The Architecture of Change

In February, 2007, I watched a televised teach-in sponsored by the American Institute of Architects and the New York Academy of Science. The speakers included Dr. James Hansen of NS.S.A. and Dr. Ed Mazria, a member of A.I.A. and the founder of a non-profit called Architecture 2030.

While all of the section are informative, I was particularly impressed by Dr. Mazria's presentation and the 2010 Imperative that his organization is championing. Here is the simple truth, known then and still valid. You can not solve the problems of climate change without addressing the building sector. If you do take on the building sector, then many of the other diminish in scale and the time frame to finish the job becomes much more manageable.

The title of Dr. Mazria's talk was Resuscitating a Dying Society. His original proposal was to get strong backing for what he called the 2010 Imperative. Many people listened, but few acted. Had they done so, I don't think we would be facing the possibility of a failure in Copenhagen. Had they done so, we would not have had to listen to the Palin-ites chanting "Drill, baby, Drill."

Now, however, more and more architecture firms are taking up the challenge. I quote from an Architecture 2030 release date Sept. 28, 2009. (2010 will soon be here.)

Building Sector Leaders Call for
Steep Energy and Emissions Cuts

SANTA FE, NM - Twenty-four of the largest and most influential architecture, engineering, and development firms based in the U.S., which are responsible for a combined $100 billion in building construction annually, have joined forces with Architecture 2030, a leading non-profit research organization, to call on Congress to update national building code standards to meet steep and achievable energy reduction targets.

Specifically, this group is pressing the Senate to pass the building energy reduction targets in Section 241 of the American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009 (S. 1462) and incorporate timelines to reach carbon-neutral buildings by 2030.

Now we know what the Republican response will be: Lie, obfuscate, delay until it is too late. The leader of the charge is Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma. The initial Press announcement has already been made. A major chance was missed when OK failed to replace him in 2008.

So, here is the next challenge, for those who believe in thinking globally and acting locally. Attend the next meeting of your local planning commission and demand that they only approve projects where the architecture meets the standard laid down by Architecture 2030, that the Cities where you live only deal with architecture firms who have signed on like those listed.

This is not for you and me. It is to resuscitate a dying society for our children and grand children until the 7th Generation.

HR. 2454 - American Clean Energy and Security Act.

There are many reasons to hate H. R. 2454 the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. For one, it contains ongoing funding for the dream of a clean coal future and totally fails the goal of setting realistic constraints on carbon emissions.

Architecture 2030, a leader in the effort to change our future, finds in one section of the bill enough benefit to call for it's adoption. In E-NEWS Bulletin 16 today, Architecture 2030 identifies the real value.

Buried deep within the 1,428-page Waxman-Markey climate bill (H.R. 2454: American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009) passed by the House and now on the Senate floor, is Section 201, pages 320-348. It is this section that makes H.R. 2454 worth passing.

No matter what else is compromised or changed in the climate bill working its way through the Senate, Section 201 must not be changed or weakened.

This bulletin is not yet on-line, but should be shortly. However, the real analysis in contained in a fact sheet that is currently posted.

According to Architecture 2030 Chairman, Ed Mazria, the entire effort falls apart if this portion of the bill is weakened.

It is clear that the building energy code targets set in Section 201 are not only essential for achieving the energy consumption and GHG emissions reductions needed, but that they also are the most cost effective approach for doing so.

Why ask a Green to wear Blue on Earth Day?

That is what I thought to myself when I got the following yesterday from Peter Chapman, Marketing Coordinator, 2030, Inc. / Architecture 2030.

Hello Wesley,

I want to thank you for following our work at Architecture 2030 through your posts at Daily Kos, California Greening and Grist last year.

Well, at least Peter did some research, or let Google do it for him, but I think that he missed a couple, like Green Commons and Andrew Nevkin's dot earth blog at the NY Times. The note from Peter was more than a request to wear blue. It was all tied to the rest of Architecture 2030's agenda. So, I followed the link from Peter's note to BYOBlue.org.

