Synapse: This Week's News for LA’s Best Buildings

Climate Hope is Back

After withstanding four years of official US efforts to sabotage progress on combating climate change, the world is entering a promising new era of opportunity.

The Riskiest Place for a Natural Disaster in the U.S.? You're Living in It, L.A.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has calculated the risk for every county in America for 18 types of natural disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, volcanoes and even tsunamis. And of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties, Los Angeles County earned the highest ranking in the National Risk Index.

How Affordable Green Housing Enhances Cities

Green + Affordable = Sustainable. A seemingly simple equation, but one that is challenging to consistently and holistically solve for in practice. Sustainability is typically described as having three dimensions: environment, economy, and equity. Green building guidelines provide clear practical guidance on how to capture the environmental and economic benefits but are less clear on how to articulate and implement the equity aspects of sustainability. Equity focuses on the social aspects of sustainability. Evaluating equity from structural, procedural, and distributional perspectives can reveal how both burdens and benefits are distributed through a society, with the goal of eliminating unjust practices and detrimental disparities.

As Emissions Climb, California’s Climate Targets Could Slip Out of Reach

California’s stand out progress reducing greenhouse gas emissions has temporarily reversed, with pollution upticks signaling an increasingly difficult path ahead in achieving the state’s 2030 and 2050 climate targets. That’s the finding of the 12th annual California Green Innovation Index—released by the nonpartisan nonprofit Next 10 and prepared by Beacon Economics.

Podcast: 'Paths to Net-Zero Emissions by 2050' by the Interchange

Last month Jesse Jenkins, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton and a well-known expert in the domain of energy-system modeling, and his Princeton colleagues published a massive study called Net-Zero America that examines five pathways for the U.S. to decarbonize the entire economy. On this week’s Interchange, Jesse Jenkins walks through the different ways America could zero out carbon dioxide.

Source: LA Times