The Sustainable Home Blog

“[The President] shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
The United States Constitution, Article II, Section 3

Members of Congress, madame Speaker, distinguished guests, my fellow Americans…as many who have come before me, I stand before you this evening to fulfill a constitutional obligation. The first State of the Union address was delivered in straight forward manner to a newly formed congress by George Washington on January 8th, 1790. However, some two century’s latter, this time honored tradition has in devolved into political theatre with standing ovations predictably limited to one side of the aisle and political points cynically won from guests planted in the gallery. The American people deserve better, so this evening I will depart from my prepared remarks and tell the people of America and of the world what they need to hear rather than what they either want or expect to hear. Many will not like what I have to say, but this union and the world stand at a cross roads and there is no better forum than this to address this critical moment in history.

When George Washington delivered the first address in 1790 the population of the world stood at approximately 1 billion and the population of our new fledgling country was less than 4 million. Our nation’s borders had yet to reach the Pacific and many parts of the earth, including our great western states were still unexplored. Mankind’s footprint on this world was still relatively small. At the beginning of our nation’s life, it was just and reasonable to limit the focus of this address to our new and fragile union. However, today we cannot understand the state of our union without first putting it in both its historical context and in the context of the state of our planet. To do otherwise, would be to put us in grave danger.

In contrast to the time of Washington’s address, the population of the earth today exceeds 6.6 billion and our country’s population stands at nearly 304 million. As a result of that growth, mankind’s footprint on this world has in many ways begun to exceed the limits of the earth’s carrying capacity. We see the effects of these limits manifested in record high natural gas and heating oil prices, $200/barrel oil, $10/gallon gasoline, climate change, a persistent and prolonged state of financial crisis, the ongoing military conflicts in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and in the continuing food shortages and riots in both our country and around the world. But these issues, as serious and troubling as them may seem, are merely symptoms, not the root cause of the problems we face today.

When America’s space program provided us with the first photos of our planet from the perspective of space, we were awed not only by the beauty of our planet, but by it’s lonely isolation. One small planet providing an island oasis for humanity in an infinite universe. We can easily grasp the limitations of an island, but we have naively thought of the earth as an infinite source of life nurturing resources. The truth however, is that every planet like every island has a limited supply of natural resources and our planet is no different. As the world’s population and economy has grown, our natural resources have been systematically exhausted to the point were we can no longer depend on their increasing supply to fuel our economic growth and standards of living. Our undeniable reality is that we will have to accept and adjust to the limits imposed by the closed system we call Earth.

The challenge these natural limits will impose on our nation and the world will exceed any that we have faced either as a nation or as a community of nations. Our state of the world is that we have outgrown and exceeded the capacity of the earth to sustain the current level of population at current levels of consumption. Every other problem we face today is but a symptom of this one undeniable fact. Our choice is simple, we can either chase after symptoms and descend into a death spiral of conflict over dwindling resources, or we can use what remains of the earth’s resources to create a sustainable world for thousands of future generations. As a community of nations, we will have one chance and one chance only to accomplish this transition and the time is now. This is our moment to fail or succeed. If we fail to use what remains of our fossil fuel and other resources to successfully make this transition, the consequences will be dire and the world will return to a pre-industrial existence capable of sustaining only a fraction of the world’s existing population. Time is not on our side and we have only two, perhaps three decades to complete the task. It is incumbent upon this union, and the people of this nation to lead the world in this transition.

Our union began with a simple declaration penned by Thomas Jefferson.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Historically, as we pursued these simple Rights, we have much we can hold with pride and much we must hold with shame. As a country we have been both a shinning beacon of hope, opportunity, freedom, and prosperity; and we have also practiced slavery, committed genocide against our native populations, and covertly and overtly meddled in the affairs of other sovereign nations. We have won wars justly fought in the name of freedom and lost wars with murkier political and moral aims. Today we are no longer the the republic our founding fathers envisioned. We have become the most powerful nation in the history of the world….a virtual empire with over 800 foreign military posts and bases and a military budget exceeding the next 46 countries combined. If you add all of the money spent to maintain and support our worldwide empire by the DOD, the CIA, the Treasury, the FBI the State Department, Homeland Security, the Veterans Administration, and the interest we pay on past military expenditures, it amounts to well over $1-trillion per year and growing. This figure does even include the “supplemental” funds being spent on our current middle east conflicts. These expenditures are not sustainable, and the slow creeping growth of this overreaching empire has turned us into the world’s largest debtor nation and moved us far from the founding principles and ideals of our nation.

The economic success we experienced for the better part of the last century has given us the highest standard of consumption in the world, but by many measures, not the highest quality of life. For many of us, our pursuit of happiness has become a frantic, costly, and unsatisfying pursuit of the trivial and meaningless. In just a few decades we have managed to transform the strongest, most dynamic manufacturing economy in the world into a economy completely dependent on consumerism and debt. In a country with a negative savings rate, record high credit card debt, and declining home values, our consumer led economy is long past sustainable.