At least, it was not Democratic Party Blue, nor even Yves Klein Blue, though the latter is close. It is more like that of the Blue Man Group who did the warm up for the most recent Architecture 2030 webcast: Face It.

The connection is rather obvious: no more coal means a bluer sky. Got that. It also means a future where climate change reverts to normal cycles. Got that too. Actually, they have put together a pretty good campaign. So, what to they really want us to do?

First, wearing blue for an Earth Day event is taking on a tone of protest, not against Earth Day, but rather against the way that we are changing our atmosphere but not changing our energy policies.

Want to stop global warming? Wear BLUE for Earth Day 2008! Join millions of people around the world who will be wearing BLUE to signify their vote for NO COAL

OK, got it. but isn't there more? Well yes there is.

Then, on April 22, make your voice heard. Pick up the phone: Call Congress at 202.224.3121 and demand an immediate ‘Moratorium on Coal’ - a halt to the construction of any new coal-fired power plants. Through this Call for Climate event, Earth Day hopes to generate over a million phone calls to Congress!

Now, I am really getting it. It is obvious that the connection of the Democratic Party, their reliance on votes from key coal producing state (PA, WV, IL) will make it very difficult for either Clinton or Obama to do anything that will substantially solve the problem. Maybe, just maybe, enough call on April 22 will help get someone's attention. Let's hope that Pennsylvanians get the message and make the call, because that is Primary Day for the Democratic Party.

It also follows the proposed Science Debates 2008, to be held at the Franklin Mint in PA on April 18. McCain, Clinton and Barama invited... none have accepted.

The attention that we have given to the subject of coal is already having some effect.

Fifty-nine coal plants were canceled in 2007. That’s over a third of the 151 plannned. That happened before millions of people joined together to say No Coal. Source: Architecture 2030.

So, here is the to do list:

• Wear Blue
• Call in
• Vote Green

Peter forgot the last item there, but if you read what Obama and Clinton are saying, they are not going to "stop coal." Big Business won't let them and we know what big business thinks, or we should after listening to GE CEO James Immelt (not to be confused with James Inhofe) was reported at Grist as referencing Coal this way.

If business doesn't take a seat at the table, regs will be determined by politicians and activists (some of which, he said with evident horror, want to do away with coal entirely!). USCAP may not be perfect, but it replaced a vacuum.

In fact, none of the major party candidate, not McCain nor Clinton nor Obama come close to matching the understanding of what it really means to tackle Global Warming. Instead, you have to look to Kent Mesplay, for whom I voted in the CA Primary, or Jesse Johnson, two Green Party candidates who don't need to coached on this issue.

So Celebrate Earth Day, you all know how now.

Greening LA

When I hear the words Green and LA in the same sentence I have a wide range of images, not all of them with positive connotations. In fact I have indulged myself in a rant against one part of Mayor Villaraigosa's Green LA plan. There is one view of water wasted on picture perfect suburban lawns while we are beginning to wonder whether we will have enough for a shower.

However, Siel gives us another picture from the Emerald City. She nets out what an environmental coalition called Green LA is trying to accomplish.

Enter Green L.A., a coalition of 50 or so environmental and community-based organizations in L.A, working to shape city policies. According to Jonathan Parfrey, director of Green L.A., the coalition basically came together when Mayor Villaraigosa got elected, because many groups saw the new mayor's enviro-commitment as an unprecedented opportunity to push the city into a greener direction. After all, back in 2005, Villaraigosa said "Let's dare to imagine Los Angeles as the cleanest and greenest big city in America." So enviro and community-based groups linked arms and launched Green L.A. in Dec. 2005 to take Villaraigosa at his word.

