global warming

I received an email last week from Scot Horst , who chairs the LEED Steering Committee. He describes the behind the scenes narrative that has been going on since work began on LEED 2009.

Person A: “Global warming doesn't give us much time.”

Person B: “But we can't address much of anything, let alone global warming, if we're only dealing with a small fraction of the entire built environment. We need to get everyone involved.”

Person A: “Yes, but why get them involved in a system that doesn't take them far enough to save us from ourselves? We need our buildings to be restorative.”

Person B: “LEED can't save us from ourselves. LEED, as a tool, can engage the market in transformation. That transformation is about people. It is not about LEED credits.”

Person A: “You're missing the point. We have to be tougher. We have to go beyond.”

Person B: “No, you're missing the point. We have to find ways to engage a market that has never thought about these issues before.”

Persons A and B: “Let's find a way to do both.”

This is an engaging and very important narrative and perhaps the most important point is that LEED is a “tool” that helps to raise consciousness and “engage the market in transformation.” My personal view is that we must “go beyond” and that much of what we currently do in the green building movement, however well intentioned, is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. The global warming mentioned in Horst's narrative has provided the catalyst for both LEED and Architccture 2030, but focusing solely on warming misses the point. Warming is a symptom and not a cause. It has prompted us to take some action, but not to “go beyond”.

As a premise for action it has been useful, but is easily attacked on it's “scientific validity”. It is one of the canaries in the coal mine, but there is very little discussion of the coal mine. We need to expand the narrative and take a broader view. Borrowing from basic premise of ecological economics, once you picture the built environment as a mere subset of our closed ecosystem, then your conceptual framework regarding sustainable building is forever changed. It means you have to accept that there are limits, and that we are not going to be able to grow forever. It implies the built environment must have some optimal size and level of consumption relative to the larger ecosystem. It means you cannot grow beyond that optimum without threatening man's survival within that ecosystem. Out of this stream of thought flows a long list of very troubling questions: How do we stop growing? What are the limits? What is optimal? Does climate change tell us they have already been exceeded? Do we face a kind of built environment armageddon when fossil fuel production peaks and begins to decline? Is a zero energy standard imperative now? What do we do? How do we do it?

Our very survival depends on how and when these questions are answered. LEED does not provide the answers, but it does help us to prepare.

If you go to a holiday movie this weekend, you doubtless will see a preview of I Am Legend starring Will Smith as the last man in New York City. But for the real story of what would happen if we all suddenly booked a reservation at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, you should check out Alan Weisman's controvertial book The World Without Us, which paints a verbal portrait of what our planet might look like should human beings summarily disappear.

If this sounds like a bit of a downer for the holiday season, it's not--according to Salon, the book "restores our sense of awe" at the power of nature: "By approaching the end of humanity from this unique angle, as a given, Weisman succeeds in throwing the spotlight on the earth itself -- and invests us in her fate. His thought experiment is so intellectually fascinating, so oddly playful, that it escapes categorizing and clichés -- in particular that earnest moralizing that can make environmental screeds so predictable."

You can read an excerpt from the book on the NPR website, and listen to a New York Times podcast here. To watch a video representation of what would happen to your house (pictured) if abandoned to nature, click this link. 

Whether it is from misinformation of simply a lack of it, only 7% of American voters identified buildings as the top contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in a recent poll by the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

Studies show that buildings produce 48 percent of dangerous greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change, and that they consume 71 percent of electricity produced at U.S. power plants. Despite these statistics, only aerosol cans finished behind commercial buildings (1 percent) as being identified as the top source for greenhouse gas emissions. Power plants (19 percent) and natural causes (15 percent) were thought to be top contributors, while 10 percent of respondents were not sure what the top cause was and 8 percent responded “other.”

Though they weren't aware of a building's impact on climate change, 91% of voters said they would be willing to pay up to $5,000 extra for a more energy effecient, environmentally sustainable home. With cost being a very common factor for the average American not living a greener lifestyle, this study does offer some hope. More education for the public is needed to help them understand the impact of their everyday actions and uses, but it is clear that most know that something is afoot.

