Ed Mazria Monday, January 26, 2009 @ 7:30 PM, Campbell Hal

Monday, January 26, 2009 @ 7:30 PM, Campbell Hall

Now, it's PersonalŠSolving Our Energy, Climate Change and Economic Crisis

Is it possible to achieve energy independence, solve climate change and revitalize the United States' economy with a single solution? According to visionary Ed Mazria, founder of Architecture 2030 and author of the premier solar design resource guide The Passive Solar Energy Book, it is. An award-winning architect, author and educator, Mazria will present the 2030 Blueprint, a simple, yet powerful approach to achieving all of these goals through the building sector, the largest energy consumer in the United States.

Presented as part of the Global Warming, Food Security and Our Energy Future Event Series and by the Institute for Energy Efficiency as part of the Energy Leadership Lecture Series.

EDWARD MAZRIA
www.mazria.com/people.html
Edward Mazria is an internationally-recognized architect, author, educator and visionary with a long and distinguished career. His award-winning architecture and planning projects span over a thirty-five year period and each employs a cutting-edge environmental approach to design. He is the author of numerous published works, including the 'bible' of solar design, The Passive Solar Energy Book, which is currently in use worldwide.

Most recently, Mr. Mazria has reshaped the national and international dialogue on climate change to incorporate building design and the 'Building Sector'. He is the founder of Architecture 2030, an innovative and flexible research organization focused on protecting our global environment. He developed and issued the 2030 Challenge, a measured and achievable strategy to dramatically reduce global GHG emissions and fossil-fuel consumption by the year 2030. He speaks nationally and internationally on the subject of architecture, design, energy and climate change and has taught architecture at several universities including the University of New Mexico, University of Oregon and UCLA. His numerous awards include AIA Design Awards, AIA Design Innovation Award, American Planning Association Award, Department of Energy Awards, "Pioneer Award" from the American Solar Energy Society, first recipient of the Equinox Award presented on the 50th anniversary of construction of the world's first commercial solar building, and most recently a 2008 National Conservation Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation. He is a fellow of the Design Futures Council.

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TreeHugger: You've been calling for a lot more focus on climate solutions within design schools. What needs to change and how do you see that manifesting?
Ed Mazria: Well, in essence, climate change has really just come on the scene in full force in the last year. The years prior it's been understood, and many people were talking about it, but it hadn't blasted onto the scene the way it has now. Now, it's front page news all the time because we're beginning to see some of the effects of climate change.
The schools have not kept up with the news and the situation that we have today. We're going to need students coming out of school that can address the issue. We know, for example, that the building sector is a major part of the global warming problem. So we're going to need to design our buildings very, very differently from now on out.
So when students come out of school and they go into to the profession, especially the design or architecture professions-planning, landscape architecture, interior design, industrial design-they need to have a keen understanding of what the issues are and how to solve the problem within that sector. So the designs have to be appropriate really for today's situation.

TH: A lot of people really credit you with bringing to public attention in recent years the climate impact of the built environment. So in the simplest terms, how do you define the carbon footprint of buildings?
EM: Well, you need to look at two parts of buildings. There are actually many parts, but these are the two primary parts. The first is building a building and all the energy and greenhouse gas emissions that occur when you manufacture and transport the materials, and when you actually build the building.
So this is what we call the embodied energy component, or the greenhouse gas emissions component, of constructing a building.
The other part of a building is building operations. Now, that is a much larger number. Because once you build the building, it then stands for 25, 50, 75, sometimes 100 years or more. So over its lifetime, in order to operate the building-heating, lighting, cooling, running machinery, the plug load, heating hot water, for example-there are all sorts of building operations and they all consume energy and they all give off greenhouse gas emissions.
So the major portion of greenhouse gas emission is attributed to the building sector's building operations. Another percentage-a much, much smaller percentage-is the embodied energy of building the building and the greenhouse gas emissions.

But the building sector, the designers, also have huge influence on the industrial sector, on the types of materials that they manufacture and whether those materials have high embodied energy or low embodied energy and, therefore, would cut your greenhouse gas emissions.
And you're now seeing programs and instruments in the hands of designers that actually now let them see that. Let's just take carpet, for example. There are so many different carpet products, and there are programs now that let you look at all the different types of carpet and see what the greenhouse gas emissions are for the manufacture of these different types of carpet. Or different types of flooring, or different types of paint, or different types of gypsum board, or other types of board. Different types of woods, things like that.
So those tools are now making their way into the profession, and architects are beginning to use them.

