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.

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.

The media coverage of the earthquake that devastated Haiti and the city of Port au Prince on January 12, 2010 stopped long ago, creating a silence that allows many of us to remove the event from the list of immediately pressing concerns.

For a moment, let us think back to 2010 when initial reports stated that the total cost of the earthquake was between $8 billion and $14 billion and the death toll was approximately 316,000.   Later, in June 2011, the International Organization for Migration reported that an estimated 634,000 people were still living in displacement camps (New York Times).  Now, two and a half years after the natural disaster, hundreds of thousands are still living without safe housing and much of the infrastructure in Port au Price remains in disrepair.  Tent camps and damaged buildings provide unstable housing for those remaining in the city, while others have moved to the countryside to build homes with tarps and sheet metal. The crisis is far from over, and the need to build more permanent housing and infrastructure in Haiti still persists.

During times like these, it seems that our role as architects, engineers, developers, and builders is obvious.  The concepts of social entrepreneurship, social architecture, or social engineering have been around for a long time, all of which revolve around the goal of mitigating a social problem through conscious organization, planning, or design.  Shortly after news of Haiti’s earthquake reached this country, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) committed to helping the people of Haiti rebuild and recover from the disaster.  The current USGBC-led initiative, Project Haiti, is an effort to build a LEED-certified orphanage in Port au Prince.  Once complete, the Orphanage and Children’s Center will provide shelter and safety, immediate care, and a hopeful future for children.

Upon hearing about USGBC’s effort to raise money for this noteworthy project, the Urban Green Council Emerging Professionals came on board to support the cause.  At a fundraiser on August 15, 2012, the group raised over $1,700 to be donated to USGBC and used exclusively for expenses related to the design and construction of Haiti Orphanage and Children’s Center.  The evening was a cultural celebration with a brief presentation of the project and a performance by local Haitian drumming group, La Troupe Makandal.  A generous donation of raffle prizes from the Four Seasons Restaurant, TJ Allan, Rachel Goldfarb, Volta, Alexandra Weiss Designs, and Urban Green Council contributed to the funds raised.  See photos from the event here.

This project has been designed as a model for high-performance green building practices that can be tailored to any culture.  As sustainable builders, we cannot just rebuild buildings and infrastructure; we must “rebuild them better”. Project Haiti aims to inspire and teach how construction can both minimize impacts on the environment and, through maximizing energy and water conservation, be financially sustainable.  Sponsored by USGBC with partnership from the Foundation L’enfant Jesus and pro-bono design by HOK, Project Haiti has been recognized as a Commitment Maker by the Clinton Global Initiative.

The Urban Green Council Emerging Professionals are a dedicated group of young professionals who work to create a network of leaders in the field of sustainability.  Led by a core group of volunteer leaders, they develop opportunities for involvement through Urban Green Council to further generate momentum for the green building industry.

Want to learn more about how the green building industry is practicing “social design”?  Urban Green Council’s conference Cooling on Climate Change: Designing the Message on September 18, will examine how the green building industry should be responding to climate change by asking questions such as: How can the green building movement better communicate the threats of climate change?  What role do designers, developers, operators, and other real estate professionals have in climate change activism?  What role does marketing play regarding climate change in the green building industry?  How are marketing strategies adjusted for clients who are uninterested in mitigating climate change?

You might have heard wild-eyed sounding rumors in the past about the European Union legislating net zero buildings. Those weren’t rumors.

A few years ago, the EU parliament required all new buildings to be “nearly net zero” (being defined by each state) starting in 2019. Existing ones that undergo major renovations will have to hit energy performance targets set by the member states. In the UK, new homes need to hit that target even sooner – they need to be carbon neutral by 2016.

Now California (any surprise?) has established a net zero beachhead in North America. Under an executive order issued by Governor Brown on April 25^th, by 2020 half of new State buildings and major renovations will be net zero and all by 2025.

If you’re wondering how they are going to design these buildings, one could look to the net zero projects on the drawing boards in New York City: P.S. 62 on Staten Island (starting this year), Solar 2, and Cornell’s Roosevelt Island campus. And if they can do it, perhaps it’s time that we follow California and the EU’s lead?

That would be a bad idea. The first part of net zero – extraordinary load reduction – is something that all new buildings could and should achieve. We’re seeing it with these projects and we’re seeing it with Passive House. But the second part – generating solar electricity onsite – just isn’t possible for many buildings in New York. It’s no coincidence that all three New York net zero projects have large roof to square footage ratios, and are also in open areas of the city without neighboring buildings to shade their roofs.  A high-rise just doesn’t have enough roof area for PVs to generate its own energy and the only way they could meet a net zero mandate would be to purchase expensive renewable energy credits. According to our research director, Richard Leigh, “for almost any commercial or residential use, even with efficient lighting and appliances, the solar resource to get above three stories and meet net loads with on-site collectors just isn’t there, even out in the open countryside.”