RELATED:

+ UN Study: Regulations Are Needed for Green Building Progression

+ Green Building Primer (A Four Part Series) - Part III

Having recently passed the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, now is a good time to look at what kinds of creative, sustainable solutions we've come up with for flood-prone areas.

Both EcoGeek and Inhabitat have recently featured an awesome development in the Netherlands (the 'Nawlins of Europe, so to speak) consisting of homes that stay firmly planted on the ground, yet float free during times of flooding. Their foundatins are made of hollow, water-tight concrete, and all plumbing and electrical services are flexible to allow for movement. This seems like a great solution for low-lying environments that may turn liquid with nary a moment's notice.

Of course, there's a long tradition in flood prone areas of building houses on stilts, too, like this home featured on HGTV's Extreme Homes.

Nowhere will you find more varied and creative approaches to disaster relief than at the Open Architecture Network, where you can see such whimsical wonders as the Dymaxion Tree Fort and pages of projects aimed at flood mitigation.

“People cannot stand too much reality” - Carl Jung

I’ve been musing lately about exactly what it means to be sustainable in the context of residential building. Since words are the symbols we blogger’s use to communicate, I checked my American Heritage dictionary and found that “sustainable” in today’s lexicon means “capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment” as in “sustainable agriculture”. That didn’t quite do it for me. It’s the kind of feel good definition that allows people to build 10,000 SF homes with bamboo floors, dual flush toilets, and a HERS index of 85 and call themselves “green”. So I continued looking and found that one of the definitions for “sustain” is “to support from below; keep from falling or sinking; or to prop.” Since our built environment has been “propped” up and shaped by cheap oil for about a 100 years, I found that definition more on the mark.

Getting back to our friend Dr. Jung, our not so sustainable residential lives are about to be turned upside down by three major reality checks. At the risk of being labeled as a “crazed and raving doomsdayer”, let just say, it is going to be painful.

...for the complete text

Cross-posted from my site. Enjoy.

Part III - Statistics and Reasoning

So… what are some of the reasons and statistics to support the benefit of building green?

Regardless of whether or not you saw Al Gore’s global warming documentary, global warming is gaining the attention of the media and scientists worldwide. The building industry, including how we power these buildings, how we live in them, and what we put in them, has played a significant role in global warming.

Energy from the sun drives the earth’s weather and climate, and heats the earth’s surface; in turn, the earth radiates energy back into space. Atmospheric greenhouse gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other gases) trap some of the outgoing energy, retaining heat somewhat like the glass panels of a greenhouse. Without this natural “greenhouse effect,” temperatures would be much lower than they are now, and life as known today would not be possible. Instead, thanks to greenhouse gases, the earth’s average temperature is a more hospitable 60°F. However, problems may arise when the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases increases.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased nearly 30%, methane concentrations have more than doubled, and nitrous oxide concentrations have risen by about 15%. These increases have enhanced the heat-trapping capability of the earth’s atmosphere. Sulfate aerosols, a common air pollutant, cool the atmosphere by reflecting light back into space; however, sulfates are short-lived in the atmosphere and vary regionally.

Why are greenhouse gas concentrations increasing? Scientists generally believe that the combustion of fossil fuels and other human activities are the primary reason for the increased concentration of carbon dioxide. Plant respiration and the decomposition of organic matter release more than 10 times the CO2 released by human activities; but these releases have generally been in balance during the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution with carbon dioxide absorbed by terrestrial vegetation and the oceans.

