Building Energy 2001– Keynote presentation
by Alex Wilson

Fortunately for you, I don’t often get a chance to spout off about the big-picture stuff. I sit in my little office in a restored, 150-year-old, industrial building in Vermont and write about very specific green building strategies. I focus mostly on useful stuff that you can use today in creating buildings that do less damage to the environment. But being asked to speak here this morning provided an opportunity to look beyond the trees at the forest—an opportunity to wave my arms a little. Just where are we in the sustainable building movement? What are the prospects with a new Administration? Where is green building headed?

I’ll start by laying out my optimism. Despite the hours and hours I spend each week reading discouraging news about the environment, I remain optimistic. I think I picked up that quality when I took on the job of executive director of NESEA 20 years ago as a 25-year-old right when Ronald Reagan was elected president. We lost all of our government funding almost immediately (half of NESEA’s budget), but instead of folding up shop, we pulled together, tightened our belts, and diversified—in the process laying the groundwork for programs like the Quality Building Council that we’re enjoying today. Even with the darkest clouds, we need to look for the silver linings. So let me comment on a few of today’s trends and show how there is indeed a bright side.

Consider global warming. Even the most extreme of those contrarian, industry-funded scientists who argue that global warming isn’t happening are beginning to quiet down—and they’re having to grasp at ever-flimsier shreds of evidence to back up their arguments and theories. In fact, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently increased their predictions on just how extensive global warming is likely to be over the next century. It’s pretty scary stuff. At home in Vermont right now, local farmers are in the middle of the maple sugar season—current projections show that in 50-100 years, maples could be essentially gone from southern Vermont. We still have two feet of snow on the ground at home, but scientists say that by the end of this century, our climate in Vermont could become what New Jersey’s is today.

Well that’s a dark cloud. Where’s the silver lining? The silver lining is the possibility that real action could be taken to address global warming. Now it probably won’t surprise many of you to learn that I was disappointed with the outcome of the presidential elections last November—or was it December? Candidate Al Gore, for all his for all his failings as a communicator, understood the science of global warming—perhaps better than any other elected official in Washington. He understood what was happening and had a very good idea of what needed to be done to fix it—as any of you who have read Earth in the Balance know. So yes, I was disappointed when the Supreme Court picked a team of oilmen to lead our nation. (Speaking of oilmen, wasn’t there a joke during the election about diversity on the Republican ticket meaning that there were two men from different Texas oil companies?).

It’s no secret that Bush and Cheney are not big global warming believers. Indeed, while those contrarian scientists who argue that global warming isn’t happening may be quieting down a bit, I’m afraid that they now have a direct channel into the Oval Office. Even so, Bush did appoint Christine Whitman to EPA and she is on record speaking out about the need to do something about global warming. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill is similarly concerned—even more so I understand. I believe that as evidence continues to mount about global warming and as the public begins calling more loudly for the U.S. to come to the international table in addressing this issue, Bush and Cheney will give in.

If Bush does come around to recognizing the need to do something about global warming, I think he can do more about it than Gore could have. Just as it was President Nixon, a staunch anti-Communist, who was able to open up China to U.S. relations in the early 70s, Bush would have a far easier time pushing global warming measures through Congress than Gore would have. The set-back we saw a couple weeks ago when Bush reneged on a campaign promise to begin regulating carbon dioxide emissions will not be the last opportunity to address global warming, and I think the reaction he is getting from our European allies will inform his future actions in this area.

So I have guarded optimism (a little less optimism now that a few weeks ago, but nonetheless optimism) that the Bush-Cheney Administration could push through laws or regulations addressing global warming. If that were to happen, such measures could prove to be a huge shot-in-the-arm for those of us in this room—folks involved with green building.

