When it comes to climate disruption, most people worry about the effect of their driving. They assume that's where they're doing the most damage. However if you're an average American, your home emits as much as your car. If you add in your portion of the office building you work in, the store you shop at, etc. you can understand that badly designed and maintained buildings are where 48% of this country's carbon emissions come from.
Compounding the damaging amount of energy that buildings use is the fact that they last so long. Any bad decisions we make in construction today will probably still be standing 50 years from now, leaking carbon. If we want to have any chance at all of decreasing our emissions 80% by 2050 (as the scientists say we have to do to avoid the worst parts of climate disruption), we have to start pushing now to make buildings more efficient. We all have to start building and renovating to waste less energy.
The problem is the incentives for builders are not at all geared toward considering energy use, much less decreasing it. After all, most architects and general contractors working on a home are not going to be paying the gas bills for the next five decades. They also aren't likely to get rewarded with more money or jobs if they spend an extra $1,000 installing an energy-efficient furnace or doubling the insulation in the attic. No, builders who want to stay in business put their money toward what is most visible and thus most likely to sell the unit: gleaming granite counters and cathedral ceilings, etc.
Unfortunately this system doesn't work well for the home's future occupants and their electricity bills or for the planet.
Knowing this, I went to a public meeting on green buildings at a town hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The meeting was made up of builders, developers and architects who had volunteered to examine the LEED Green Building Rating System. Through LEED, buildings can get certified as being environmentally friendly. (I should be clear that although I'm discussing only energy efficiency in this article, LEED deals with more than that: if building materials were developed locally, if the interior of the building is healthy for human habitation, etc.) The system is growing quickly more popular. According to Wikipedia, "since its inception in 1998, LEED has grown to encompass over 14,000 projects in 50 US States and 30 countries."
At this meeting, the builders, developers and architects were supposed to recommend whether or not the city should require all public buildings from now on be LEED certified. They had volunteered to do this assessment because they were environmentally conscious and they wanted to like the standards. But they didn't.
They talked about the enormous red-tape and difficulty. Among other things, they mentioned you had to pay someone to follow every garbage truck that left your site to verify how much waste got recycled. They said the instruction book on LEED regulations was over 1,000-pages long. They complained there was no way to streamline the process for multi-residency buildings, so each apartment in a building had to have its own heating and cooling system checked out in exactly the same way, even if there were 50 identical systems in the same building. This group of people maintained that all the paperwork and the verification of each step added roughly $100,000 to the price of each unit.
Even if these builders were only half right in the extent of their complaints, the usefulness of LEED is crippled. Instead of being a standard that can become universally accepted to push us rapidly toward decreasing our carbon emissions, the expense and difficulty of the LEED process effectively punishes builders who try to be green. LEED turns energy efficiency into something no one but the ultra wealthy can afford, the ultimate elitist frou-frou to attach to a top-dollar project.
And it means people who are more financially-strapped can't afford to save on their energy bills. Clearly, this won't decrease our carbon emissions by anything significant.
At the meeting, these Cambridge builders also mentioned that the bureaucratic nature of the LEED system crushed many innovations in energy efficiency before they even started. If a builder had an idea for saving energy that wasn't an option on the LEED forms, then it couldn't count toward certification. Any builder, already spending tens of thousands to get a building certified, surely wouldn't spent any extra money or time being environmental if the effort didn't count directly toward LEED.
This country has been so successful at innovation through consistently having lots of minds working on a problem than restricting the options to a few regimented choices on a form. Considering the global emergency of climate disruption, we need to innovate faster than we ever have, and that means using every idea we can.
Build-Green Kitty:
So here's my idea.
At the point that the construction on a building is about to start, 1% of the total budget is put in a bond by the state government. These bonds are kept in a statewide Build-Green Kitty. That 1% of each building budget is retained in the Kitty until one year after the building achieves full residency. At that point, the energy bills of the building are examined: gas, electric, oil, etc. Comparing these energy bills per square foot to other similar types of new buildings in the state, it's easy to tell numerically if it's doing better or worse than the average. Looking at the energy bills, you are looking not at computer modeling assumptions or the preferences of specialists who live several geographic regions away from yours. You're looking at proven results of energy efficiency in the field.