TH: The 2030 Challenge is your creation. Tell us about that.
EM: It's a global challenge that we publicly issued in January of 2006. We basically worked backward and said: what are the reductions we need by 2050, then what are the reductions we need in the building sector by that time, and then we worked back to the present day.
So the first thing we need to do is level out emissions. The building sector's emissions are growing annually and energy consumption is growing annually, because we add more buildings to our building stock every year and our population grows. So the first thing we wanted to do was to stop emissions and energy consumption growth, especially fossil fuel energy consumption growth.
So we looked at the numbers: how many square feet are demolished in this country every year, how many square feet are renovated every year, and then how many square feet are built new every year. And what we discovered was that we renovate just about as much square footage as we build new in this country.
So, what we said is, if we renovate a building, we tighten it up and make it more efficient, and we reduce its consumption by 50%, then we've made room for new buildings.
Then if new buildings are 50% lower than the average for each building type, then we've basically leveled out the curve, because we make room, with renovation, for new buildings. We cut down their energy consumption to make room for the energy consumption of newer buildings.
And so that's how the first phase of the 2030 Challenge works. What it calls for is a 50% reduction in fossil-fuel energy for all new buildings and major renovations below the regional average for that building. So that flattens the curve out.
In order to bend the curve down, what we've done is we've increased the reduction by 10% every five years so that, by the year 2030, we get to zero, to what we term "carbon neutral." Which means that any new building designed in the year 2030 would be designed to use no greenhouse gas-emitting energy to operate. That doesn't mean the buildings don't use energy to operate, they just don't use greenhouse gas-emitting energy. And that's why we termed it the 2030 Challenge.

TreeHugger: People are always saying that there's no silver bullet when it comes to the climate crisis. But you say that there is a silver bullet.
Edward Mazria: Absolutely. There's absolutely a silver bullet. I think what has happened is that we look for lots of different ways to address a situation so that we can involve as many people as we can. And in a sense, that's a good thing. But, depending upon how you look at the problem, you can then find different solutions. And so how you define the problem determines the range of solutions.
Well, we began to take a look at the problem a slightly different way, so we came up with a silver bullet, and we think it works. And we think now that scientists are actually calling for that and saying that it's 80% of the solution, which means, in essence, it's a silver bullet.
And what we found was this: we're peaking in oil now. In this country, we peaked in oil production in 1970. And we peaked in natural gas production in 1973 in this country. So we have to import more and more oil and gas as we increase our consumption every year, as the country grows and we add more people and more buildings. So we increase our consumption of those fuels.

Globally, we're peaking in oil right about now. Some people say we peaked last year. Some people say we're going to peak in six months. But we're right around the peak. What happens after the peak is that production declines, therefore consumption declines, therefore the price goes up. And we're beginning to see that happen now. And the further you get away from the peak, the more expensive the commodity becomes and the less and less you use.
So, if you look at all the proven oil and gas reserves left in the world, you begin to understand that you're not going to use all that up, first of all, because it just going to become too expensive once you get over the peak. And once those fuels become more expensive, alternatives begin to look economically more feasible and a lot more attractive. And so you begin to move toward alternatives very, very quickly as the price goes up and up and up. And the faster it goes up, the more quickly you look at alternatives. And you can see that now in the transportation sector, because of oil.
So in essence, you don't use up all that you have left because at some point it just becomes too expensive, the alternatives are just a lot more attractive. So when you look at it that way, you see that oil and gas can't really push us past the threshold of 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Those two fuels can't get us there.
There are only three fossil fuels. What's the fossil fuel that will put us over? Well, there's coal. And we have plenty of it in this world. And we're moving to coal, and it's a really dirty fuel.
Coal by itself will push us way past a thousand parts per million. It has a capacity to really push the planet in that direction. Now, coal is very cheap and so there's an economic incentive to move toward it-especially if you're in a recession as we are right now-but that exacerbates the situation.
You have now the coal companies playing ads on primetime TV every night; they have a $50 million campaign going on right now to convince the American public that coal is clean. They don't tell you how it's clean or why it's clean or anything else, they just put out these warm and fuzzy ads that talk about clean coal and how inexpensive it is and how we should adopt it. They're saying nothing about climate change.
In essence, there really isn't any clean coal. So it's a disinformation or misinformation campaign on the part of the coal companies.
So if you stop coal, then you have basically leveled greenhouse gas emissions in this country and globally. We need a global moratorium on coal, then we need to phase out all dirty coal plants. So if you can't fuel global warming with oil and gas, and you get a moratorium on coal (which is the silver bullet) you don't get to the point of 450 parts per million and you can begin to actually reduce carbon dioxide emissions globally. So in essence, it's a silver bullet.
Now, people point to the fact that we have oil shale and tar sands, and those are unconventional fossil fuels. The problem with that is: to extract those two commodities requires a cheap energy source, because you have to put quite a bit of energy in to get a little bit more energy out.
So if you take cheap coal out of the picture altogether-you call a moratorium on coal-you have, in essence, made it very, very difficult to go to those other two sources.

