...[Social Security's] eight-story Southeastern Program Service Center in Birmingham, Ala., boasts the largest green roof on any General Services Administration-leased building. The roof reduces the building's carbon footprint with oxygen-producing plants and vegetables. The building also features a raised floor system that provides better ventilation for improved air quality; a "natural light harvesting" system is designed to capture as much natural sunlight as possible; and accessible public transit allows more employees to use public transportation.
Pages
▼
May 9, 2009
The Greening Of Social Security
From the Social Security Update, a newsletter put out by the Social Security Administration:
By BJORN LOMBORG
ReplyDeleteMay 8, 2009
For two years before Copenhagen Consensus 2008, teams of experts wrote papers identifying the best ways to solve the world's biggest problems: air pollution, conflict, disease, inadequate education, global warming, malnutrition and hunger, sanitation and water challenges, subsidies and trade barriers, terrorism and gender-disparity issues. They identified the investments that would best tackle each challenge and outlined the costs and benefits of each.
A group of prestigious economists -- including five Nobel laureates -- gathered and examined this research. They took the long menu of investments and turned it into a prioritized list of opportunities. At the bottom -- the least cost-effective investment the world could make to respond to any of these problems -- was dealing with climate change through immediate CO2 cuts, as the Kyoto Protocol attempts.
Bjorn Lomborg is the director of the Denmark-based think tank the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming."