The New York Times carried a remarkable, front-page piece this weekend on the severe health risks of a chemical called normal propyl bromide (nPB), a substance known for many years to cause nerve damage, infertility and cancer.  Commonly used in aerosol form in furniture adhesives, the focus of the piece is on the mendacious practices of Royale, a foam cushion company with a long history of exposing their employees to the stuff, and the ineffectiveness of OSHA in either limiting the general use of nPB or disciplining Royale for their myriad infractions.  The Times also frames the issue in terms of unintended consequences- OSHA banned the use of something called trichloroethane (TCA) because it damages the ozone layer and companies began using nPB instead.  Leaving aside the horrifying callousness of certain business managers-  one is quoted as saying, “There are people lined up out there for jobs. If they start dropping like flies . . . we can replace them today”- one wonders how we got ourselves into a situation in which the various impacts of every chemical deployed have to be chased down by government agencies and employees.  The article reads like a keystone cops version of regulatory malfeasance.  Employees tell their bosses that nPB makes them sick.  The employees (and their doctors) tell OSHA that nPB makes them sick.  OSHA doles out fines that are so small the employers hardly notice so they continue to use nPB unabated, even as multiple employees are left unable to walk, have children, or get another job.  For me, the moment of highest tragi-comic value in the story is when Mid South Adhesives, the company that makes the nPB-based adhesive, tells Royale to stop using their product. But they keep selling it to them, and Royale keeps pumping it into their employees lungs because, hey, it’s legal.

All of this has direct bearing on the building industry, where the vast majority of materials include substances with a huge variety of severe health impacts, from cancer to arsenic poisoning to lung diseases.  A recent study by Perkins + Will found 374 substances in common building materials that are linked just to asthma.  It is just this sort of staggering data that has led to the development of the Perkins + Will Precautionary List, the Living Building Challenge Red List, and for organizations like the Healthy Building Network to focus on eliminating the “worst in class” substances commonly deployed by the three-billion dollar building material industry.  To date, the focus has been on simple transparency of what is actually in building materials. Astonishingly, most manufacturers are unable to tell you what’s in their products.  No one has ever asked them.  So programs like Declare are aiming to rectify this lack of knowledge.  Which is all well and good.  But maybe we should ask ourselves a different question.  Like, why is it the victims’ responsibility, the people getting sick, to PROVE that a specific material has led to their specific illness?  Shouldn’t the folks that are pumping the carcinogens and toxins into the system be required to, you know, stop doing that?  Why isn’t it the responsibility of manufacturers to prove to us that they’re products won’t make us sick?  As Michael Braungart once said to me, “If it causes cancer, and shows up in breast milk, surely we can all agree this is a bad thing?”

We’ve been nibbling away at the periphery of this system for a long time.  Decades of banning the very worst substances, limiting the use of a few others, replacing a small percentage of raw materials with salvaged and recycled stuff- all of this has had an impact, in some cases dramatic.  But we still are left with a system that enables the use of truly horrible substances, stuff that we’d never be exposed to in a just and equitable world.  Helder Camara, the Brazilian Archbishop and champion of social justice for the poor, is famous for saying, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” Perhaps we need to be asking similarly fundamental questions about how we make things, in the building industry and beyond.

Postscript: Ian Urbina’s piece in the New York Times, referenced above, clocks in at more than 5,000 words and clearly involved a huge amount of research and interviews of dozens of people.  Although he soft-pedals some of the conclusions that might be drawn from all this work, the piece is a clarion call for the kind of long-form investigative journalism that seems imperiled these days and which our society needs as much as ever.  The message I take from this is that paying for online content (as the NYT requires after a few views) is very much worth it and we should all be prepared to do so more often on the internet.

We are surrounded by recommendations.  Everywhere we turn we find grand solutions to the grand problem of climate change. Many of the visionaries around us insist on broad policy moves, like a carbon tax, which has little chance of implementation when numerous politicians choose not to accept the simple facts of climate change.  Others have focused their resources on battling signature projects like the Keystone pipeline- a battle that might be incredibly important but is largely symbolic.  So we do not lack for big pronouncements.  What we lack are nuts-and-bolts solutions that we can, each of us, deploy today, while the larger political and geopolitical battles are waged.  In this context, it was with great expectations that I picked up Two Degrees, a remarkably practical book by a stellar team at Arup including Fiona Cousins, Alisdair McGregor and Cole Roberts, and 10 additional contributors.  Fiona Cousins is on the USGBC Board of Directors and an Urban Green Board Member Emeritus.

It seems likely that Two Degrees will become a definitive resource on the role of the built environment in producing, mitigating and adapting to our changing climate.  The book is divided into three broad sections; Fundamentals, Mitigation and Adaptation. Since Sandy, everyone has been talking about resilience and adaptation but as this book was started roughly four years ago the strong emphasis on those subjects has to be counted as relatively prescient.

