Cooling the Warming

People are rapidly waking up to the ramifications of rising energy costs, atmospheric pollution and, most notably, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission increases. On the energy side, a simple trip to the gas station underscores the fact that oil prices have reached historical highs.

With regard to climate change, it is hard not to associate dramatic and unmistakable shifts in weather patterns with rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon and other GHGs.

In addition, there are almost-daily stories about China and India, the world’s largest emerging economies. With their rising populations and living standards come exponential increases in energy and natural resource consumption, raising awareness of the current and future effects of China’s and India’s energy choices on the rest of the world.

With this increased awareness comes a newly-charged search for solutions. While many smart minds are looking to the transportation, industrial and energy sectors to solve the climate challenge, many do not realize the over-sized contribution of the built environment.

Buildings are enormous energy consumers, requiring three-quarters of U.S. electricity just to operate. Buildings are the single largest producer by sector (40-plus percent) of U.S. GHGs. Moreover, the built environment produces about 40 percent of landfill waste and uses significant amounts of potable water and virgin resources.

A culture of inefficiency, fostered by entrenched interests in the design, engineering and construction trades, helps to ensure that buildings remain enormously resource-intensive. That’s five billion square feet of new buildings and 300 billion square feet of existing buildings that incorporate energy-inefficient materials and technologies.

But here at Rocky Mountain Institute, we know that it does not have to be so.

Rocky Mountain Institute’s Cooling the Warming initiative offers a new paradigm for the built environment in the United States and throughout the world. It is all about designing and constructing high-performance buildings that use less fossil-fuel-based energy and minimize waste production and water consumption.

It is about targeted research into new technologies that will not just help stabilize GHGs but actually reduce emissions from the built environment. And it is about education and disseminating new practice knowledge regarding the incredible advances that are already available in the building, engineering and design worlds.

Cooling the Warming involves the following components:

Indeed, as we look to the future, it appears that much of the future is already here. Even now developers are reaching beyond the LEED and Energy Star programs toward “net zero” buildings, designed to mitigate negative impacts related to construction and operations. Buildings in a variety of climates are producing more energy than they consume as a result of super-efficient design and the use of on-site renewable energy systems.

As building practitioners become more knowledgeable about climate-responsive strategies and the cost of renewable energy continues to decline, “regenerative” buildings will soon become the status quo. Cooling the Warming aims to accelerate this trend by promoting whole-systems thinking as standard practice, a practice that will make regenerative buildings the only option.

In short, Cooling the Warming sets an economically viable, accelerated path for changing the current paradigm that governs the built environment while radically reducing not only GHGs but also atmospheric pollution – sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter – that results from the burning of coal and natural gas to power our buildings.

The time for Cooling the Warming is now. Indeed, roughly 50 percent of the homes that the U.S. will need by 2030 have not yet been built. Our investment in Cooling the Warming now can and will alter the future, so that the built environment in 20 years is dramatically different from the built environment today.