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This country has a global carbon debt in its consumption footprint that comes to about 150% of biocapacity, which clearly requires a rapid reduction in carbon emissions that is critical to achieving the balance in global ecology. The goal of achieving this Net Zero by 2030 is within reach, according to Architecture 2030. This is due to the response by the building industry of coalescing around the target of integrating natural processes into the structures and projects themselves, and abandoning fossil fuels.
The 2030 Challenge, shown here as a graph,was established in response to the climate change crisis by architect Edward Mazria in 2002. It was a recognition that the industry had no other option but to transform itself from a consumption model to a regenerative model, given the realities of climate change. This effort, among many models for reducing emissions and generation of local power sources, has been the underlying motivating force for the creation of the new model energy codes. It's anticipated the development of these codes because of the public policy established at the Federal level in October of 2009,when a commitment to utilize green technologies and alternative energy was made by President Barack Obama who issued the Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy and Economic Performance Executive Order, setting sustainable goals for federal agencies, and also announced a $3.4 billion investment in a smart energy grid.
As a result, the military - including the Army - has established a net zero goal by 2030. Many cities and local regional planning entities have also moved ahead with their own planning models to achieve the reduction of their carbon footprint at the urban scale. Chicago's Decarbonization Plan is one of them. San Francisco has also made an early start in the regional planning game with its approach to "the Precautionary Principle" as a legitimate basis for making environmental decisions.
While the building industry, the government and many environmental groups are moving as quickly as they are able towards the Net Zero goal, we see at the global climate summits that even this goal will not be enough. Our country, because of its massive emissions over the last century, will owe the world's people a tremendous level of support in the reduction of global consumption and providing the necessary carbon sink through exerting its global influence. That's when our bill comes due.
Dealing with the many aspects of climate change and at the same time drastically reducing carbon emissions into the biosphere may seem absolutely daunting. It has certainly eclipsed the ability of the global community to agree on carbon reduction strategies, particularly the Contraction and Convergence model that is necessarily an appropriate course.
Yet, the momentum is building to not only use technology to produce clean energy, but also a shift in the way that human habitation systems are built as well as how they are integrated into coherent systems. This kind of intelligence creates a synergy (greater than the sum of its parts) from interlinked hubs. There are many kinds of linked systems - nature is the biggest one - but in our built habitat there are many of them, such as: watershed, dams and pumps of the water companies; regional and local transportation systems; and in particular, distributed power systems known as "smart grid" infrastructure. An excellent example of this kind of infrastructure development is found in Denmark.
The flexibility of this kind of an approach allows the system to shift and respond to environmental conditions as well as document it over time. This reduces the demand, consumption and waste that are found in static transported utilites, in much the same way that computer systems have increased in power and miniaturized in accordance with Moore's Law. This kind of coherence, thus intelligence, is key to implementing the many strategies that are available right now to reduce our human demand on global resources. While many things can be undertaken immediately to address local climate issues, it's necessary to integrate these strategies into a coherent whole. The potential climate agreement by the global community will necessarily impact a tremendous number of human systems, as I've outlined here.
But it's the only way forward for the common survival of our living systems.
It's the month of reckoning in the USA: taxes, filings and that great exchange between citizens and their local financial and accounting professionals. The only sure thing in life, death and taxes. And yet another element of coming to account has been laid on the table: a unified building code for sustainable practices in the USA and its properties and projects abroad, the 2012 International Green Construction Code. This is a mandatory model code which will be adopted throughout the country that supersedes a myriad collection of voluntary and local "green" standards, including the LEED standard. This overlay code came about because of the need for a common standard that complies with the requirements in the US and abroad for a means of requiring energy and water conservation and carbon reduction. As the American Institute of Architects puts it, this is a game-changer for the USA and the global community.
The International Code Council is an industry organization that writes and establishes the model codes (IBC) adopted in 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, NYC, Guam, and the Northern Marianas Islands. It has just issued the new IgCC for adoption by all jurisdictions. It's the response by the building industry to create a common groundwork that attempts to reduce the impact of the built environment on ecosystems by requiring green strategies to be implemented throughout the country.
The IgCC is the first model code that includes sustainability measures for the entire construction project and its site from design through construction, certificate of occupancy and beyond. The new code is expected to make buildings more efficient, reduce waste, and have a positive impact on health, safety and community welfare. The IgCC creates a regulatory framework for new and existing buildings, establishing minimum green requirements for buildings and complementing voluntary rating systems which may extend beyond the customizable baseline of the IgCC. The code acts as an overlay to the existing set of International Codes, including provisions of the International Energy Conservation Code and ICC-700, the National Green Building Standard, and incorporates ASHRAE Standard 189.1 as an alternate path to compliance. Adoption of this code is already going forward in jurisdictions that want to benchmark the attributes of sustainable construction, rather than trying to cope with many kinds of certifications, products and processes.