The Fundamentals section includes a review of the science of climate change and new findings since the most recent IPCC Report in 2007.  (And the source of the book’s title.)  It’s a strong summary, but for me, this focus on the science tends to obscure the singular content of the book- which are strategies for the built environment- and might even play into the hands of climate change deniers with the inherent assumption that the science needs to be reiterated or bolstered in some way. (And if you’re reading the book, you probably aren’t among those that need convincing about the now fantastically obvious science of climate change.)  These early chapters also outline the role of the built environment in greenhouse gas emissions, the major policy prescriptions being pursued at different scales and the basic synergy between mitigation and adaptation.  The content of this opening section is first rate, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. I couldn’t help wishing the authors had spent time further deepening the exemplary solutions featured later in the book rather than review and update science that is dealt with in so many other places.

I say this partially because the solutions portion of the book is excellent.  To date, most of  the work in this field has been approached from two distinct perspectives.  On the one hand you have the pied pipers, like Al Gore in the film An Inconvenient Truth and Ed Mazria with Architecture 2030, who have focused almost entirely on challenges at the expense of solutions. This can be pretty frustrating and has left a lot of folks on the sidelines- folks that might have engaged in the fight if they’d been handed some tools.  On the other hand, among those who have focused on overcoming those challenges. the overwhelming emphasis has been on individual technical widgets that can be plugged into any given project.  From solar panels to high efficiency equipment, there is a huge amount of marketing and salesmanship driving what I cannot help but call green Band-Aids. 

Two Degrees avoids these pitfalls by largely focusing on the design/decision making process- and then providing a few key examples of successful outcomes from that process.  How you approach lowering the impact of a building or community- the actual steps you take, the questions you ask, the tools you use to answer them, and the stakeholders you involve- has a remarkable effect on the results of any project.  This focus on the process of decision making (there is even a chapter on how humans make choices, and how irrational we are about them) is commendable and much needed.  Following the critical path thinking outlined in various ways throughout this book should improve any project, regardless of  scale.  They describe, for instance, the importance of 1) reducing loads (both internal and external), 2) developing passive strategies (like natural ventilation or thermal mass) to the extent feasible, prior to 3) developing active strategies to condition the environment and counter the much reduced loads that remain.  Only then do they recommend the introduction of renewable energy and offsets.  Such a process will allow most teams to optimize buildings as whole systems rather than discrete parts, and understand the multiplied savings that ensue when you pay for one system to solve multiple problems (or, to put it another way, to produce multiple efficiencies.)  One of the primary examples the authors offered in support of this process, the subject of an entire chapter, are the efforts over the last decade by Walmart to dramatically reduce its environmental impact.  The systems and thinking deployed in this effort are described in great detail, from passive building strategies like daylighting to active systems like a cogeneration plant.  Perhaps most notably they don’t shy away from the various challenges the project faced, including commissioning complicated systems, lower-than-expected performance of some equipment, and the prohibitive cost of deploying some of the most successful upgrades, like solar PV panels, across their entire portfolio.

The authors address both the design of buildings and communities, and quite sensibly devote a separate chapter to the particular challenges of existing buildings. (There is a nice case study of a UC San Francisco project in which simple monitoring of airflow rates produced savings in fan power, heating and cooling energy.)  Although I wish the community design chapter in the mitigation portion of the book was more granular, the authors do an admirable job of describing the different challenges faced by inland and coastal communities in adapting to climate change.  The book excels at describing solutions that address both mitigation and adaptation and they boldly address the cost and economy of climate-positive solutions (a topic most design and engineering professionals avoid.) They also outline the risks for communities in hotter, drier climates as opposed to warmer, wetter climates.  These chapters break strategies down in to items that must be done now, like increasing professional capacity and selecting the right places to build, and things like the Thames Barrier in London that must be done in certain long-term timeframes of 25, 100 and 200 years. I will be surprised if these chapters do not become required reading for everyone, including policy makers, looking at adapting to anticipated changes to regional climates.

I have a few quibbles with the book.  There are some strong visuals but some of the graphics leave the reader guessing as to the message being conveyed, and some images are not particularly educational or are given a prominence at odds with their importance.  There is a fair amount of overly technical language that will limit the book’s appeal to lay people (including chapter titles like Low Carbon and Climate Positive Communities which I had to think about for a second to gather what they were talking about.)

Today, most project teams understand that sustainability is something that they must address in some way.  But many still leap from ill-defined green goals to a list of technological widgets that have been incorporated into projects that are not otherwise impacted by green thinking.  For those looking to dislodge projects from this typical track, Two Degrees will be an incredibly valuable resource.  It goes a long way to helping those folks to, as Amory Lovins says in the introduction, “. . . create abundance by design, through practical transformation, in a spirit of applied hope.”

