Manufacturing Dissent Since 1996
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Pretty Good Housing For All / Dan Kolbert

The  y hwb  earthen round house  built using cob and ecobricks by incredible edible porthmadog  north wales  uk

Obviously we have a lot of the looming climate apocalypses baked in already, so one of the things I worry about these days is what should we be focusing on? Should we just be focusing on resilience? If we have a vague sense of what's in store for us, should that be our focus? Another thing is that if anything, I'm really trying to drive home the message that any action we take has to be carbon neutral or carbon negative in a very short period of time. We talk about this in the book somewhat, that there's a lot of products out there that can get your house to be incredibly energy efficient, but the carbon intensity of those materials, especially things like foam insulation is the typical example, the CO2 equivalent in them is in the thousands or tens of thousands. So it could easily take a century for the energy savings to pay off the carbon load of those materials. And we don't have a century.

Chuck interviews Dan Kolbert, co-author along with Christopher Briley, Michael Maines and Emily Mottram, of, “Pretty Good House: A Guide to Creating Better Homes.” Dan has been a carpenter and contractor in Portland, Maine, for three decades. He has written for various trade publications, including Fine Homebuilding magazine, and for the past 10 years has been moderator of the original Building Science Discussion Group in Portland, Maine, where the Pretty Good House idea originated.
You can see Dan’s work at kolbertbuilding.com
Follow Dan’s work on Instagram @kolbertbuilding

 

Image:  Lizzie Wynn, Project Manager - Bwyd Bendigedig Port / Incredible Edible Porthmadog, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Guest

Dan Kolbert

Dan Kolbert has been a carpenter and contractor in Portland, Maine, for three decades. He has written for various trade publications, including Fine Homebuilding magazine, and for the past 10 years has been moderator of the original Building Science Discussion Group in Portland, Maine, where the Pretty Good House idea originated.

 

Follow Dan’s work on Instagram @kolbertbuilding

 

kolbertbuilding.com

 

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