What has changed in the last few hundred years is the additional release of carbon dioxide by human activities. Fossil fuels burned to run cars and trucks, heat homes and businesses, and power factories are responsible for about 98% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, 24% of methane emissions, and 18% of nitrous oxide emissions. Increased agriculture, deforestation, landfills, industrial production, and mining also contribute a significant share of emissions. In 1997, the United States emitted about one-fifth of total global greenhouse gases. (Source:http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/climate.html)

US buildings alone are responsible for more CO2. emissions than those of any other entire country in the world except China. (Source: Kinzey et al., “The Federal Buildings Research and Development Program: A Sharp Tool for Climate Policy,” 2002 ACEEE proceedings, Section 9.21.)

Global mean surface temperatures have increased 0.5-1.0°F since the late 19th century. The 20th century's 10 warmest years all occurred in the last 15 years of the century. Of these, 1998 was the warmest year on record. The snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere and floating ice in the Arctic Ocean have decreased. Globally, sea level has risen 4-8 inches over the past century. Worldwide precipitation over land has increased by about one percent. The frequency of extreme rainfall events has increased throughout much of the United States.

Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are likely to accelerate the rate of climate change. Scientists expect that the average global surface temperature could rise 1-4.5°F (0.6-2.5°C) in the next fifty years, and 2.2-10°F (1.4-5.8°C) in the next century, with significant regional variation. Evaporation will increase as the climate warms, which will increase average global precipitation. Soil moisture is likely to decline in many regions, and intense rainstorms are likely to become more frequent. Sea level is likely to rise two feet along most of the U.S. coast. (Source:http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/climate.html)

Energy use is therefore extremely important to consider. Buildings represent 39% of U.S. primary energy use (including fuel input for production), and represent 70% of U.S energy consumption. (Source: 2003 U.S. DOE Buildings Energy Databook)

The savings which can be realized through the green building process, both new builds and retrofit/remodels is not arguable. Coupled with the use of Energy Star rated products for both your home and business, the immediate and long term savings are a big part of green building incentive.

For example, tenants can save about 50 cents per square foot each year through strategies that cut energy use by 30%. This can represent a savings of $50,000 or more in a five-year lease on 20,000 square feet (Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency). On average, green buildings use 30% less energy than conventional buildings.

Water use, material use, and waste are also heavy contenders when opting for green building. Conserving water is often as vital as saving energy. Buildings use 12.2% of all potable water, or 15 trillion gallons per year. (Source: U.S. Geological Service, 1995 data.) Many things incorporated into a green building; including the landscaping, take water usage strongly into account.

Buildings use 40% of raw materials globally (and 3 billion tons annually). Combine this with the EPA’s estimate that 136 million tons of building-related construction and demolition (C&D) debris was generated in the U.S. in a single year – and you will have an understanding for the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” (Sources: Lenssen and Roodman, 1995, “Worldwatch Paper 124: A Building Revolution: How Ecology and Health Concerns are Transforming Construction,” Worldwatch Institute and the EPA)

On the forefront of the green building industry has been the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Program.

What is LEED®?

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ is the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high performance green buildings. LEED gives building owners and operators the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their buildings’ performance. LEED promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality. (Source: U.S. Green Building Council)

LEED’s rating system basically gives “points” in all of the above stated goals, with various levels of “green-ness.”

Several other organizations have developed their own green building guidelines, specs, and initiatives as well including: the National Association of Home Builder’s voluntary Model Green Home Building Guidelines (http://www.nahb.org), Minnesota Sustainable Building Guidelines (http://www.csbr.umn.edu/B3/), Federal Guide for Green Construction Specs (http://www.wbdg.org/design/greenspec.php), and the American Lung Association Health House Builder Guidelines (http://www.healthhouse.org/build/04HHBuilderGuidelines.pdf)

Think green!

To be continued...

Cross-posted from my site. Enjoy.

Part 1 - Laying the groundwork.

Ask ten people their definition of “green building,” and you’re likely to get ten completely different answers. While many perspectives of green building are more personal in nature, the basic concepts remain the same.

Green Building, which has quickly become a buzzword with the media, consumers, and manufacturers of every product under the sun, seems to have reached its tipping point. What was once reserved for the “alternative hippie” crowd, or the rich upper class – has finally found its way into mainstream America. Do a Google search on “green building construction,” and you get over 39 million hits! People are interested!

