In honor of Climate Week and World Green Building Day, I thought I would highlight several internationally oriented articles. World Green Building Day comes at an auspicious time, coinciding with the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City, which is celebrating Climate Week by creating general gridlock in Manhattan for an entire week, thereby significantly raising CO2 mitigation requirements for future generations.
World Green Building Day is an initiative of the World Green Building Council, which now boasts 14 national councils on five continents. To celebrate the day, the U.S. Green Building Council hosted a delegation of international green building experts who were on Capitol Hill Wednesday arguing for the expansion of green buildings as a climate change mitigation strategy. No doubt the delegation would have benefited from quoting the Rand Corporation study of lessons learned from the European Union and Australia in creating effective policies and programs to reduce energy consumption and climate emissions from buildings. Key findings from the study include the importance of standardization whether it is performance requirements for materials and technologies or standardization of energy performance requirements across different regions.
It seems to me that standardization in financial analysis and property assessment techniques also will be important for identifying and quantifying green attributes and their benefits compared with non-certified properties. It's likely that the Jones Lang LaSalle's new PASS program will be able to provide helpful services in this regard. I'd love to see some sort of incorporation of carbon and other environmental footprint liabilities that are likely to be part of future investors' analytical demands. This could be one small step toward Eco-nomics from our current Ego-nomic situation.
One of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons shows two dinosaurs laughing at this bizarre looking mammal as it walks along, while a third dinosaur is looking up at a snowflake coming out of the sky. The laughing dinosaurs remind me of the climate deniers who are crawling out from under their respective rocks this week to bleat about the infeasibility of President Obama's bold proposals for leadership in the climate arena.
Yet, lest anyone doubt the seriousness with which many global corporations are trying to attack the problem, the Carbon Disclosure Project's 2009 report demonstrates that broad-based activities are getting under way and yielding impressive results. Far from being the programmatic efforts of wild-eyed environmentalists, the Carbon Disclosure Project is being undertaken on behalf of nearly 500 institutional investors that control $55 trillion worth of capital. The report was written by that radical left wing commie front, PricewaterhouseCoopers and covered corporations whose combined carbon footprint represents approximately 12 percent of the world's CO2 emissions. While the main purpose of the Carbon Disclosure Project is to simply report companies' emissions, it provides a potentially reliable benchmark against which the progress of firms can be tracked.
I was fortunate to be able to attend Amory Lovins' closing keynote at the Urban Green Building Council's first annual meeting in New York City Wednesday afternoon. Rocky Mountain Institute's Lovins noted that since 1990, DuPont had decreased its CO2 footprint by nearly 80 percent, while UTC had reduced their carbon emissions per dollar of revenue by 45 percent in nearly 5 years. The energy productivity of General Electric has gone up 30 percent and Interface Carpet has reduced its net carbon emissions by 80 percent as well. Far from the economic ruin predicted by most of the "Ptolemaic astronomers" out there as a result of CO2 mitigation, these companies have been posting near record profits since they began implementing these measures.
Closing as this week's Look-Grandpa-I-picked-up-the-$20-bill-you-said-was-fake-but-it's-real! winner is our own Marc Gunther for braving the Energy and Technical Services Conference of the Food Marketing Institute and managing to escape without being tagged with a pocket protector. However, he did learn one of the dark secrets that we energy efficiency advocates have tried desperately to deny or hide at all costs: energy efficiency is dull, dull, dull. Mark, the Men in Taupe are coming to flash that little memory thingy at you. All kidding aside, there is much to be learned from the cutting-edge engineers who present at these kinds of events. These pioneers are laying the low-hanging fruit out in front of us and it's just begging to be eaten. Happy munching!
Image CC licensed by Flickr user otodo.