looks like (you can click on it and be taken to a readable version on the magazine's website):

Eric Taub of the Times has a story this morning saying that the coming age of LED lights is just about here, but I don't know if he hit it just right.

The story touches the usual points about LEDs — very expensive, but lasts longer, has no mercury, and can generate any color — but on the question of white-light intensity, he devotes no more than an aside: "L.E.D. bulbs, with their brighter light and longer life, have already replaced..."

One way to describe Leith Sharp is to include her on the roster of hugely influential people who you've never heard of.

I wasn't aware of her myself until recently, when I started looking for the best people around Boston to interview about the state of green building in Boston, for a story I'm doing for GreenSource magazine. Turns out that, as founding director of Harvard's Green Campus Initiative, she's one of the obvious, top-shelf voices to consult.

When the new site goes live, it will have a blog made up of all the green content from here. Where here, green has been one category among many, it will be divided it into green subcategories. One of them is going to be infoporn, a term that I think arose at Fast Company, or Wired; it is a perfect description of one of my itches. And, it's about the most I can say about the rest of this post...

This all comes from an LA Times story yesterday:

This could easily be the post about the energy audit that we got from our utility, but instead, it's about our insulating the pipes in our basement that radiate heat.