So let’s build super energy-efficient buildings and install whatever onsite renewables we can. But as we look towards the next generation of green buildings, let’s remember that while net zero can be done for low-rises it doesn’t work for high-rises.

Bloomberg’s homepage is pretty much what you would expect from the world’s leading financial information firm: the market snapshot…a crawl of all the major indices, and of course the Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ at a glance.  Below the logo, the navigation bar shows all the things relevant to the world of finance: News, Markets, Personal Finance, Sustainability…

Holy cow! “Sustainability”!? Last week, Bloomberg quietly offered up prime online real estate for this critical category. So far, it’s proving to be a fantastic source of national and international environmental news (I used it last week to track the depressing climate treaty discussions). But that’s the smaller point.

The big news here is the message Bloomberg is telling the finance industry: today’s businesses need to understand and track sustainability. One interesting question—is Bloomberg responding to a need voiced by the industry, or are they trying to make a market for it? Hopefully it’s a little of both.

One of the great benefits of climate change is the opening of the Arctic, making available vast new supplies of fossil fuel, most recently highlighted by a substantial mutual exploitation agreement between Russia and Exxon.

Seriously, of course this is awful.  It won’t even lower the cost of fossil fuels significantly because it will be such a small slice of global oil production, and even that slice will take years to serve.   More importantly, when (not if) some pipe cracks open under the ice in the middle of the four-month night, they (whether Exxon, Rosneft, Shell, BP, or whoever) will be totally helpless. Well, I mean the crews on the rig will be helpless. The lads and lassies back at corporate HQ will be doing the usual bang-up job of manufacturing reasons why no one could possibly have seen this coming.

The U.S. should at least try to stop this.  Unfortunately, we don’t have much influence over either Russia or Exxon, and one major reason is that we have no serious national program for reducing fossil fuel use ourselves. We really can’t castigate Putin for their arctic adventures when we recently approved Shell poking a few 4,000-foot holes into the seabed off Alaska’s north slope), and all signs point to our imminent (and tragic) approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to bring very heavy oil from Canadian tar sands to Houston refineries.

If you haven’t noticed (which would be reasonable, considering the scant attention it’s paid in the mainstream media), the Keystone XL pipeline is the reason our foremost climate scientist James Hansen, agitator Bill McKibben, and activist celebrities like Darryl Hannah have been getting arrested in front of the White House. The White House?  Aren’t the good guys in charge? Why aren’t these demonstrators over at the House of Representatives, protesting climate change deniers?  Well, because we seem to have moved from an administration that denied climate change and let oil companies do whatever they wanted to an administration that supports climate science and lets oil companies do whatever they want.

There are two likely explanations for the administration’s lack of resistance to these potentially catastrophic developments.  First, the price of gasoline is heading toward $4/gallon, and anyone opposed to drilling and pipelines is attacked on that basis (no matter that neither arctic drilling nor the tar sands will have any real impact on gas prices.)

Second, in the middle of a deep recession and with staggeringly high unemployment across the country, politicians may have finally realized that voters want them to do something about jobs. Unfortunately, Keystone XL has a well-oiled publicity machine bragging about the 20,000 jobs they say they will “create.”

This analysis is wrong. Simple arithmetic shows that energy efficiency programs aimed at reducing our need for fossil fuels will create more jobs than any pipeline, since the money that will go to Canada to pay for the oil would instead stay within the country and go to workers in weatherization programs, wind turbine factories, or electric car development efforts. This arithmetic was developed by Democratic Party policy wonks over decades, but their understanding seems to no longer be operative.

If this foolishness continues, arctic seals will soon find it much easier to see the oil-soaked polar bears trying to sneak up on them.  On all other fronts, these projects are bad news in both the short and long term.  Oil spills will darken the Arctic, or even Montana, and the ongoing increases in greenhouse gas emissions will ensure that the ice and the food chains we all (seals, polar bears and humans) rely on for our survival will soon be irrevocably altered or gone.

Photo credits: [Keystone Pipeline] U.S. Dept. of State |  [Tar Sands Protesters] Ben Powless / tarsandsaction.org

Like me, you’ve probably heard the sentiment that however much progress we’ve made on sustainability we are still way behind Europe; much of what we consider advanced is just standard practice over there.

For example, there’s an EU-wide mandate for new buildings to be net zero by 2021. The UK has mandated an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Many of Europe’s building codes are far stricter than our own…and so on.