Those builders who built well enough to get bills lower than the average will get double their original 1% from the Kitty. Those who built less efficiently than the average will be fined an additional 1% of their project's cost. These fines will go back into the Kitty to pay off next year's winners. Those who did well will get rewarded. Those who didn't will get punished.
Funding for this project will come from the interest earned on the money in the Kitty. This Build-Green Kitty will cost a lot less than that interest, since it needs just the energy bills and a few inspectors to make surprise visits checking that each building is actually being lived in and that the heat's on. The interest earned on the money in the Kitty will therefore accumulate, allowing the reward for building an energy-efficient structure to increase until it becomes a bit of a jackpot for those builders who win it. At the same time, the fees for building an energy clunker will get more severe too, perhaps increasing by half a percent of the building cost each year, until it reached 10%. At that point, the financial rewards and punishments of considering energy in a new building will be too big to ignore.
Long before this, everyone in construction will begin to consider efficiency. They will start reading up on it, experimenting and talking about it. Every one of them will pass around ideas and work together. They will begin to innovate and compare innovations. There will be an industry-wide synergy much greater than any created from multiple-choice paperwork options.
With the Build-Green Kitty, builders won't be punished for thinking green. Instead those who got good results would get financially rewarded. This Build-Green Kitty would level the playing field, allowing home-owners who were financially strapped to be just as likely to have low energy bills as the ultra-wealthy.
The Build-Green Kitty would increase the energy standard for new buildings with every passing year because its incentives and punishments would increase each year. You as a builder will be competing not with a LEED-level calcified by a specialist years ago, but instead with innovations going on this year. You would be trying to be better than the average and that average would be a rapidly ascending target.
The Build-Green Kitty would also deal with geographic differences in a way the LEED standards don't because LEED standards are the same across the country. Installing a solar-water heater is really not going to decrease energy costs as much in Maine as in Arizona. And in Arizona an energy efficient furnace is really not going to help as much as in Maine. So rather than having one national building-standard, each state would have its own Kitty. By comparing builders in Connecticut only to builders in Connecticut, the Build-Green Kitty would foster regionally-appropriate innovation and adaptions.
The Buyers Market:
Finally, it's critical to get the market to reward the efficiency created. When you tour a newly-built home or business suite now, no realtor is able to talk objectively about how much heating or cooling costs will suck out of your wallet each month. The realtor won't yet have any data to show you. Without this knowledge, even if you wanted to, you are hampered in your ability to prefer and pay more for an energy-efficient house. You need a standardized energy guide to a house. You remember those big yellow Energyguide labels on washer/dryers and fridges? Isn't having info like that for a house more important than on a small appliance like a microwave? So on the door of every new building being sold, as well as on its realtor listing sheets, there should be a mandatory Energyguide label that shows how efficient this house will probably be in comparison to the average building stock and how much money it will probably cost each year. The Department of Energy has some great computer modeling software to do just this. It won't be as accurate as the info you get from living in the house for a year and looking at the bills, but it will give you a ballpark figure.
Transparency of information like this will make the housing market much better at reflecting the energy-efficiency of each building. Now that oil is up over $85 a barrel and natural gas is going up daily, buyers are going to crave that information. The resulting market demand will help reward the green builders even more.
Within three years, once the bugs in this process are worked out, the Build-Green Kitty will be spun off into a Renovate-Green Kitty to reward renovators of building stock, another critical need.
I believe the Build-Green and Renovate-Green Kitties will create an easy-to-verify cheap system that can be widely applied. It will foster regionally-specific innovation through increasingly powerful incentives. It will reward those who have proven results.
We have to have rapidly escalating results. If not for us, then for our children who in 2050 will be living in the buildings we create today while they attempt to deal with the climate problems we've handed them.
So I throw this open to you. Tell me where my idea needs work and clarifying. I'm not strong on actuarial sciences. Tell me where the numbers don't add up and who I'm being unfair to or what factors I haven't considered. Should I put more of the economic punishments and rewards on the buyers? Give me ideas. Let's innovate together.
Note: cross-posted on www.truthandprogress.com