I attended Greenbuild for the first time in 2004 when it was hosted in Portland and it was truly a revelation.  I understood for the first time, in a really tangible way, that I was not alone in my interest in healthy, energy-conserving buildings and communities.  Having felt like a pretty lonely voice at various architecture firms over the years, this was enormously empowering.  At that time, there were also very few places you could learn about products or systems that were greener than the rest.  The floor of that showroom was where I first learned of the existence of Icestone countertops, tankless hot water heating, biodegradable textiles and a host of other amazing materials that few if any architecture firms had in their materials libraries.

Sadly- it was also the first time I would run into the forces of darkness and their heavily funded program to retain the status quo (in which we DO NOT ask questions and we continue poisoning our environment and ourselves.)  This came in the form of a booth for the Vinyl Institute.  Back in those days most manufacturers had not invested heavily in marketing for Greenbuild.  Booths were mostly scrappy affairs, high on content and low on glitz.  In the middle of the floor, however, the Vinyl Institute had erected a gleaming white rectangular space, with a staff in pristine white uniforms.

It was like a set from 2001: A Space Odyssey and was almost as creepy since it included no products or materials- just disconcertingly cheerful staff handing out white postcards with their pitch for using vinyl in buildings.  Written by what must be the most brazen PR team in history, I kept this comical brochure on my desk for years.  The debate about whether LEED should reward buildings that avoided vinyl was brewing and the brochure was full of vague language asserting that vinyl created “healthy” buildings because the surface was easy to clean of germs and bacteria- totally ignoring the up- and downstream impacts of polyvinyl chloride.  It was mealy-mouthed stuff but the best part was the asterisk at the end of a paragraph, which referenced the following caveat: “This is not meant to be a technical document.”  I was very glad to have THAT cleared up.

Sadly- almost ten years later the debate about vinyl and many other materials rages on.  The most recent evidence of this battle is industry pressure on the Government Services Administration (GSA) to include other rating systems than LEED in their performance standards.  Eco Building Pulse notes the efforts of a group called the American High Performance Buildings Coalition (AHPBC) to influence the public comment process.  Certainly this is a decision that should be reviewed.  Green Globes is a much better system than it once was, and as code standards like IGCC and ASHRAE 189.1 are developed, the GSA and others should look into whether and how to incorporate them.

But I think we are allowed to question the motives of a group like AHPBC professing deep concern for the environmental impact of our buildings that is funded by the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Adhesive and Sealant Council, the American Chemistry Council, and the aforementioned Vinyl Institute.

Among other complaints, the AHBPC is opposed to the inclusion of the European REACH standard in LEED v4.  One of their prominent spokespersons, Craig Silvertooth of the Center for Environmental Innovation in Roofing, has even said that the materials standards proposed in LEED v4 “prohibits the design and construction of energy-efficiency, safe buildings.”  Because, you know, they don’t have any of THOSE in Europe.  Many positions of the AHBPC seemed predicated on a willful misunderstanding about the role of voluntary, market leadership guidelines like LEED and minimum threshold codes for things like life safety.  They also have failed to understand that not getting credit for something isn’t the same as that thing being prohibited.  You can pack all the non-FSC woods you want in your LEED Platinum building- you’re just not going to get the FSC credit.  It must be frustrating to them that LEED is structured so reasonably.  The real problem seems to be that they just don’t want anyone, ever, pointing out that lots of their materials contain toxins and carcinogens, or that their extraction processes are deeply harmful to the regional ecology.

In related news, Lloyd Alter over at Treehugger does some digging to discover who is funding the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, another group that seems determined to undermine LEED, and finds deep connections to major players in the far-right conservative universe, including Dick Cheney.

As a proponent of LEED and as someone who disagrees with everything I have read about the positions of AHBPC and TPA, I actually find it heartening to learn that Dick Cheney may be our enemy.  From a purely objective perspective, having someone as prominent as that as a detractor is clear evidence that the green building community is an important movement making real impact.  Big enough to be noticed by the biggest players is a good thing.  It is also evidence that those of us who disagree with folks like AHBPC and TPA need to remain vigilant, engaged and determined.  We are what stands between progress and a harsh reversion to the status quo of 20 years ago.

One of the most encouraging developments in the real estate community over the last ten years has been the stark realization that advances in technology must be accompanied by advancements in the education, training and engagement of the people that will be interfacing with that technology.  You can’t just plug in a new, highly efficient widget and flip the switch.  We’ve seen this understanding inform the design community through the increasing prevalence of more integrated design processes.  We’ve seen it inform the construction industry in efforts to break down barriers between the trades and designers and operators (in which Urban Green Council’s GPRO training plays a significant role.)  And we’ve seen it, perhaps most dramatically, completely transform our sense of the importance of engaging both building operators and building occupants in the goals and aspirations for a given project.  As is often said, designing and constructing a really green building only makes sustainability possible.  It is the occupants and operators that will ultimately determine the success of your project.