The list of what they are trying to do is almost right. There is one topic that is missing from the list. That is to influence LA's Planning Commission, Building Code, permitting process to back adhere to the standards put forward by Architecture 2030. Anyone who has viewed Ed Mazria's recent webcast knows that this is job 1 (to steal a line from Ford).

Every city seems to be getting in line to do something. Chuck Reed has a big public Green Vision for San Jose. Like Villaraigosa's Green LA plan, it is long on goals and short on effective specifics. Gavin Newsome made the same claims for San Francisco since 2004. None of them has it right, but Siel has shown us where our non-profits are making a difference.

It would seem to me that there is a real opportunity here for local Green Party candidates to step in, point out the obvious failings of the Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose paper plans and to begin attracting real backing from those who still care about the environment. Take the time to watch Mazria's web cast is you have not yet done so.. I did mention it before.

30 minutes to save a planet

I have posted a short note on the Green California Forum email list asking everyone to watch the webcast that Ed Mazria did on Global Warming, Coal and how to recover from the recession we are in.

I also made a longer commentary at Green Commons.

I have never seen one person so clearly and directly outline the problem of global warming and provide such a clear cut, easily understood plan for how to deal with it.

There are those, even in the Green Party, who consider that ecological thinking is essentially a spiritual tree-hugging type experience, rather divorced from real life. If you paid close attention to Mazria, you will note that he never mentioned Eco Villages even once.

What he did do was to make it abundantly clear that it is absolutely essential to stop coal. I mean stop it dead in it's tracks. Just that. No more coal. Full Stop.

The second thing that is unique about this presentation is the fact that Marzia does not subscribe to the belief that this would be a major hit on the US Economy. Rather, he sees this as an opportunity for building our way out of the current recession.

You can read the rest over there. It is much more important that you watch the video here.

Major Breakthrough in battling Climate Change

Those who come back to this column with any frequency know that I have advocated taking the Architecture 2030 targets for energy use in the building sector and turning them into law, at the local level. In the State of California, this requires some approval from the California Energy Commission.

Just this evening, I received a release from Architecture 2030 that this approval has been granted. According to the release:

On December 5, 2007, the California Energy Commission unanimously adopted the California Public Utilities Commission's (CPUC) plan for achieving zero net energy residential buildings by 2020 and commercial buildings by 2030. "The Energy Commission endorses these ambitious goals and will, with support from the CPUC and the utilities, strive to achieve them through successive cycles of the building standards and appliance standards in combination with other program efforts," according to The Committee Final Report.

The San Francisco Chronicle went even further into trying to predict the long range effects of this action.

California should make all new homes so energy-efficient by 2020 that they won't need to draw power from the state's electrical grid, according to a plan for meeting the state's future energy needs.

We know that this is the target. We know also that this action by the Commission is not binding. (read the full decision here.) However, this action appears to indicate approval of the Architecture 2030 standard adopted by the City of Santa Barbara last month.

Global Greens are directly involved in Climate Change at the meeting in Bali. The Green Party US released information to the press today on our stand.

Now, it is time for Greens in California to get organized and push every local City Council and planning commission to take the action that was taken by Santa Barabara. If we wait for actions to come out of Washington and / or Sacramento, for government to do it for us, we will be waiting until the rising sea level is waist deep on the Embarcadero.

Santa Barbara and San Jose

In one recent post, I commented as to how the City of Santa Barabara was leading the way in combating climate change. They acted to implement the standards suggested by Architecture 2030. It is an example that needs to be followed by every community in California.

This week, we have the City of San Jose taking a few tentative steps in that direction. They published a new Green Vision for the City. It takes 14 pages to discuss their goals.

