[Scpg] Ed Mazria Monday, January 26, 2009 @ 7:30 PM, Campbell Hall free

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Ed Mazria
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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The TH Interview: Edward Mazria, the Man from 2030
by Jacob Gordon, Nashville, TN on 02.23.08
TREEHUGGER RADIO
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/02/the_th_intervie_32.php

Architect Edward Mazria was one of the first to 
draw major attention to the source that emits 
almost half of all greenhouse gas emissions: our 
buildings. Architecture 2030 has been his vehicle 
for communicating a design logic based on 
stemming the carbon footprint of the built 
environment, and his widely adopted 2030 
Challenge has laid a strategy for rendering those 
buildings carbon neutral. Mazria was featured on 
PBS's e2 series on sustainable design, and his 
2010 Imperative is a call to teach ecological 
literacy to the fledgling designers of the world. 
::TreeHugger Radio
Listen to the podcast of this interview via 
iTunes, or just listen/right-click to download.
(Thanks to Calabash Music for our soundtrack.)
Full text after the jump.

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: You yourself, of course, are an architect but 
some of your talks make you sound like a 
climatologist. Is climate science something that 
architects need to now grasp?
EM: I think so. I think climate science needs to 
be understood by everyone. I think it's now 
becoming part of the conversation and people 
really need to understand what it means and what 
it means for them. Because everyone has a role to 
play. Some more than others, but everyone has a 
role to play in addressing the situation.
We understand that in the building sector we have 
a major role to play. So we need to, for example, 
not only change the profession and change the 
schools, but we need to change the people who ask 
for buildings to be designed and built. So 
there's a lot that we need to do to educate all 
sorts of people about what's going on.

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.

TH: When you look at the entire pie that 
represents carbon emissions, how big a slice does 
the build environment constitute?
EM: Well, the built environment, it's pretty much 
everything. But if we say just buildings, about 
48% of total energy consumption in this country 
is attributed to buildings. Forty percent on an 
annual basis is attributed to building 
operations; 8% is attributed to building the 
buildings, what I talked about as embodied energy.
So that's just buildings. Then you have 
transportation; so you have air, rail, auto, and 
bus, and part of that is attributed to what we'd 
call the built environment, how you lay out the 
building plan, so you can affect that part also. 
It's only three sectors: building, industry, and 
transportation. And so the build environment 
consists of all those three.
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.
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