So it is fascinating and heartening to see a similar understanding developing among folks responsible for urban infrastructure.  As a case in point, I direct you to an excellent piece by Eric Klinenberg in the current New Yorker, titled Adaptation: How can cities be “climate –proofed?”

Klinenberg covers the basic hard infrastructure proposals that most of us in this field are familiar with (smart grids, ecology that accommodates storm events, etc.) and also points to successful efforts in places like Holland and Singapore to prepare for future sea level rise.  But perhaps most interestingly he also surveys the importance of “social infrastructure” to successful responses to disasters and extreme weather events.  In a remarkable anecdote, he compares two relatively poor neighborhoods in Chicago during the devastating heat wave that killed more than 700 people there in 1995.  The two neighborhoods are almost identical demographically and physically but had death rates during this disaster that varied by a factor of 10.  The basic difference between the neighborhoods?  One had a robust community infrastructure of “sidewalks, stores, restaurants and community organizations that bring people into contact with friends and neighbors.”   The other had seen businesses and residents flee over the preceding 30 years and as a result lacked the social cohesion that might have helped them help each other during an extreme event like the heat wave.

More evidence that we have to engage people as forcefully as we deploy technology in the face of climate change.

Update: If you prefer listening to reading, Eric Klinenberg discusses his Adaptation article with NPR here.

For many years folks in green building and sustainable development circles have questioned the logic of developing in coastal areas and flood plains.  As the New York City region now knows firsthand, coastal areas are susceptible to harm and when development is pursued a loss of habitat (like wetlands) inevitably follows, directly or indirectly.  LEED, for instance, provides credit to projects that avoid areas like wetlands, water bodies and habitat of endangered species.  Notably, this is not a prerequisite to achieve LEED, but a voluntary credit (though making this a pre-req has been proposed in LEED v4, slated for 2013 rollout.)

Typically this issue is raised only when new developments are under consideration.  Very few people in the mainstream conversation have advocated for retrenchment from established communities, no matter how vulnerable.  Exceptions that come to mind include regions like the Mississippi River flood plain, where recurring floods have required an almost annual outlay of significant funds to reconstruct devastated communities, and post Katrina New Orleans- when many questioned whether there should be a city in that location at all (though presumably those people have never been to Mardi Gras.)  After Katrina and the BP spill in the gulf there were spikes in conversation about the impacts of human development and how we had managed to remove 34 square miles of wetland habitat from Southern Louisiana EACH YEAR for five decades- habitat that might have softened the blow of Katrina and helped clean crude oil and other toxins out of the ecosystem.   A similar discussion point has been heard after Sandy, with people pointing out that wetlands and oyster habitat used to be extensive in New York Harbor (and around Staten Island and the Rockaways) with lots of speculation about how the presence of these ecosystems might have mitigated the impact of the storm.

Credit: ARO, dLand Studio

Among the most reproduced images post-Sandy was this rendering, by the design firms Architectural Research Office and dLand Studio, of New York Harbor redesigned to withstand dramatic sea level rise, for the Rising Currents exhibit at MoMA- a prescient examination of the impacts of sea level rise on the NYC waterfront in 2010.

But for the most part, no one questions the right of cities and towns to exist much as they are- mostly folks wonder what can be done to make our communities more resilient in the face of dramatic events, whether it be storm surges or heat waves.

But we may be witnessing a turn in this conversation.

Last week it was reported that City Councilman Brad Lander of Brooklyn asked Lightstone Development to withdraw their application to build a 700-unit housing complex alongside the Gowanus canal.  For those not familiar, the Gowanus canal penetrates almost two miles into Brooklyn from New York Harbor and it suffered severe flooding during Sandy.  Exacerbating the situation, the canal is a Superfund site–laden with myriad toxins and other nasties left over from its industrial past. The Gowanus is also an active outfall for our combined sewer system (in New York City, and most northeast cities of the same age, the sewer and stormwater systems are combined and when it rains the system can be quickly overwhelmed, resulting in raw sewage being diverted to surrounding waterways.)  All of which makes the Gowanus quite a noxious body of water (sarcastically nicknamed Lavender Lake by the locals) but, property values being what they are in New York, there is significant pressure to develop around it.  And Lightstone has responded that they intend to move forward with the project.

