I'm in decent shape for 52, but it took everything I had to carry a hefty piece of welded steel plate out of the backyard -- and I didn't place it any too gently on the curb when I got it there. So I was impressed when John from Blue Scrap & Recycling casually flipped the hunk of metal into his truck without apparent effort. John suggested we ought to give him a call when we have more demo work. "We're used to moving heavy stuff around," he said. "Plaster and wood, that's kid's stuff." Even so, it took John and a crew of four a full afternoon to rip out our old heating plant.

The oil furnace, tank, and gas boiler that took up half the basement will be replaced in the JP Green House by an efficient air circulation system, heat exchange unit, and a small electric heating element, drawing as little power as a intermittent hair dryer. Supplemental heating will only be required on the very coldest days, provided by a wood or pellet stove (which only need burn for brief intervals), and air conditioning will not be neccessary.

Heating a home with a hair dryer -- that is the astounding promise of passivhaus, the state-of-the-art energy efficient construction standard that's so far ahead of the envelope in U.S. building codes that structures built to passivhaus code score low in Energy Star and LEED rankings; that's because neither standard accounts for buildings so tight and well insulated that they don't require traditional heating plants (and lose points in the ratings game for having none!).

Minneapolis blower door.The Energy Conservatory.Placetailor's Pratt House project illustrates the point. The super-insulated home of Simon Hare, founder of Placetailor, built on the footprint of a 100-year-old gunsmith shop on Fort Hill in Roxbury, scored an astonishing 0.6 in volume of air replacement in a recent blower test (dead-on for the passivhaus standard and difficult to achieve in a very small spaces). In the test, a large fan is attached to a door to create a partial vacuum, and the rate at which air filters into the structure gives an accurate picture of the tightness of its envelope.

Passivhaus certification sets tough standards for air tightness, heating, and total energy consumption, and recommends three additonal measurements covering window efficiency, peak heating, and ventilation heat recovery. Taken together, these criteria ensure a snug, parsimonious, well ventilated space, intelligently oriented to prevailing weather and the path of the sun, that stays cool in summer, as old adobe buildings do in the Southwest, and hoards heat from appliances, bodies, and lighting so well that it remains pleasant and warm without additional heating on all but the coldest days.

Energy savings (and avoided carbon emissions) are immense. The JP Green House aims to use less than 4.75 kBtu/sq. foot per year in heating, an austounding 1/8 of the 40.5 kBtu/sq. ft. of our estimated past energy expenditures in a barely insulated structure with cracks wide enough to admit daylight. (Based on U.S. Energy Information Administration 2001 survey data.) The comparison with average U.S. housing stock, and even Energy Star-certified homes, shown in the chart below is no less remarkable. If we are able to install pv solar and micro-wind, it will be no great trick to reach negative (net) carbon emissions and become a small electric power generator.

Challenges. The challenges confronting our design/build team at Placetailor are mountainous. To meet exacting passivhaus standards on a shoestring budget in a rickety 100-year-old building abandoned for the last five years is tough by any measure, but Andrée and I have heaped on additional burdens by our persnickety insistence on certain aesthetic considerations. We are assuredly among the very few climate-conscious homeowners called to task by our designers for not daring to dream large enough in reducing our own carbon footprint.

Take the matter of the windows. To minimize energy loss and maximize passive solar heating in winter months, it makes sense to virtually eliminate openings on the north side and install large windows on the south to warm concrete floors and retain energy, which radiates into living space at night. From the perspective of energy expenditure, there is no utility to windows on the east and west sides and the strict dictates of the passivhaus standards encourage designers to limit their size or do away with them entirely. This can be handled in new construction by turning south-facing walls into a curtain of glass -- with shades, screens, and even intelligent planting of deciduous trees and vines to provide summertime shade -- but such a solution is out of reach in our constrained budget.

But forgoing those windows is a problem for us. We do not want to lose the view on our west side, which looks onto our garden, nor on the east, which commands a fine prospect of the intersection anchored by our former corner store and cemeteries further down Bourne Street, and we worry about how our demonstration home will be received by an American audience who will not find appealing, it seems safe to say, any house that feels dark and closed in. Placetailor cut the Gordian knot of the windows by designing permanently emplaced, triple-paned picture windows with small venting casements on the side, and will custom-craft insulated shutters to cut heat loss at night.

Another example of tradeoffs was whether to use cellulose or recycled-foam insulation. The choice matters, in terms of modeling low-carbon impact construction pathways; cellulose is a clear winner, but it also means a four-inch difference in how much interior space is lost. In the end, we decided to do both, employing an innovative construction solution devised by Placetailor using recycled cellulose on the second floor and installing recycled foam on the first.

These are just two example amid many of the tradeoffs between cutting carbon emissions to the bone -- the imperative on which averting collapse of civilization depends -- our personal wants and sensibilities, and our best guess as to the comforts, aestetics, and amenities essential to winning acceptance by a wider audience.