Green Vision Goals

Within 15 years, the City of San José in tandem with its residents and businesses will:

1. Create 25,000 Clean Tech jobs as the World Center of Clean Tech Innovation
   
2. Reduce per capita energy use by 50 percent
   
3. Receive 100 percent of our electrical power from clean renewable sources
   
4. Build or retrofit 50 million square feet of green buildings
   
5. Divert 100 percent of the waste from our landfill and convert waste to energy
   
6. Recycle or beneficially reuse 100 percent of our wastewater (100 million gallons per day)
   
7. Adopt a General Plan with measurable standards for sustainable development
   
8. Ensure that 100 percent of public fleet vehicles run on alternative fuels
   
9. Plant 100,000 new trees and replace 100 percent of our streetlights with smart, zeroemission lighting
   
10. Create 100 miles of interconnected trails

While these are all laudable goals, the document is short on specifics.

In 2007, after the City Council signed on to the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement, it went one step further and adopted the most aggressive municipal greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals in the nation.

We have seen that time and again governments set goals and then, when faced with a decision to permit something or to allow a possible 50 jobs to go elsewhere, they always opt to forget those requirement in favor of building up their inventory of jobs.

But it brings me back to the same point I made in my last post, that Greens need to walk away from the Step It Up meetings and go directly to their own city councils and planning commissions and demand action now. Until there is some concrete statement of requirement that goes into the building permitting process, the fancy word goals are only good intentions.

Santa Barbara leads the way.

In yesterday's post I made a comment about King Coal and how that relates to any good things that our governor might try to do regarding vehicle emissions. I am not sure that Arnold is serious enough about Global Warming. I sourced that information from the web site of an organization called Architecture 2030.

Architecture 2030 just release a new story. They announced the fact that the City of Santa Barbara is taking the most far-reaching steps of any California community toward the goal of becoming carbon neutral. In fact, they have turned the Architecture 2030 recommendations into law and building code.

The following is from the Santa Barbara Daily Sound.

It was more than a year ago that renowned Santa Fe architect Ed Mazria came to the Marjorie Luke Theater in Santa Barbara and lectured on environmental building standards, lighting a fire under local architects, contractors, government leaders and community members.
Now, with approval from a state commission a pending formality, Santa Barbara stands to mark a new chapter in green building.

A glowing Santa Barbara City Council unanimously approved the Architecture 2030 Energy Ordinance today, legislation that, if approved by the California Energy Commission, will give Santa Barbara some of the most stringent environmental building standards in the state.

This raises a few questions.

• Which California City will be the next to invite Ed Mazria to speak?
• What other community has the courage to do what is absolutely necessary?
  
• Most importantly, what are our Green Party locals doing to educate themselves and to get their communities to take steps similar to that of Santa Barbara?

Sundance Conference on Global Warming

For those who have stuck with this blog, you know that I have made specific recommendations as to what needs to be done regarding global warming, mostly based on the programs put forward by Architecture 2030. This is all based on the knowledge that global warming is directly related to energy use and that building operations consume approximately 50% of our fossil fuels.

While the Federal Government offers platitudes about "voluntary programs" the world around us is changing. The arctic icecap is shrinking at an increasing rate. We were warned about this in 2003, in 2004, and we were warned again just this week.

The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at a record low, scientists said last night. Experts said they were "stunned" by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as Britain disappearing in the last week alone. So much ice has melted this summer that the north-west passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the north-east passage along Russia's Arctic coast could open later this month. If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030.

The rate of melt of the arctic ice is paralleled by the rate of melt / movement of the Greenland glaciers. Like the arctic ice cap, the rate of change is much greater than predicted. As the Time article suggests, maybe the meltdown has begun.

The usual argument put forth by global-warming skeptics for why we shouldn't rush to do anything yet is that the science behind climate change is uncertain--and in fact it is. While there's little doubt that humans are helping heat up the planet, the questions of how much, how quickly and leading to what consequences are fiendishly difficult to pin down. That's because the actual climate is still far more complicated than any existing computer model can accurately reflect, making predictions iffy at best. Some natural processes nobody has yet thought of could end up blunting the severest impact of global warming.

Or, conversely, they could make the impact even worse than expected.