Credit: Lightstone

New York City is a place that revolves around, and is largely defined by, real estate. Property ownership is sacrosanct, in some circles probably considered more fundamental than access to oxygen.  The Lightstone proposal is essentially “as of right”- meaning they are not requesting any variances to zoning or codes like more bulk or more square footage than allowed by the baseline codes, and therefore will not have to go through extensive environmental reviews.  Whether you agree or disagree with a new housing complex being located alongside the Gowanus, it is a significant change in the conversation for a public figure to openly request that the developer withdraw their proposal.  Will Lander be suggesting a wholesale review of the zoning around the Gowanus?  Or will the city be reviewing proposals near water bodies with a renewed scrutiny?  The former seems complicated and the latter seems a little vague, and probably unfair.  That said, Lander raises good questions about the ability of the project to withstand storm events.  There are not easy answers to these questions, and I’m certainly not suggesting solutions here.  But the conversation has started.  We should all take note.

There is no doubt that we need to transform our entire consumer process.  The question is: How?  Most of the focus is on simple reductions in the amount of consumption, but folks like Michael Braungart of Cradle to Cradle fame are imagining a different path.

There are many ways to look at this issue but the first step is understanding the scale of problem we are dealing with.  The environmental impact of our consumption is staggering, but rather than bury you in the raw data on our depletion of global resources and our poisoning of the planetary ecosystem, I will simply point to some of Chris Jordan’s photographs- among the most effective means of communicating the terrifying scale of our impact that I have seen anywhere.   I’ve posted these before on this blog, and if you have visited the offices of Urban Green you’ll see some of these hanging on the walls.

The image above looks like blurry grey pixels but is actually a composite image of 426,000  cell phones- the number that are “retired” every single day in the US alone.

Again- the above looks like colored pixels but is actually a composite of 38,000  shipping containers- the number that move through U.S. ports every 12 hours.

It’s clear, I think, just from looking at these images that something has to give.  The planet simply can’t produce enough precious metals, fossil fuels, wood pulp and other raw materials to sustain this wild orgy of consumption.  If the photographs aren’t compelling I recommend you spend a few minutes with Annie Leonard’s short movie, The Story of Stuff.

So what do we do?  Those of us that care about this subject spend most of our time getting people to use less- a simple message of conservation.  It’s a natural response to the problem of over-consumption- but maybe there’s another way to frame the problem.  As William McDonough (co-author of  Cradle to Cradle) has said, being “more efficient” with resources is like a driver whose destination is Mexico finding that he is heading north toward Canada and responding by driving slower.  You haven’t really corrected the fundamental problem.  You need to turn the car around, 180 degrees.

In terms of our material cycle this would mean rethinking what we mean by “resources” instead of simply displacing a small percentage of raw materials with down-cycled product waste.  (The classic example here is turning copy paper into newsprint and newsprint into cardboard and . . . . cardboard into landfill waste.  You’ve spared using raw wood pulp twice, which is great, but that is all.)  In nature, these questions have been answered.  Millions of years of evolution has produced almost perfectly balanced ecosystems in which all waste is essentially food for the rest of the system.  A tree falls in the forest.  Whether anyone hears it or not, it is now food.  The tree is not sent to a landfill.  It is not shredded into 10,000 tiny pieces and distributed around the globe so that it is unrecoverable as a nutrient.

Along these lines, Michael Braungart has an article on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website encouraging us to treat CO2 emissions, that bogeyman of global warming, as a valuable resource.  Now, the message from Braungart isn’t that we shouldn’t be trying to curtail our CO2 emissions- but that in the absence of federal and global leadership in this arena there is no reason we shouldn’t be finding ways to encourage industry to use those emissions.  And there are uses for CO2.  Examples Braungart provides include industrial greenhouse agriculture that introduces huge quantities of CO2 as a nutrient for plants, and similar applications of CO2 to support the growth of algae for biofuels.  As our political system remains ineffective in the face of such a complicated set of problems, reorienting our thinking along the lines promoted by McDonough and Braungart might be just what is required.

Panelist David Ropeik at Cooling on Climate Change

Urban Green pulled together a fascinating conference last week on the current science of climate change, exploring how it is impacting the building industry and why polls reveal public skepticism on the subject.  The format included two excellent panels and a short keynote by the distinguished scientist and activist, Dr. James Hansen.  There was a lot of intellectual firepower on display, including fascinating data on perceptions of climate change from Lisa Fernandez at Yale, and deep discussions of the role of the building industry.  David Ropeik, a risk perception consultant and the author, most recently, of How Risky Is It Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts, offered the most unexpected perspectives of any speaker and clearly challenged our assumptions about how to effectively message on climate change.