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Seattle is the most sustainable big city in the nation, according to a list compiled by Smarter Cities, an NRDC project that looks at the progress American cities are making toward going green. Not surprisingly, San Francisco and Portland are the runners-up.

Using data from the EPA and the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as some voluntary survey responses from city governments, the project identified the top 15 large, medium, and small cities according to 10 different environmental criteria, from air quality to recycling to transportation.

Here's a look the top 15 large cities (population of 250,000 or more):

It's hard not to be environmentally minded in a city with views like this.Photo: Simonds1. Seattle
The Emerald City gets props for its brand-new light rail system, reliance on hydroelectricity (and the resulting good air quality), Mayor Greg Nickels' U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Agreement, and two global warming initiatives: Seattle Climate Action Now and Seattle Climate Partnership. Seattleites are described as "highly educated and environmentally minded." Think it's just a coincidence that Grist is headquartered here?

San Francisco is one of the most densely populated cities in the country.Photo: ATIS5472. San Francisco
San Francisco's dense population, walkability, plastic-bag ban, city-created carbon offset fund, solar power program, and booming local food movement propelled it to the No. 2 spot. (Read more about Mayor Gavin Newsom's green efforts.)

Portland has always been a leader in big-city sustainability.Photo: Ben Amstutz3. Portland
Seattle's neighbor to the south got its light rail up and running more than 20 years ago, and the city has always been ahead of the curve on controlling urban sprawl and suppressing greenhouse-gas emissions. Portland's residents also recycle more than half their waste.

Oakland is making a green comeback.Photo: satanslaundromat4. Oakland, Calif.
This once-struggling city has a Green Jobs Corps, a New Urbanist 10K Downtown Housing Initiative, a Zero Waste Plan, and a growing local food movement (as urban farmer Novella Carpenter explains). It also gets 17 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. Sounds like there is a there there.

How green was my Silicon Valley?Photo: the_tahoe_guy5. San Jose, Calif.
Always on the cutting edge of the high-tech world, this capital of Silicon Valley is fast on its way to leading the green-jobs revolution. Its Green Vision includes plans for bringing 25,000 new clean-tech jobs to the area.

Austin's new smart grid will light up the night -- sustainably, of course.Photo: Visualist Images6. Austin, Texas
A liberal outpost in red Texas, this city owns its electric utility (meaning voters elect the utility's board) and plans to adopt a smart grid in the near future.

Sacramento aims to be green while it grows.Photo: kla40677. Sacramento, Calif.
The Golden State's capital, while suffering from the side effects of rapid population growth, has a progressive, publicly owned utility that, in addition to offering a 100 percent renewable power option, provides free trees to residents hoping to cool their homes with natural shade.

Boston stands out among less-green East Coast cities.Photo: werkunz18. Boston, Mass.
Boston's push toward wind and solar energy, its efforts to become more bike-friendly, and its LED traffic lights make it a leader on the environmentally lagging East Coast.

Denver conserves water like nobody's business.Photo: kla40679. Denver, Colo.
The Mile High City is already way ahead of its goals for reducing water consumption. Its new bike-sharing and composting programs and extensive system of city parks also helped it make the top 15.

Chicago's city hall has its own green roof.Photo: Smarter Cities10. Chicago
Always famous for its architecture, today Chicago has more LEED-certified buildings than any other U.S. city and boasts 300 green roofs. (Read more about Mayor Richard Daley's green efforts.)

San Diego is growing smart.Photo: Smarter Cities11. San Diego
Parks and open spaces make up almost a quarter of this city's land area, and its smart growth program has led to impressive developments.

The Big (Green) Apple.Photo: mikeleeorg12. New York City
What it lacks in air quality and renewable energy it makes up for in density, walkability, and Mayor Bloomberg's commitment to reducing the city's carbon footprint. (Read more about Bloomberg's green efforts.)

L.A. works to clear a path through the smog.Photo: Storm Crypt13. Los Angeles
Infamous for its smog and clogged freeways, L.A. is making admirable efforts to switch to renewable energy and conserve its water supply.

Big D: Greener than you'd think.Photo: dherrera_9614. Dallas
Dallas gets 40 percent of its electricity from wind, has seen a huge spike in public transit usage in recent years, and cracks down on lengthy truck idling during the "ozone season" from April to October.

Columbus hopes for an urban resurgence.Photo: jpmueller9915. Columbus, Ohio
A perhaps unexpected entry on the list, flat Columbus lends itself to bike-friendliness. The city has also been working hard to revitalize its downtown core and combat sprawl.