Now let’s consider energy. Many of us here have been predicting for a long time—some of us like broken records—that energy shortages and dramatic price increases were coming. It’s been a long wait since the last oil crisis in 1979, but us doomsayers were vindicated this winter, as natural gas prices soared nationwide and California learned to deal with rolling blackouts. Those blackouts were back this week. While the California power shortages may prove to be an anomaly that could fuel a rash of power plant construction that ultimately lead to significant capacity excess, at least the event brought energy conservation back into our collective lexicon.

Some say the situation will get a lot worse before it gets better—all it took was a little warm weather in Southern California this week to increase consumption enough to create the current shortages; just wait ill it’s really hot. California’s electricity shortages have already driven some dramatic energy conservation measures. The state pushed through a significant tightening of its already best-in-the-nation state energy code (Title 24) in a record 119 days. The California Energy Commission is investing heavily in energy efficiency and renewables, which is great news for most of us at this conference. Massachusetts, New York and a number of other states are following suit.

On the national level, we’re also seeing some renewed interest in efficiency and renewables. A bill to provide tax credits for renewable energy equipment is back with lots more sponsors and, while I’m not a big fan of solar tax credits, this performance-based bill is far far better than the solar tax credits we suffered through in the late 70s and early 80s—at that time, as director of NESEA, I got a lot of grief for not supporting extension of those tax credits. All this focus on efficiency and renewables bodes well for the green building industry.

Let’s look at some other issues.

Consider public interest in the environment. For example, look how powerful the environmental vote was in the last presidential election. The green vote, in fact, determined the presidential election—it threw the election the wrong way, but at least it was influential! Public opinion polls continue to show that Americans care deeply about the environment. In the debate over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, public opinion remains firmly against opening up the refuge to oil drilling—by a 60-40 margin.

Public support for parks and preservation of natural areas remains high. It’s so high, in fact, that increased funding for parks and natural areas has even made it onto the Bush-Cheney budget outline—despite concerns from the mining and livestock industries in the West. We have yet to see just how daring the Administration will be in trying to roll back Clinton’s national monument designations or his roadless areas initiative—which essentially set aside 58.5 million acres as wilderness.

Strong public support for the environment should carry over to the buildings we all live and work in. I think this will happen if we—the people in this room, collectively—can help make the connection between how we design and build buildings and the environmental benefits that are realized. Now that we have a national organization committed to promoting green building, the U.S. Green Building Council, I’m optimistic that we can begin making inroads in this public education need.

The Council’s LEED rating system provides an ability to rate buildings according to their “greenness” in a nationally consistent way, dramatically increasing the visibility of green in the commercial building design arena. Already, several Federal agencies (including the Navy and State Department), a handful of cities, and some private companies are making LEED rating a requirement for all new facilities being built. GSA just announced intent to do likewise.

The beauty of the LEED rating system is that it’s easy to understand. I was initially not a supporter—because it’s not a rigorous life-cycle assessment tool. But I realized just how important LEED’s simplicity is. It’s really easy for a City Council or a corporate board of directors or university trustees (maybe here at Tufts?) to decree that new facilities shall obtain LEED certification—or even go further by requiring a LEED Silver rating or LEED Gold rating.

The value of this simplicity was made clear to me last year in talking with Jim Toothacker of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Jim described how he made the decision to obtain LEED certification for several new buildings his agency was planning. The obtained a silver rating. After going through the certification, Jim told his boss, the Commissioner of the agency, about the process and how LEED certification works. After hearing all this, his boss responded, “well why didn’t we go for a Gold?” I guess it’s that American competitive spirit—usually I don’t like it, but if companies and agencies want to compete to be greenest, more power to them!

The point is that we now have a nationwide green certification program for commercial buildings. As this program is adopted by more building owners it is likely to have a domino effect, with other building owners getting on board. If Intel decides that it’s buildings will achieve LEED certification, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft may have to follow suit—because they need to compete for the same employees. Savvy business managers know that to keep employees they need to make the workplace comfortable and pleasant to work in.