This interest IMHO stems from several basic realities –
1. Global warming and environmental concern is a very hot topic.
2. Consumers are more aware of the health effects which are associated with poor indoor air and environmental quality. Through the media, personal journeys, and the stories of others; many more people are beginning to “think” about what goes into their homes and bodies.
3. Energy costs. Energy costs continue to climb, our natural resources are being quickly depleted, and big businesses are learning about the large amount of money which can be saved by reducing their energy costs. Regular consumers can reap the rewards as well.
4. Over-development of land. While development is a reality, having a conscience about the impact to that land, and how the land will be used, is becoming a necessity as open spaces dwindle.
5. Incentives. Because of all of the above, many incentives such as tax credits and positive exposure have lured people in.
6. We live in a technological era where there is a mass of information available at our fingertips. Gone are the days of pouring over stacks of books at the library… We are quickly becoming a more self-educated society.
7. It just makes sense – and cents!

As it is with everything, there is never one single “silver bullet” to undo the damage which has already been done, create an instant utopia, and not come with some trials and tribulations. But – green building is surely a step in the right direction.

To be continued...

File this one away under "Great Ideas."

John Ardern, a designer from London, has taken second place in a DESIGN 21 Competition for his "Power Point," a fantastic gadget that makes the amount of power being consumed by each electrical socket visible. The idea is that, after seeing how much energy we are using/wasting, we might change our habits.

The DESIGN 21 series challenges designers of all disciplines to find solutions to social and global issues. The prompt for this particular competition, Heated issues, was: "Design an awareness campaign to educate the public on the issue of global warming."

As one of the judges of the competition noted, Ardern's design makes the invisible visible.

We agree, and admire the design so much because it forces us to consider something that would normally be so easy to ignore.

We now know that energy use by housing in the U.S. accounts for about 21% of green house gas emissions and that global warming has probably already reached a tipping point. A point from which we can now only mitigate worldwide effects that will eventually be catastrophic. That problem with global warming however is that politically we don't act on “eventually” very well. Politically we're much better at reacting to collapsing skyscrapers, market crashes, and other “Pearl Harbor” kinds of events. So policy changes in reaction to the slow moving Chinese water torture of global warming are likely to be a series of tepid half measures until our grandchildren are face-to-face with the sea water lapping up against the second story buildings in Brooklyn.

However, long before that happens, Peak Oil will kick our not so green or sustainable butts into action in a very Pearl Harbor kind of way.

The growing consensus is that Peak Oil (the point at which worldwide production begins an irreversible decline) will happen within the next ten years. Some (T. Boone Pickens, Matthew R. Simmons) believe that we peaked in 2005, but that we had enough headroom so that demand has not yet exceeded supply. Lending credence to Pickens and Simmons, the International Energy Agency has just warned of a supply “crunch” after 2010 due to rapidly rising demand and slower-than-expected production gains.

Once this “crunch” creates obvious and persistent shortages we can expect inflation, unemployment, more oil related military adventures, and a world wide recession. If that weren't enough, N. American natural gas production is expected to peak this year or next! Either event will put us in crisis/action mode, and combined they will easily supplant “Terrorism” as the number one social, financial, and political issue. The only good news, is that this coming “energy Pearl Harbor” will be the political tipping point that gets us on the road to true sustainability.

The following commentary by James Howard Kunstler gives us an entertaining look at what's to come.

“The final blowout of cheap oil is now ending, and the suburban juggernaut is entering its death throes. It wasn't slain by the New Urbanists, but they will be the last ones standing - just as the little warm-blooded mammals were the last creatures standing when the dinosaurs expired in the warm Cretaceous mud. The focus of their work will certainly have to change. There will be no more suburban subdivisions (or the accessories and furnishings of them - the strip malls, Big Box pods, and fried-food out-parcels), and the TND (Traditional Neighborhood Development) will emerge not as a counterpoint to all that crap, but as the template for a redefined type of village or town scaled to the new realities of available energy.