Ropeik walked the audience through the current neurological research on risk perception, all of which supports the sense many of us have had over the years- that something as abstract and slow moving as climate change does not appear to motivate most of us to change our behavior.  Ropeik points out that very few of the tools we use to assess risk are cognitive- most of them are subconscious.  Our brains are wired to focus on things that will impact us directly, right now or in the very near future.  Threats that are catastrophic are deeply important, but chronic issues barely register on our internal threat scale.  Most of us in the environmental community act as if the simple communication of additional knowledge will cause people to change their minds- the more facts people know about climate change the more they will be motivated to change behavior.  But a deep body of research (and probably if we are honest with ourselves and our own experiences) tells us this simply is not the case.  People are not generally motivated to significantly alter their behavior because of threats to other species, or threats to our own that are likely to occur years from now.  Mr. Ropeik’s distillation of this context colored all the other discussions at the event and made for lively discussion.  In this context, Mr. Hansens’ slides communicating the impact of climate change through bar graphs and statistical plots seemed, though intellectually rigorous and important research, seemed somehow not up to the task at hand.  Based on Mr. Ropeik’s presentation I came away with the overwhelming sense that we need to find new ways of communicating that humanizes climate change and describes how it will impact each of us directly.

Which is not to minimize the critical importance of Hansen’s presentation.  For those of us familiar with his work and the work of his colleagues on the IPCC it was exciting (though sobering) to see the latest research on climate change.  Hansen pointed out that we have increased the amount of atmospheric CO2 from 280ppm to 390ppm, with every indication that average global temperature will increase by 2 degrees within a century.  The last time this happened, sea levels were 15 meters higher than today.  Already, significant changes are moving through the system.  The extent of arctic sea ice at the end of the melt season, as reported elsewhere, is reduced by half.  And the sea ice is significantly thinner, so the actual mass has been reduced by three-fourths.  This is a monumental shift that augurs more changes to come.  In addition, the % of land mass that experiences extreme weather events annually (droughts, flooding, fire) has increased 10 times since about 1920.  Dr. Hansen’s primary concern today are impacts that might be irreversible- like losing the ice sheet altogether, or a melt off of the Greenland ice sheet, or climate zones that move so fast that it triggers mass extinctions and failing ecosystems.  These are sobering but very real possibilities in our near future.

To produce a reduction in greenhouse gases Dr. Hansen proposes a “fee and dividend” policy that would ramp up a tax on carbon emissions and distribute the collected money equally among the population.  The funds would not go to the government and if current subsidies were removed it would level the technological playing field.  With our political establishment locked in a sweaty wrestling hold that allows for considerable activity but no resolution, it is highly unlikely that Hansen’s proposal will be enacted, or even discussed seriously.  But considering such a proposal allows us, at a minimum, to contemplate the high degree to which our current system is reliant on petroleum, and the significant degree to which the “market” is currently weighted in favor of the fossil fuel industry- which dominates energy subsidies despite being wildly profitable and flexes its lobbying muscle to influence almost every aspect of federal and state energy policy.  As Dr. Hansen stated, “the government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers.”  His fee and dividend proposal would remove the embedded advantage of the wealthiest industries and if ramped appropriately would spur innovation. Activism and individual action, Dr. Hansen points out, are wonderful but without a price signal that makes carbon emissions pay something like their share of externalized costs there will be little movement on the issue.  In fact, he seemed almost concerned that making buildings and other users of energy more efficient simply reduces demand and drives the price of oil down, incentivizing others to burn it.

Some years ago, Gore Vidal recommended that the world would be considerably improved if we simply swapped the cost of a university education with the cost of an intercontinental airline ticket- thereby making education available to all and significantly reducing the swarms of tourists senselessly marauding the globe.   Whatever the merits of this improbable idea, Dr. Hansen’s “fee and dividend” proposal might go a long way to achieving Vidal’s dream.  In a world where there is no tax on aviation fuel- the “market” will have to change significantly for us to re-assess how we do things. Without a bold move like carbon tax it is difficult to feel confident about our prospects for combating climate change.  As we wait (hopefully not in vain) for such a solution to gain traction, it is heartening to consider how much we now know about how our brains function. Amory Lovins likes to say, “The good news about climate change is that it is cheaper to fix than it is to ignore.”  The bad news might be that we are not well equipped to deal with it.  Despite this, I found myself invigorated as I left the conference.  We are truly beginning to understand how, at a primal, subconscious level, we respond to long range threats. This knowledge suggests a way of crafting our messages that might actually compel a majority of us to take the threat of climate change seriously.  Nothing could be more important, though I can’t expect my saying that to change your mind.

In his quirky but groundbreaking book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Buckminster Fuller pointed out that if you are aboard a sinking ship, even a floating piano top can look extremely promising.  But Fuller also notes that this doesn’t mean a piano top is the ideal design for a flotation device.