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There's a monster in our basement. It eats fistfuls of dollar bills, guzzles No. 2 heating oil, and belches filthy clouds of soot and CO2. We have to kill it before it kills us. Only problem is, we and our tenants are dependent on it -- this being New England, we need something down there to keep us from freezing our butts off when winter rolls around again.

Nothing to fear but furnace itself.Ever since my partner Edith and I bought our 100-year-old Boston triple-decker two years ago, we've been plotting the demise of its beastly old, big-as-a-refrigerator, criminally inefficient, oil-fired boiler. Now we've found an unexpected solution, and it's taking shape right under the gluttonous old fiend's outstretched cast iron pipes. We're replacing our monster with a state-of-the-art, super-efficient micro-combined heat and power system.

Huh?

Combined heat and power -- or cogeneration, as it's also known -- captures the waste heat from generating electricity to heat a building. Thomas Edison himself thought it up in the late 1800s, but only now, in the face of 21st century energy challenges, is it starting to catch on for small-scale use. Ours is one of the first 80 or so residential MCHP units to be installed in the entire country. And it should cut both our total annual energy cost and our carbon footprint by roughly half.

Looking for Heat in All the Wrong Places

We knew when we started househunting that we'd almost certainly have to invest in a significant energy upgrade. Homes in the U.S. use roughly 20 percent of the country's energy and produce roughly the same share of carbon emissions; and a huge amount of that -- as much as 60 percent by some estimations -- is wasted. Older homes tend to be especially inefficient, and the one we ended up buying was no exception.

The old beast in the basement.Peter Thomson

In many ways, our modest urban three-family is a paragon of efficient resource use, built to accommodate a lot of people comfortably on a very small patch of land. But energy-wise, the house and its heating system remain relics of a distant era. By the time we first crossed its threshold, heating oil was heading toward $4 a gallon and atmospheric CO2 toward 400 parts per million. We knew the consequences were potentially catastrophic, for us and the planet.

But we also knew we'd have to be patient -- we were putting down a mountain of cash on the house, and it would be a while before we could make another big investment.

And despite its faults, our boiler was a little like my dad: still lumbering along in relatively fine shape even after eight decades or so. The thing may not have been designed for efficiency, but it sure was built to last.

So we started with the low-hanging energy-saving fruit: we caulked cracks, installed low-flow water fixtures, swapped our incandescents for CFLs, and added insulation (incredibly, after 100 New England winters, our house was still wearing the equivalent of a spring jacket).

These improvements helped curb the monster's appetite, but the beast was still not broken. So we started researching alternatives.

We began with grand visions of the big three renewables: solar, wind, and geothermal.

Alas, while our research revealed exciting advances in those areas, none were yet a good fit for our property or budget, so we resigned ourselves to making a more conventional swap -- from our ancient, no-better-than-65-percent-efficient oil guzzler to a decorous modern, 95 percent natural gas sipper.

That swap alone would bring a huge savings, in money, energy, and carbon. Gas is cheaper and has more energy per unit of mass, and burning it produces nearly 30 percent less CO2. And switching from a heating and hot water system that wastes at least 35 percent of its energy would mean a huge boost in efficiency.

But we also knew that the electric grid we draw our power from is an even bigger hog per unit of energy than our ancient boiler. We were eager to tamp down its appetite as well, if only by a tiny fraction, and willing to invest a bit more up front to make that happen. And just as we thought we were out of options, a new one came into view.

As a journalist covering the environment and energy, I'd first caught sight of micro-cogeneration maybe fifteen years ago -- a blip on the far edge of the radar screen. "Someday soon," everyone had said, and there it sat, like nuclear fusion or cellulosic ethanol, a promising energy breakthrough, always just out of reach. But now, here were the EPA and the Sierra Club and even Popular Mechanics suddenly extolling the benefits of micro-CHP, and there was an actual brochure, for an actual product, from an actual company -- which, it turned out, was just a few towns away. We picked up the phone.

Watts, Happening Now

The company was called Climate Energy, a joint venture between a little local engineering firm and the big national heating equipment manufacturer ECR International. After seven years of R&D, they'd just brought their first product to market: the Freewatt system, which pairs a 95 percent efficiency gas heating unit with a small, 1.2 kilowatt, gas-fired Honda generator.

Honda's generator: a model for the future?HondaHere's how it works, in a nutshell: When a home needs heat or hot water, the first part of the system to fire is not the furnace but the generator. It burns gas to produce electricity, and also produces an unavoidable byproduct, waste heat. But instead of venting that heat, the MCHP unit uses heat exchangers to capture some of it and pump it into the heating system. Then, if the demand for heat exceeds what the generator can provide, the furnace itself kicks in. The electricity, meanwhile, is either used in the house or fed back onto the grid. Together, the system produces heat, hot water, and electricity at more than 90 percent efficiency. That's 10 percent better than even the highest-efficiency boiler paired with a comparable amount of electricity from the grid, and more than 50 percent better than our current system.