LEED certification of commercial buildings, and a similar program under development for houses, will ultimately boost demand for energy-efficient, green building designs. Architecture firms and general contractors with knowledge and experience in green design will be at a competitive advantage, and all of us in the green building field will almost certainly benefit.

The final argument I’ll provide as to why the future looks bright for green building is one that’s more directly a part of what I’m involved with: information. There is incredible information out there—and not just from our company, by the way. There are dozens of superb books on energy-efficient construction, daylighting, passive solar, building-integrated photovoltaics, HVAC design. A new book I’m particularly excited about is the Second Edition of Heating, Cooling, Lighting: Design Methods for Architects by Norbert Lechner (John Wiley & Sons, 2001). What’s remarkable about this book is that out of 17 chapters of a book on energy, only one chapter covers mechanical equipment! Most of the book is on building design as it relates to heating, cooling, and lighting. And that’s the way it should be!

Even more significant are the advances in computer-aided building design over the past 15 years. We can now very accurately model the energy performance of buildings. Programs like DOE-2, Energy-10 and REM Design model whole-building performance. More specialized programs deal with daylighting, solar system performance, and even three-dimensional visualization of air flow and air temperatures—something called computational fluid dynamics.

In the area of building materials, we have more—and better—information. Because architects, builders, and building owners are asking about it, manufactures are providing information about recycled content and VOC emissions. In part because they’re having to publicize environmental performance, manufacturers are improving the environmental characteristics of those products. Manufacturers are changing their manufacturing to appeal to green designers and builders—funny how that works. The forthcoming edition of our GreenSpec directory of green building products, by the way, will have about 1500 products—up from 1200 in our 2000 edition. We’ll be talking about some new products this afternoon. Having all this information on green building materials makes our collective efforts to improve our building stock easier.

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All right, enough of my unbridled optimism. Let’s take a look at where the green building movement is headed. Most of what we think of today as green building are readily achievable features. Maybe not this year or next year, but over the coming decades. I’m talking about things like 4- to 10-fold reductions in energy consumption by buildings, on-site water recycling, building-integrated photovoltaics, recycled-content building materials that are based on closed-loop production not “downcycling,” bio-based alternatives to today’s paints, carpet fibers and plastics, and indoor environments that are truly healthy and safe. We can call these “technical fixes.” These aspects of design won’t be easy to achieve, but they are achievable—even creating buildings that are net energy producers. And seeing so many people here today makes me optimistic that the design community has what it takes to actually get us to that point.

But there are other aspects to green building that, I’m afraid, will be more difficult. It is these areas that will challenge and, at times frustrate, the efforts of the best, greenest designers and builders in this room. What I’m referring to are the outdoor aspects of green building—where we put our buildings, how we integrate them into the surrounding communities and ecosystems, how we protect vital biodiversity, and how we use development as a way to restore or regenerate ecosystems.

When you consider our place in a broader time scale of several thousand years—something we don’t often do—the energy shortages we are facing are temporary. In fact, the entire petroleum era is temporal. Within a few hundred years—probably well before the turn of the next millennium—our descendants will only read about the petroleum era. They will read about this period of binge consumption you and I are living through—a period in which millions of year’s worth of stored carbon were consumed in a wink of an eye in geologic terms, converting much of that stored carbon into carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Our descendants will probably read with some amazement and dismay about how their ancestors continued this binge consumption even after the scientific community presented conclusive evidence of the impacts of converting all that stored carbon into a greenhouse gas. Having peaked, global temperatures by then will likely have begun dropping back toward more typical geologic averages. The earth’s protective ozone layer will have recovered. The human population will have stabilized—probably at a level significantly below that of today. We won’t be introducing toxins into the environment anymore. Manufacturing will be a cyclical process in which the raw materials are extracted from existing products or mined from landfills that were created during the consumptive generations.