We will be inhabiting the terrain differently from now on. Whatever intact farmland remains will have to be reserved for feeding ourselves, and the "countryside" that has been regarded as having only scenic or recreational value for so many decades, will have to be both productive and carefully tended by human hands. Our big cities will certainly shrink, contract, and the fortunate ones will redevelop and re-densify at their old cores and around their waterfronts. The part of Philadelphia that we were in last weekend may be about as big as a sustainable city can get - minus the skyscrapers, which, alas, will be obsolete.

The demographic shift to come will be a shocking reversal of what has been going on since the start of the industrial revolution. The small towns and small cities of America -the places that have moldered in desolation and squalor for decades - will be coming back to life, surrounded by an agricultural landscape shaped by human attention.”

“Green or environmental accounting describes an effort to incorporate environmental benefits and costs into economic decision making.” - Gernot Wagner

If you didn’t think economic and accounting theory were important in our lives, consider this.

Much of what enters our national model energy codes is a some point filtered through a cost benefit analysis (CBA). CBA’s are subject to the principle of “lies, damn lies, and statistics”, in that much like statistics their end product is subject to underlying assumptions like the future cost of energy and discount rates. For example, the requirements for insulation levels in our codes is decided by cost benefit analysis which mysteriously always results in requirements that correspond to the exact thickness fiberglass batt that can fit into a 2×4 or 2×6 wall cavity or a 2×10 ceiling cavity.

Green, environmental, or social accounting would add in other factors to a CBA such as:

* the cost of air pollution
* the cost of climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions
* the benefit of insuring energy supply security

This would give us a “sustainable” Green CBA methodology that would transform our code requirements.

The EU and even China has already started moving in this direction, but the politics of vested interests have blocked progress in the U.S. Back in 1993 the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the official bookkeeper of the U.S. economy, did began working on a green accounting system called Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounts. However, the initial results released in 1994 showed that GDP numbers were overstating the impact of mining companies to our nation’s economic wealth. Mining companies didn’t like those results, and it didn’t take long for Capitol Hill to react. Alan Mollohan, a Democratic House Representative from West Virginia’s coal country, sponsored an amendment to the 1995 Appropriations Bill that stopped the Bureau of Economic Analysis from working on revising the GDP and that’s where things stand today.

You can imagine Owen Corning’s response to the application of a Green CBA approach to our current insulation requirements. Consider for a moment the effect a carbon tax would have on the our national requirements for insulation. I’ll use Sweden as a model. In an effort to account for the environmental costs of fossils fuels, in 1991 Sweden enacted a carbon tax of $100 per ton (raised to $150 in 1997) CO2 emitted. If the U.S. were to enact a $100/tCO2 carbon tax it would increase the current cost of natural gas by about 75% and the current cost of coal fired electricity by about 70%.

Since the basis for code requirements for insulation are primarily driven by current and projected energy costs, if the social and environmental costs of energy were included in a “green” CBA analysis, model energy code insulation requirements would increase by the order of 70%.

… more on Sustainable Economics

“To understand what sustainable economics is, and why it would be superior to conventional economics, we need to start with a brief recap of conventional economics. I’ll need to go through a number of definitions and distinctions, but this is far more than an academic exercise. The conventional economics concepts I’ll be describing provide the basis on which those in power all over the world (which to some degree includes most of us in the rich industrialized countries) justify the destruction of the Earth. It would be hard to find a more pervasive, pernicious and powerful evil than the seemingly innocent concepts that currently rule our economic lives. Let me be more precise, it is not so much the concepts on their own - they have served an historically useful role. The real evil is the continued dominant use of these concepts long after they have become seriously outdated and destructive. This is indeed the belly of the beast, and until we can replace these concepts with a more Earth-friendly approach, our prospects are grim.” - Robert Gilman