While the Feds do little or nothing, the US Conference of Mayors is pro-active. With little media notice (Brittany Spears is too fat and has no energy) Mayors from all over America held the Sundance Conference on Global Warming.

Part of that conference involved Architecture 2030. Follow this link to see their online report. I suggest that you click on some of the location in California to see what would happen were the ocean to rise.

Is I was right in talking about the need to have an economic plan for America, then I ask you to spend some time thinking about what these changes will do to our economy. Consider also what they will do to millions of displaced people all over the globe.

How many of them will want to immigrate to America? I don't know. I can guess that the Minute Men will meet them at the border with machine guns blazing. If Jared Diamond was right in "Collapse" about the decline of civilizations that failed to adapt, then we are not far from failure. I know what I am going to do about it. Do you?

Climate Saving Buildings

Architecture 2030 has just published it's 4th Newsletter. (HTML or PDF)

There are many influences pushing the architectural community in different directions. There is even not a blog entitled The Architecture of Fear, rather a study of design in a post-911 world.

I still find myself coming back to the basic fact that, unless we are willing to demand more of the development community: architects, developers, contractors and especially local government, we will not succeed in combating global warming. It makes little sense to me to focus solely on vehicles or to expect that LEEDS certification is all that we need to achieve. Architecture 2030 goes fare beyond that in their proposals.

Newsletter 4 makes a big deal about sustainable architecture in higher education and gives five examples, all from California: Sonoma State University, U. C. Berkeley, Los Angeles Community College, U. C. Santa Barbara and California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo. It is one sign of progress that CalPoly SLO has established a Renewable Energy Institute within the Architecture Department. While it may not seem much it definitely shows that attitudes are changing and that new architects will have been exposed to concepts that previous generations did not even consider. Once in a while you find a reason to hope.

Nuclear thaw

Every time the question is raised as to how we are to meet our energy demands in the face of Global Warming threats, the nuclear industry has a ready answer. Go Nuclear.

Thanks to Don Eichelberger who alerted the GP Issues list about the fact that there is now a bill in the California State Assembly that will remove the current restrictions California has placed on new nuclear power generating facilities. AB 719 (full text) Sponsored by Orange County Republican Chuck DeVore and N. California Republican Doug LaMalfa, I would hope that this bill will not get passed.

However, the fact that it could even get this far should be a wake up call for all of us. LaMalfa appears to be a Junior Richard Pombo: same issues, same property rights mantra, same use of the environmental bogeyman to rail against, and that is scary.

Don's email gives a good, short reason why we should all contact our California State Legislators and tell them that this is not what we, the public wants. Maybe General Electric wants this, but we do not.

AB 719 is written using the "Zero Carbon Emissions" terminology, but, according to Don, does not recognize a number of issues with Nuclear.

Even if those claims were true, there is still the matter of the wastes. The bill claims that, in ten years, by the time a new nuke is operating, there will, of course, be a safe storage site. A presumptuous hope, given the history, so far. Meanwhile, economic supports for nuclear power would continue, at the expense of funding real solutions.

Then, remember that the costs of any nuclear solution is heavily subsidized by the US Government. We should be pushing our Representatives to removed these subsidies from the energy market and to force the nuclear industry, if it goes forward at all, to carry the full cost of all the associated problems that is brings us. If that were to happen, nuclear may turn out to be the most expensive of options.

AB 719 is one bill that we can not allow to pass.

Practical solutions for global warming

I have been emphasizing local actions regarding global warming, specifically in the building sector. It is not a new idea. David Cobb has a column in the current issue of the Eureka Times-Standard regarding Local ways to act on global warming. He defines the crux of the problem as ourselves.

Mark Twain once quipped, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.” That's what many of us felt about the looming crisis that global climate change represents.

Cobb goes on to recommend that people adopt the Personal Global Warming Action Plan from the Redwood Alliance's Climate Actions Project. That is probably a good start.