To continue the metaphor, in the absence of anything like a global plan to combat the planetary climate crisis, we seem to be searching the horizon for piano tops, forcing ourselves into a series of more and more uncomfortable decisions regarding energy, resources and the ecology that supports us.  In almost every sphere of the environmental movement, you see strategies once considered beyond the pale under serious consideration–only because the options grow worse and worse each day.  Should we allow hydro-fracturing for shale gas if it keeps us from using the even more damaging Canadian tar sands?  If we could eliminate mountaintop removal to extract coal by ramping up our nuclear power output shouldn’t we consider doing that?  Even if tomorrow there were some miraculous global compact to transition to 100% renewable energy, these questions would need to be resolved to determine how we bridge to that desired outcome.

A recent addition to this growing list of uncomfortable strategies under consideration is geoengineering: the science of intentionally altering the earth’s atmosphere to curb the rise in average global temperature.  As we continue to burn fossil fuels at a breakneck pace and as negative feedback loops in the global system (like the growing seasonal reductions in the polar ice cap or the release of methane from melting permafrost grow worse much more quickly than expected, a growing chorus advocates for a dramatic response: injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere that will reflect significant amounts of the sun’s heat, thereby slowing the rise in global temperature.  What might once have sounded liked science fiction is being studied and discussed by reasonable, intelligent people with no particular ax to grind.

A few weeks back Michael Specter at the New Yorker did a wonderful job of summing up the recent scientific activity in the field, and there have been other discussions of the subject at Scientific American and Wired.  Yale 360 surveyed the pros and cons here.

The basic idea is to mimic a major volcanic eruption, without the big bang and the earthquakes.  When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, huge quantities of sulfur dioxide were released into the atmosphere and a period of global cooling followed.  Scientists surmise that a continued infusion of sulfates would result in long-term cooling of global average temperature.  Tinkering with the earth’s atmosphere is not for the faint of heart.  Somehow filling the atmosphere with sulfates would need to happen every year, in perpetuity, or the cooling effects would cease.  Perhaps more importantly, many are concerned that even discussing the concept of geoengineering will give those that are already complacent about climate change an excuse to ignore the subject entirely under the assumption that a simple technical fix will be found.  Others have pointed out that simply reflecting the sun’s heat while continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere will do nothing to curb acidification of our oceans, one of the most dreadful and largely ignored impacts of the current climate crisis.

Ultimately, what should give us pause about geoengineering are the things we don’t know.  The atmosphere is too complex a system to think that we can start mucking with it and have anything like a comprehensive sense of the repercussions.  For instance, many fear that geoengineering has the potential to seriously disrupt the Indian monsoon.  The list of things we don’t know about how the atmosphere interacts with our planetary ecology is almost unfathomably long.  I was reminded of this when someone recently described to me the relatively recent discovery of ballooning spiders, which cast their gossamer into the air like a sail and are carried off by the wind to new domains.  These spiders have been found upwards of 16,000 feet above sea level and travel many hundreds of miles. Will geoengineering impact this species?  I doubt anyone really knows.  And how many others are there like them?  Or consider the emerging understanding about how microbes in our stratosphere impact rainfall, disease and climate?  How will geoengineering affect this almost unknown ecology?

Humans have a tendency to assume that what we know is all there is to know, or close to it. Ultimately, the thing that should make us wary of geoengineering is the same thing that should lead us to slow our emission of greenhouse gases, because we don’t really know how it will impact our otherwise stable global climate.

I wish LEED had more nuanced critics.

As regular as winter, articles crop up purporting to outline the problems with LEED.  Every time I dive in eagerly and almost every time I come away disappointed.  Maybe this is inevitable.  LEED is technocratic, both in terms of content and process, and the building industry moves at its own pace.  Maybe we can’t expect our frothy media to deliver on this subject.

The latest instance along these lines is an article for Urban Land, provocatively titled LEED Backlash, that contains three paragraphs of wheat surrounded by a cloud of somewhat disorienting chaff.  First, the wheat.

The piece notes that the most recent Department of Defense (DoD) reauthorization bill included a provision that restricts DoD projects from pursuing Gold or Platinum certification without a waiver from the Secretary of Defense and requires the DoD to complete a cost benefit analysis of their green building standards (which, despite the bill, still require LEED Silver certification.)  It’s a fascinating development but the tenor of the LEED Backlash article seems misplaced.  First, they report that “the U.S. Congress passed and President Obama signed a bill in December that severely restricts the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) from spending extra money on” LEED.  This implies that government has arrayed itself against LEED, when in fact a small minority have attached a restrictive provision to a massive defense funding bill.  As the article notes later, “It appears that Congress’s action primarily stemmed from a dispute over the use of wood in green construction.”