The new code also tackles water reduction and grey water, ventilation system design, and most importantly, it tracks measures which improve a building’s thermal envelope. Some LEED buildings have missed their energy goals, and a big reason is because neither LEED nor code looked closely at wall assemblies, windows, and doors. HVAC equipment efficiency is also boosted, which also now includes a section on evaporative coolers.
This model code is the new consensus measure of sustainability throughout the USA, and is another step forward in the recognition that the entire industry must be responsible in the development of the built environment and focus on preservation of natural resources and processes, as opposed to the old dinosaur model of burning up our resources beyond the planet's ability to support human activities.
What are drylands? One of several kinds of ecosystems as defined by the United Nations University program, as is outlined here on its site:
Many of these dryland areas face severe land degradation, in which marginal areas are turned into wastelands and natural ecosystems are altered through destruction of surface vegetation, poor management of water resources, inappropriate land use practices, overuse of fertilizers and biocides, and disposal of domestic and industrial wastes. This, in the face of climate change, is endangering most of the land and its resources for ourselved and for future generations.This requires a comprehensive and strategic approach to regeneration of natural processes in order to preserve the earth that provides for us.
Many strategies have been developed that can apply to this problem. There are various ways of recycling water, conserving it, recharging aquifers, clearing out the toxic wastes and fertilizers that are polluting our water supplies. An open ideas design competition has been staged for a drylands approach to local ecosystems that's a call for solutions in an area located in California. The International Drylands Design Competition, was hosted by the California Architectural Foundation, AIA California Council, and Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University. It's officially this years' William Turnbull Competition in honor of his ideas for sustaining and improving the California landscape.
One of the best examples of this kind of overall planning in the competition received a Merit Award: Geeti Silwal, AICP, San Francisco Resource Infinity Loop: Watershed Urbanism in San Francisco, called "The Resource Infinity Loop" that contains a scalability toolkit for implementing its strategies. (pdf download here)
The A+D Museum, established and supported by the architecture and building industry in Los Angeles, is exhibiting the competition this month:
DRYLANDS DESIGN features work by architects, landscape architects, engineers, and urban designers responding to the challenges of water scarcity in the face of climate change. With a focus on the US West, the exhibition will presents a portfolio of adaptive strategies large and small, rural and urban, high tech and low-carbon. Since no single solution will meet the complex needs of the US West, the exhibition will explore a range of approaches for how buildings and parks, houses and streets, industry and agriculture, cities and neighborhoods might be adapted to face a drought-prone future. DRYLANDS DESIGN recognizes water scarcity as an issue of global concern, and challenges the industrialized world to take a leadership position with water-conserving, low-carbon design innovation for its own backyard.
This competition is an important step in recognizing the urgency of developing comprehensive solutions to urban problems that regenerate natural systems.
The effort by the building industry to decarbonize the built environment has been underway for twenty years now. New York City, of all places, has made a commitment to reducing the carbon footprint of its existing structures, including its largest skyscrapers. Many of these examples were demonstrated at an APA Conference in the spring of 2001, called "Green Towers".
In 2009, a $20 million eco-refit of the Empire State Building as an addition to its $500 million renovation was announced, and in 2011 that retrofit was completed. Tony Malkin leads a discussion of the project which involves a 3 year payback on operations and maintenance. And that doesn't include a an accounting of the savings in "embodied energy" of the existing iconic structure and keeping massive amounts of demolished material out of landfills.
Existing buildings are full of energy efficiency opportunities waiting to be realized. While some savings are obvious and easy to reach via one-off upgrades of windows, lighting and appliances, by using an integrated, whole-buildings design approach, profoundly larger energy savings can often be gained at little or no added capital cost. The efficiencies of many systems work together to create a drastic reduction in energy and water use.
The specifics of a deep retrofit are described here, as one of the initiatives established by the Rocky Mountain Institute. There's many tools on this site that help determine the best approaches to different recycling and retrofit issues with these older structures. It involves a whole process beginning with selecting the goals and going all the way through to measurement and verification of the resulting improved structure, thus completing a cycle of design and management.
In greater detail, the RMI has actually made available a complete white paper that discusses creative elements of deep whole building retrofits, published by ASHRAE. It's called "Whole-Building Retrofits: A Gateway to Climate Stabilization", by Victor Olgyay and Cherlyn Seruto. Olgyay is the author of the classic book, "Design With Climate" published in 1963. This approach has been evolving for decades, and the integration of natural principles, technological advancements and digital building managment has opened the door to an era of sustainable practices with the existing infrastructure of historic buildings. You couldn't build many of them today - the structures are the result of the kind of construction labor and material resources that you can't find today, hence the greater value in preserving and improving structures like this.
It's not just an old building anymore, it's a symbol of the new approach to the urban environment, that values what has gone before and conserves the heritage, the embodied energy and keeps that carbon out of the natural environment.
