-By Katie Weeks

There's no way to sugar coat it: When it comes to energy consumption, the built environment sucks, literally. The building sector is responsible for 48 percent of all U.S. energy consumption, and globally, 76 percent of power plant-generated electricity is used to operate buildings. The sector also is the largest contributor of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to the atmosphere. These numbers, however, can—and must—change in order to address the global-warming crisis, according to Edward Mazria founder of Architecture 2030 (www.architecture2030.org). The 2030 Challenge asks the global A&D community to adopt several targets, including the increase of the fossil fuel reduction standard for all new buildings and major renovations to 60 percent by 2010 and requiring carbon neutrality by 2030. Also introduced under the organization is The 2010 Imperative, addressing ecological literacy in design education and two new plans examining how creating energy efficient buildings can jump-start the economy both locally and nationally.


Q: What is the significance of the year 2030, and how did you develop the 2030 Challenge targets?

A: When we began looking at climate change, the scientific community was aiming for 70 to 80 percent total global GHG emissions reductions by 2050 in order to avert what they called dangerous climate change. Looking at what the building sector is responsible for, we wanted to work backwards and develop a realistic strategy for meeting targets. We realized that we needed an immediate 50 percent reduction in energy consumption, moving to carbon neutral by 2030. We then titled the organization Architecture 2030 as that was the target for net zero and carbon neutral buildings.

Q: What is the A&D community's role in addressing energy efficiency?

A: It's huge. When you design a building, you're beginning to lock in its site use energy and its carbon footprint. Unless you educate the design community to design net zero or carbon-neutral buildings, you're going to have a hard time reducing energy consumption in the built environment.

Q: How do you determine the true carbon footprint of a typical building?

A: It's not easy. You have to determine site-use energy, source-use energy, and the carbon emissions for the source use. The reason it may get tricky is that if you're in the Pacific Northwest, for example, most of your electricity is produced by hydro, which has very little or no carbon footprint. The catch is we're running out of hydro in terms of the number of places that can be tapped or streams that can be dammed up, and people are having to build in coal or oil use or use renewable energy like wind. If you have to build a natural gas plant for all the new buildings in Seattle in the next five years, how much of that gas plant do you attribute to each building? Site-use energy is the number we like to use because it gives the best indication of a building's efficiency.

Q: How is the organization moving the industry toward the 2030 goals?

A: We're working on building codes at national, state, and local levels so that those targets are requirements. States and cities are committing to the targets through legislation, requiring all state buildings to meet the targets. For example, in New Mexico, state buildings must meet the 2030 Challenge targets by executive order, and in Minnesota and Illinois, it is in the legislation for all state and state-funded buildings. The state of Washington changed the building codes for all its buildings, and in California, the energy commission changed codes to get to net zero energy for all new or renovated residential buildings by 2020 and commercial buildings by 2030.

Q: How has the global financial crisis affected the progress toward the 2030 Challenge goals?

A: First is in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption because there are no buildings going up. In that sense, it is positive, but the negative side is that it hurts quite a number of people financially and closes down a number of industries.

We also have a full-blown climate change crisis that's beginning to be understood along with an understanding that resource depletion in terms of peaking oil and natural gas is just around the corner, and that could create huge global problems.

So, we're trying to deal with three issues at one time: the financial crisis, energy independence, and climate change. The interesting thing about that is they all are tied heavily to the building sector, and solutions in the building sector can effectively address all three. This kind of opportunity, where we can really address all three crises in a way that's beneficial on all fronts, comes along once in a lifetime, if ever.

(Architecture 2030 recently released the Two-Year, Nine-Million Jobs Stimulus Plan and the 14x Stimulus Plan for state and local governments, addressing how energy efficiency can help rebuild the economy. Both plans are available in detail at www.architecture2030.org.)

Q: How do Architecture 2030's economic plans entice people to move toward energy efficiency?

A: You want to create more efficient buildings and to renovate buildings to become more efficient at different levels from moderately more efficient all the way to carbon neutral or net zero. With 14x we're trying to get incentives in place to renovate large amounts of buildings and create the infrastructure for the next phase, which is the national plan. We can use the economic downturn to incite people to save money through a mortgage buy-down while paying less money on their energy bills. We can begin to turn the economy around that way because the sector that's taken the economy down is the building sector. It's also the sector that needs to be revived in order to build the economy back up. The national plan and 14x bring it back in a more responsible way and in a way that's less prone to crash again.