TH: You spoke a second ago about the coal industry and the efforts that they're making to sell people on the clean coal thing. Architecture 2030 has taken out some ads lately in the New York Times and elsewhere, and the one that really stuck out to me where you list some of these major corporate sustainability initiatives and then juxtapose them against the impact of coal power.
The first one on the list says: "Home Depot is funding the planting 300,000 trees in cities across the US to help absorb carbon dioxide."
Then, to put that in perspective: "the CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized coal-fired plant in just 10 days of operation will negate this entire effort." That's pretty humbling. What sort of response have you gotten since running this ad?

EM: Well, people are amazed. They didn't understand the power to pollute that coal has. So for example, the 300,000 trees: Home Depot's spending over $1 million and they want to up it to 3,000,000 trees.
Now, they're doing this for a number of reasons. One is to beautify cities, to provide shade, or create better microclimate conditions, create a nicer environment. But part of it is also to sequester carbon. What a tree does is as it grows is it soaks up carbon dioxide and stores it in its fabric, in its wood. The negating of this effort is negating the 300,000 trees over their 100-year lifetime. That's the power of putting out the CO2 from that power plant.
It also says is that it's going to be very hard for us to plant our way out of the situation-you just can't do it. You just can't plant enough to absorb more than a very small fraction of what we put out and produce in terms of carbon dioxide annually. So it really is going to take a moratorium on coal. That is the silver bullet.
What's interesting about that is it's something people can rally around. It's not some kind of amorphous, hundred-thousand item smorgasbord of activities. It's something you can define, it's something you can get behind, and it's something you can call for. And once the numbers get large enough, then that action will happen, especially in a democracy.
So it's critical that we get that word out, because the more numbers we have, the quicker we can get the job done.

TH: The U.S. Green Building Council's LEED standards have become the benchmark for what a green building is. At the recent Greenbuild Conference in Chicago there was a lot of talk about the fact that LEED buildings aren't very good to performing the way they're predicted to. Are the LEED standards getting us where we need to go as far as buildings?
EM: Right now, no. But they're moving in the right direction, and they have adopted the 2030 targets. If you look at the actual energy consumption and LEED certification, you have different values of LEED certification. Everything from just basic certification up through Silver and Gold and Platinum.
The Platinum buildings perform within the targets set by the 2030 challenge. Some of the Gold buildings do and some don't; and very, very few of the Silver buildings do. And then among those that are certified, you don't get very many that do. But recently, the USGBC adopted the 2030 targets and they're now working to incorporate the targets in LEED certification.
So that is a very, very positive move because the USGBC was one of the first organizations to bring awareness and, in a sense, they coined the phrase "green building." And so they have a huge role to play in alleviating the building sector's role and actually turning it around and making it part of the solution to global warming and climate change. And I think they're moving to do that now.

TH: Where do you see the most encouraging signs? What can you point at and say, there! There is what we need to see more of?
EM: Well, there are two sides to the coin: there is the supply side and demand side. Coal is the supply side. So we call for moratorium on coal-that's the silver bullet. The demand side is the 2030 challenge. You reduce demand, you don't need the coal. So you need to work those two in tandem.
What gives me tremendous hope at this point is that on the demand side, the 2030 challenge is spreading like wildfire. In fact, the federal government, in the latest energy bill that was just passed and signed into law, requires all federal buildings to meet the 2030 challenge targets.
So the feds now have taken it on. That puts the resources of the federal government behind creating the technologies, the information, to meet the targets, and so that is a very, very important step. So in that sense, the demand side is very, very encouraging.
You get cities and states now signing on to the 2030 challenge targets. Santa Barbara was the first city that actually enact it into code. California Energy Commission adopted it, the city of Richmond, Virginia adopted it, most professional organizations have adopted it.

On the supply side we had, up until a month ago, about 151 new coal plants in various stages of development in the U.S.; conventional dirty coal plants. About 50 of them have been knocked out already. So about a third of the coal plants that were going to be built-that were in various stages of development in the US-are now not being built. You see Governor Crist in Florida: no coal for his state. In California they are saying, 'we're not going to import any more coal.'
So you see things happening across the country that are heartening, and word is now getting out. That's why you see the coal companies on a $50 million campaign to convince the American public that coal is somehow clean. They wouldn't be doing this unless there was tremendous pressure not to build these dirty coal plants.
If we build the coal plants we just don't have a chance. The power of coal is just so great in terms of the emissions each one of these things puts off that no matter what else you do, you can't negate it.
We also see many states and governors, for example, issuing executive orders saying, "we're going to reduce our state's emission by X-amount by this date." Well, you go with coal in that state you'll never make it.
Another thing that has to get across to the investment sector is that not only do we need a moratorium, but we are going to need to phase out all these dirty coal plants. The investment community must understand that if they put money into building a plant, it may be shut down in a short period of time. That's a risk that they're going to have to take if they want to put their money in that basket.