Virtually all one hears on this subject is anecdotal, or so general that it’s not useful.  Here at Urban Green Council we’ve been asking ourselves for some time how much what we “know” about Europe’s building industry is accurate and what lessons there are for own industry.  Are the progressive measures similar across Europe?  Do they have programs on par with the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan? How do our best buildings (both new and existing) compare with those in Europe? What about the rest of the world, like Canada and Asia? And how much of the differences between these regions are driven by market characteristics like energy prices?

Our September conference, Global Lessons in Green Building: How NYC Stacks Up, will address these questions through two high profile panels.  One will focus on policy and codes, the other on market and finance forces.  We’ve developed the conference hand-in-hand with our partner, ULI New York, and are looking forward to the closing remarks from Clay Nesler of Johnson Controls. It’s our hope that learning about green building in the rest of the world will give us a better understanding of initiatives at home and expand our sense of what’s possible.

Please join us September 19^th.  A cocktail reception will follow the proceedings.

RELATED READING:
Greening the Concrete Jungle (The Economist 9.3.11): America’s cities are confronting climate change. They are also saving money.
Germany Sets Renewable Records (Grist.org 8.31.11): In the first half of 2011, renewables accounted for fully 20.8% of power production.
In Seattle, Work Starts on “Greenest” Office Building (L.A. Times 8.29.11): 1st big office building designed to carry its own environmental weight being built in Seattle, 1 of 12 “living buildings.”
Is This the World’s Greenest Neighborhood? (NRDC: Switchboard 8.24.11): Dockside Green in Victoria, BC was the first applicant for LEED for Neighborhood Development.
Western Grid 2050 (NRDC Switchboard 8.24.11): Provides a Clean Energy Vision & Roadmap for the West’s Economy and Environment

Weather is what’s happening in the air around us, and climate is how it is, long term, where we are. At least, that’s what we used to mean, back when a location came with a climate: temperate, tropical, sunny, or moist.  Seasonal variations were part of the idea of climate – summer, winter, monsoon, mistral – but there was little room for other change within the concept.  On the other hand, the weather changes constantly, giving us a way to make conversation in elevators with total strangers or romantic rivals.

At the end of the nineteenth century,  Arhennius pointed out that man-made variations in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could alter the earth’s temperature, and the science of climate change was born.  A fringe activity until around 1990, it now attracts most of the attention of atmospheric scientists, since it is well established that if we continue our wasteful ways we will irretrievably alter the earth’s climate, and not in a good way.

But all this talk of climate change is about long term statistical quantities, like average temperature, area of minimum arctic sea ice, fraction of coral reefs bleached past recovery, or the range of altitudes over which the edelweiss can flower.  Ask a climate scientist about the severity of the rainstorm last Sunday night and she will suggest that you talk to a weather analyst, since no individual weather event can be directly tied to the slow process of climate change.

Well, for any individual event, that’s probably true.  But have you been following the news lately?  Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, has, and in an astonishing op-ed piece published in the Washington Post he implicitly challenges climate scientists to deal not with individual weather events, but with the extraordinary series of floods, tornadoes, and everything but a rain of frogs that have been devastating one locality after another.  I won’t tell you his conclusion because everyone should read the entire piece for themselves. Less time than you’ve already put in, guaranteed!

Photo credit: NASA

With the first annual deadline for New York City’s new benchmarking law rapidly approaching, I’ve been wondering how our efforts compare with similar efforts around the US and Europe.  How does Germany, so far ahead of the U.S. in virtually every green building category, track and rate the energy efficiency of their buildings?  Fortunately, the folks at the Institute for Market Transformation and the Natural Resources Defense Council have teamed up to create a robust website dedicated to collecting information on energy efficiency rating efforts worldwide: BuildingRating.org.

The website currently has two fundamental offerings, a “Policy Map” that allows you to peruse very basic information about rating efforts country by country through a world map, shown below, and a “Document Library” which is a collection of research papers and studies about energy efficiency rating, sorted by country.

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Credit: Mark McCormick and Paul Scruton, The Guardian

The Guardian has produced the beautiful graphic you see here showing CO2 emissions by country.  According to the Guardian the big story here is that China now produces more CO2 than the US and Canada combined, and that India is now #3 on this list.  But don’t be despondent, we still crush China in the category that matters, CO2 emissions per capita.  As you can see in the graphic below, each American proudly pumps 18 tons (or tonnes, to the Guardian) of CO2 into our precious atmosphere every year.  China can only manage a measly 6 tons per year per person and India only a pathetic 3+.  Note: the graphic above uses 2009 data, and the below is based on 2007 data.

Credit: Stanford Kay Studio.com