The above graphic is from the Environmental Law Institute, and illustrates a discussion of how the US Tax structure subsidizes foreign oil production, in 2009. Things have changed since then, and now polices are beginning to shift to support renewable energy sources. That, and conservation in many areas, have begun to take effect.
Which is a point emphasized by Amory Lovins and the RMI - the "think and do tank" - who takes the position that we can make this transition without further regulation by congress, by simply invoking the profit motive and efficiencies of scale. In promoting his book, he points out that China is currently the world leader in the use of renewables: photovoltaic, wind, small hydro, biogas, and solar thermal for hot water. This is evolving into a big, profitable business. Lovins goes right to the heart of the strategic argument for renewable energy as a standard:
In fact, to go back to the beginning of the modern climate debate, I think that when the bogus studies were issued claiming that climate protection would be very costly, the environmental movement fell into a trap of saying it won’t cost that much and it’s worth it. What they should have said is, “No, you’ve got it wrong. Climate protection is not costly but profitable because it’s cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel.”
Lovins also delves into energy strategies that can be adopted immediately, such as net energy metering as well as addressing existing challenges for updating the US electrical grid to include all the issues that distributed systems of electricity create for the ratepayers as well as the utilities. The industry is evolving, and the integration of solar and wind power on an intelligent grid is becoming a fundamental shift from the old model of generated power from distant, dirty plants that also consume considerable amounts of water.
Yet the issue remains that public policy and taxation structures in the US and in other countries must necessarily be rapidly reformed to create even greater incentives for abandoning extractive energy sources. Going back to the global picture, these shifts in global taxes and incentives to renewables will be necessary to be in accord with agreed-to guidelines on carbon emissions by the countries around the globe. The US, being the largest contributor to global carbon over the last 200 years, will necessarily need to reduce its footprint extremely rapidly in order to get its per capita allowance under the probable caps. But if you look at it as Lovins does, it creates tremendous savings that can be applied to productive industries that propel economics forward under a different energy and development model. It's not a cost, it's an opportunity to create better solutions to human existence at a "profit" to those who undertake these challenges, since they'll not be burdened by the costs and responsibilities of carbon cleanup, toxic waste recapture, and a bunch of industrial "legacy" infrastructure.
A synergistic solution is something that's greater than the sum of its parts, and this is where collaboration and information exchange can leverage people and industries across the globe, since these interactions are the result of creativity and knowledge-sharing. Under these kinds of circumstances, constructive change can happen suddenly and in surprising ways. In the same way that no one dreamed of our current internet and global communication network fed by intelligent digtial technologies twenty years ago, there will be new people - driven social and communication structures that make many things possible within a decade that no one can even imagine today.
A future centered on the principles of life and a new view of managing energy could be the strategy that breaks out of the old structures that bind us to the destructive effects of carbon sources and the wars they create in the name of controlling resources for profit. These networks, being less territorial and more flexible than physical structures, could give way to a more vibrant way of existence for all of us.
The presentation above is from The UC Davis Chancellor’s Colloquium Series, a 45-minute presentation with question and answer for 30 minutes. It's presented by Ralph J. Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences and Chair of the National Research Council. His expertise is in atmospheric chemistry, and he's one of the pre-eminent scientists speaking out on documented climate change in order to mitigate the increasingly critical impact of human activities on the global ecosystem.
In a nutshell, earth's climate is changing, as can be seen from measurements of rising air and water temperatures, decreasing amounts of polar ice and rising sea levels worldwide over the past three decades.Human-caused increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, chiefly carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion, are the likely cause of contemporary climate change. The rate of rise of carbon and greenhouse gasses has become frightening in the rapidity of change that's now being observed, particularly with the increasing rate of the melting of the polar ice caps. The changes in the last 50 years are unprecedented even in geological history.
The bathtub analogy is used to show how it's necessary to manage the global carbon dioxide cycle. The challenge of scale that it will take to reduce the carbon going into the ecosystem is daunting. Energy efficiencies are an approach that can be tackled immediately: greatly reducing oil and coal consumption through various strategies. Cicerone lays out approaches to geo-engineering that are possibilities that affect the factors of population, energy consumption and technology. A global per-capita emissions cap agreement (contraction and conversion model) seems to be the most necessary step in reversing the carbon impact that is projected in the future, particularly from developing countries.
Carbon capture doesn't seem to be a very viable part of the strategy; however, there are some steps being taken that produce possible solutions to creating more carbon sequestration. A big problem on the planet is the acidification of the oceans that results from the carbon absorption over the earth's seas that takes place as a result of increasing carbon levels. Research and examination of a science-based response to our impending self-inflicted catastrophe is critical. However, putting carbon genie back in the bottle is essentially a zero-sum game, once its released it takes eons to absorb it back into the global structure.
And time is of the essence; a 3 to 5 degree temperature rise in this century is inevitable, bringing us to the cusp of catastrophic climate change in the relatively near future.
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