All this is relatively easy to envision—it will take hard work to get there to be sure, but I can envision us getting there. The messages of people like Joe Romm, Amory and Hunter Lovins, Paul Hawken, Bob Berkebile, Bill McDonough, and David Orr will have long-since gotten through. Much more challenging, I believe, will be protecting our ecological heritage and the world’s biodiversity. While these other problems like air pollution, water pollution, ozone depletion, and even global warming will begin to wane after just a few centuries of repair, loss of biodiversity will last far longer—millions of years. The phenomenal rate of species extinctions that we are witnessing today will leave holes in the ecological fabric of our world environments that may remain unfilled for millions of years. Some of the thousands of species of plants and animals lost to extinction each year offer medicines and cures for diseases that may not even exist yet. We are losing the potential to find out. We need to do what we can today to protect our ecological heritage. Doing so, I believe, will eventually become the number-one priority of the green building movement.

The green buildings I am most excited about these days are demonstrating the potential for protecting habitat and restoring ecosystems as a part of development. The best landscape architects and civil engineers are learning how to turn parking lots into biofilters to remove pollutants and allow rainwater to infiltrate into the ground, or how to build sewage treatment wetlands that not only do a better job than conventional sewage treatment plants at removing nutrients, but also provide habitat for birds and other wildlife, or how to control erosion along streams and rivers through plantings (bioengineering) rather than miles of rip-rap and concrete and chain-link fencing.

The most exciting building projects I read about aren’t ones that make their mark by incorporating a lot of recycled materials, but that make their mark by helping to foster communities that work. I was at Seaside a month ago for a meeting of the U.S. Green Building Council. Seaside has a few of those qualities. This is the place designed by Andres Duany that launched the “New Urbanist” movement—and was most recently seen in the movie “The Truman Show.” The pedestrian aspects to Seaside really work; it has a compact and good feel. Unfortunately, the green aspects of Seaside don’t go much further, and it’s become a second-home community, not a real community with families and schools, and a vibrant commercial sector. But it’s hard to create places like that. It takes years of planning and coordination and permitting; a lot can go wrong. Look at Canyon Forest Village outside Grand Canyon National Park. That was a superbly designed and envisioned community, with participation of people like Bob Berkebile, but it was shot down by voters in November, acting I think out of fear of the unknown; only weeks later work was already moving forward on conventional tourist-oriented strip malls—which don’t require the same level of review and approval.

Cohousing is another wonderful model for responsible development. We have Cambridge Cohousing near here and others on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard and in Amherst. Cohousing is even better, because some redundancies built into our conventional home ownership model are eliminated. But it is very process-heavy and slow.

What we need is development that takes the best ideas of New Urbanism and cohousing and marries those models with the state-of-the-art in ecosystem restoration and stormwater management and responsible wastewater management—and of course all that other stuff that we usually call green building (energy-efficient design, renewables, recycled-content materials, healthy design, etc.). Then we will be justified in talking about a transition to sustainability.

So I leave you with this thought: in your design and construction projects, focus not only on the buildings themselves, but also on the land-use context and the potential for restoring, enhancing, and preserving ecosystems as a part of that development. Keep up with the technical fixes that will continue to make our buildings greener—like PV glazing, and fuel cells that will power both our cars and our homes, and new cementitious panel materials that will outperform plywood even while its manufacture uses up tons of fly ash generated by power plants. Keep up with all that neat stuff, but also work to make your buildings relate better to their communities and to nature.

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Before closing, on behalf of the conference organizers, I’d like us to offer a moment of silence to celebrate the contributions to the sustainability movement of Donella Meadows, who passed away a few weeks ago. Dana, perhaps more than anyone I knew, embodied sustainability—from her groundbreaking book, Limits to Growth in 1972, to her weekly columns in recent years, to her cohousing community and farm.

Thank you very much.

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Alex Wilson is founder and executive editor of Environmental Building News in Brattleboro, Vermont. To learn about EBN and other publications produced by his company, call 802-257-7300 or visit the Web site http://www.buildinggreen.com