It goes on to state, “A coalition of green building advocates, timber interests, and dozens of congressional members have objected to what they believe is an exclusion of domestic sources of wood in the LEED point system.”  This is fascinating, but it doesn’t mean there is a generalized backlash against LEED.  It means that much of the timber industry is still frustrated that FSC remains the baseline within LEED to receive credit for the use of sustainably harvested wood.  The article, for instance, could just as easily have been titled “Timber Lobby Engineers Destructive Rider to Defense Authorization Bill.”   This debate has been raging for years and is far from resolved.  More specifics on the background would have been illuminating.  Who exactly is in the “coalition” noted by the author?  Which member of Congress added the provision to the bill?  I’d be fascinated to know more about this but instead the author surrounds this nugget of actual news with a host of vague quotes about LEED’s place in the market, pro and con, and a frustratingly undeveloped premise that governments are “pursuing green building standards other than LEED.”

Which brings us to the chaff.  The article suggests that California’s CalGreen building code is somehow a rebuff of LEED.  But LEED is not a code.  It’s not written as a code and the USGBC would be first to tell you that it should not be implemented as one.  In almost every instance of LEED being “mandated” by a public jurisdiction you’ll find that the fine print is much looser.  Most require that projects meet LEED standards, but not actually certify.  And most include broad provisions for the folks that hold the purse strings to opt out if LEED isn’t suitable for the project.  This is prudently cautious, but also a recognition that LEED should not be treated as something that can be legislated.  The advent of CalGreen and other green codes can be seen as a direct result of LEED’s success in the market- not a repudiation of it.  The article also treats the existence of Green Globes as news and states rather vaguely that it is “gaining momentum.”  I’d love to know how Green Globes is faring in the market.  If states or cities are using it as a guide I want to know about it.  Same goes for the International Green Construction Code, developed by the International Code Council and soon to be, as the article notes, adopted by Maryland.  In the same sentence the article notes the presence of the Living Building Challenge, so progressive it is mind-boggling, and a new certification for windows and doors by the AMAA, a comically out of place reference.  As a result, the article hints at some fascinating developments in the industry but doesn’t pursue them in any kind of depth.

There are certainly big questions about the future of LEED; for one, LEED certified buildings don’t always perform as one might expect.  Why, specifically, does this happen?  While LEED is looking at the horizon the floor is being raised by increasingly stringent energy codes.  Will LEED remain relevant in this context?  These are important but complicated questions and none of them are served by articles that treat them without nuance.

Another piece in the same publication, The Greening of the Real Estate Industry, looks at the disconnect between right-wing policy and the work of the private sector.  It’s well worth a read and be sure to scroll down to the comments where you will be treated to entries from Roger Platt of the USGBC on the obstruction tactics of the timber lobby and a reply from Kathleen Sims of the Plum Creek Timber Company.

LEED has many rough edges.   It does some things well and others not so well.  Understanding these flaws and their impact on the future of our industry is important work.  Let’s make sure we treat those issues with the care and specificity they deserve.

I was pretty impressed with the sustainable design elements in the recently unveiled plans for the new Cornell technology campus on Roosevelt Island. SOM has proposed systems like under-floor air distribution, radiant heating panels, operable windows and a roofscape of PV panels.  There are rainwater cisterns, a cogen plant and a geothermal system. Most striking, though, is the site planning of the structures- which are laid out almost entirely in relation to the sun. As such, the orientation and massing of many of the buildings naturally provide access to useful north light, easily deal with the high southern sun, and present limited exposure to the harsh, low angled rays of sunrise and sunset. Though wrapped in the cool glass of fashionable contemporary design, the SOM proposal is a model of solar architecture- minus earth berms and banana tree greenhouses.

Interestingly, there is a remarkably illuminating counter-example right across the water from the Cornell site–the United Nations building. The UN project is designed not to ignore the sun- but to boldly and aggressively court the most debilitating aspects of it. The UN building shows its massive glass façades to the east and west horizons, and a narrow, completely solid stone façade to the south and north. If rotated 90 degrees in plan and if some simple exterior shades and interior light shelves were provided the project would be a model of contextual sensitivity. Instead, it is a nightmare. Low-angled sun slams into the east façade in the morning and the west façade in the afternoon- requiring the deployment of interior blinds, blinds that are rarely raised when the sun isn’t present, effectively eliminating the one positive aspect of this design, the view. In addition to the glare problems, the morning and afternoon sun heats up the respective facades creating a situation where the building is cooling one side of the building while it heats the other, and then vice versa, throughout the entire day. It’s a grim situation that could easily have been avoided by rotating the plan 90 degrees.

So it’s inspiring to see SOM, the heirs to the high modernism practiced at the UN, proposing a design so sensitive to its site, a design that won’t be fighting against the sun but working with it, in perpetuity.