This first Freewatt system was built around a hot-air furnace, which is what heats most houses in the U.S., but -- damn! -- not ours. But the company promised to have a forced hot water system available soon. If we were willing to take the leap of faith that goes along with being early adopters, we could soon be among the first in the country to embrace this long-promised technology.

We loved the idea. We were also terrified. This would be a very expensive experiment.

We set out to do a direct comparison of the ten-year costs of each system. The upfront expense was easy; including some major replumbing that we'd have to do for either system, a conventional high-efficiency gas system would cost us roughly $20,000, while the MCHP would cost us about $23,500, about 15 percent more.

Click image to enlarge.

Running the longer-term numbers, though, was another story. It turns out that the array of variables involved in comparing the cost and efficiency of heating and hot water systems is mind-boggling. Roll in the added complexity of switching fuels, generating some of our own electricity, and trying to calculate carbon emissions, and it was almost enough to send us running to the basement to give our dependable, uncomplicated old monster a bottle of Geritol and a winter-long hug.

After weeks of research and calculations, we finally arrived at a rough bottom line: either system would likely save us at least $3,000 a year in fuel while improving our overall efficiency by more than 30 percent, and cutting our carbon emissions by more than 40 percent, or almost nine tons. But the Freewatt would reduce our emissions by roughly another two tons a year. It would also save us at least $500 a year on electricity, which meant we could pay off the difference between the two systems in about seven years.

We took a deep breath, crossed our fingers, and took the leap.

Leap, and the CHP Will Appear

And now, there it is, a sleek array of white boxes, tubes, pumps, valves and pipes, settling in next to our fuming, red-faced monster and climbing the granite walls of our foundation. Soon, the Freewatt system will be hooked into the plumbing, and our house will have made a 100-year leap into the future. Our friends and neighbors are already lining up to come over and see it.

The shiny new system, installed (see a labeled version of this photo here).Peter ThomsonWe still don't know exactly how this leap will pay off, given all the variables, including things completely out of our control, like how cold next winter is, and how well our tenants manage their heat. We don't know how well the technology itself will work, or even how the new company that designed it will fare. We're going out on a limb here, and there's a small chance it could fall out from under us.

But we know that if the U.S. is going to make the huge changes required on energy consumption and carbon emissions, some people are going to have to go out on limbs, try new technologies and start to seed the market. Without early adopters there'll be no massive transformation.

We're willing to take the risk. And we're fairly certain our gamble will mean we'll even save money in the long run. We're slaying our own little monster, and hopefully helping give birth to something that will help us all slay a much bigger one.

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Transit ridership has jumped across the U.S. as folks get tired of paying at the pump. From January to March, transit ridership jumped 10 percent in Boston, 8 percent in both Los Angeles and Denver, and 7.2 percent in the Twin Cities. In Philadelphia, transit ridership in March 2008 was up 11 percent from March 2007; in April, ridership in south Florida was an impressive 28 percent above the year before. "Nobody believed that people would actually give up their cars to ride public transportation," says Joseph Giulietti of south Florida's transportation authority. "But in the last year, and last several months in particular, we have seen exactly that." In addition, motorcycles and scooters are selling like fuel-efficient hotcakes, and vanpools and bikes are increasingly popular. Says Clark Williams-Derry of the nonprofit Sightline Institute, "It's almost like we hit a point where, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore,' and that point was about $3.50 a gallon."

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The city of Boston is looking to build an urban, indoor composting facility. Most cities, if they compost at all, transport food and yard waste in gas-guzzling trucks to dumps outside the city limits, where energy and methane from decomposing biomass get lost to the atmosphere. The first-of-its-kind proposed Boston facility would generate electricity from rotting leaves and fruit, enough to potentially power 1,500 homes. The project would create green jobs, make fertilizer available to sell, and, of course, put all of those colorful New England leaves to good use. The facility is still in planning stages, but Mayor Tom Menino is optimistic, proclaiming, "We're really turning Beantown into Greentown."

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A Think Outside the Bottle campaign kicked off today, urging municipal governments to cut off bottled-water contracts and to press for greater disclosure of the source of bottled H2O. The campaign is spearheaded by Corporate Accountability International and joined by cities including Boston, Minneapolis, Sacramento, and Portland, Ore., many of which held taste tests today to see if consumers can tell the difference between bottled and tap water. Chicago's mayor urged a 10-cent tax on bottled water, while Salt Lake City Mayor (and official Grist crush) Rocky Anderson told it like it is: "When I see people ... waste their money buying bottled water at the vending [machine] when it's standing right next to a water faucet, you really have to wonder at the utter stupidity and the responsibility sometimes of American consumers." Not to be outdone, the International Bottled Water Association issued a press release stating that the campaign is "based on factual errors and subjective viewpoints."

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