Yet it is from this point in our history that we must face our greatest challenge. If we continue to look at symptoms, our situation to many will seem hopeless and out of desperation and fear we will be tempted to blame others for our problems. Demagogues have and will call for pre-emptive military action against those that control what remains of the world’s rapidly depleting natural resources. But there can be no peace in the context of scarcity and no pursuit of happiness without peace. The root cause of our problems will not and cannot be solved by military action.

No other resource defines our current state than the world’s declining reserves of oil. Beginning with the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1865, our country rapidly became the world’s first oil economy and this cheap and abundant energy resource would be the fuel and engine of growth that enabled us to become the world’s greatest economic power. However, U.S. production of oil peaked in 1971 and the petroleum power center quickly moved to middle east. Today it is painfully evident that oil production has peaked world wide and at current rates of consumption and depletion only half of what the world uses today will be available in just two decades. We will face similar “peaks” and painful declines in the production of coal, natural gas, and even uranium in the not so distant future.

Transitioning to a post fossil fuel world will not be easy. It will require sacrifice, high levels of cooperation, leadership, and the personal effort of every citizen of both this nation and of our community of nations. The last time our nation and much of the world was called upon to truly join together for a common cause was during WWII. That generation met it’s challenge and now it is our turn. The stakes have never been higher and the future of humanity literally hangs in the balance.

There will be some that say that “the market” will naturally adjust to the decline in fossil fuel resources and that all we have to do is stand back and trust in the magic of free markets. There is an element of truth is that view and one could point to recent growth in the renewable energy segment as proof of the validity of that position. However, like it or not, government is an integral part of the “market” and decades worth of federal and state laws, tax codes, and zoning and building regulations have been erected in direct or indirect support of our fossil fuel dependent economy. These laws, codes, and regulations will have to be rapidly deconstructed and rewritten to support a new sustainable, steady state economy fueled by renewable energy sources.

I have referenced population size several times in this address, and now I must return to this difficult and sensitive topic. The topics of human life and family size in this country have always been sacred, however as a nation and as a community of nations, we must face the very real limits of our planet to sustain life. The earth has a limited carrying capacity and can only support a reasonable standard of living for a given population size, and this capacity has already been exceeded. The world’s population can now only grow at the expense of our collective living standards and at the risk of increased and severe suffering. The only rational and humane course of action, is to limit and then reverse population growth in both the U.S. and the world.

The political, economic, and technical challenges we are facing are unprecedented and nothing we have faced in the past has prepared us for this moment. For the first time in human history we cannot meet these challenges and expect to succeed merely as individuals, or political parties, or as religious groups, or as nation states or as blocks of nations. To meet this challenge at this time, the entire world of nations must all join together in order to succeed or risk the catastrophic collapse of civilization.

Over the coming days I will be outlining a broad range of programs to meet this challenge. There will be no time for the usual political posturing or distractions, or for the interference of vested interests. Reason and events tell us that we all share the same vested interest and that our very survival is at stake. The american people will expect Congress to act boldly and decisively. The world will be watching.

First, to free up the required capital and additional engineering and R&D talent required to make the transition, I am proposing that we begin to aggressively reduce the expenditures of our military empire. A reduction in our current defense budget by 50% would still leave us spending as much as the next 5 countries combined. We can no longer afford to have our military robbing us of the nation’s industrial capital and technical talent. We must and will create a new manufacturing economy in America based on renewable energy and other sustainable technologies.

This new economy will be powered by electricity derived from solar and wind for our peak power demands, and most importantly by geothermal energy for our base load demand. In order to meet the challenge of making the transition to a post fossil fuel economy, I am proposing a government funded and fast tracked “Manhattan Project” to replace all of our coal fired power plants with geothermal energy by the year 2030.

Since we can only meet our future energy needs by addressing both the demand and supply sides of the equation, we must aggressively revise our tax codes to provide both credits and write-offs for a much broader array of energy conservation technologies and products. For example, we currently provide no incentives for solar hot water heating and rather than leading the world, as we must and should, the U.S. ranks behind both Solvenia and Albania in the the application of this technology.

The challenge of transforming our food supply may be one of our greatest. Food in U.S. travels an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table and we are dangerously dependent on oil and natural gas which supply the feedstocks for the pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers on which our centralized and mechanized industrial food system depends. As evidenced by our growing food crisis, this system is rapidly becoming unsustainable and to help bridge the transition to a more localized food delivery system we will reinstitute the “victory garden” program of WWII and create millions of citizen farmers to secure our nations food supply.

Our residential, commercial, and industrial buildings consume 73% of our electricity and 20% of our natural gas. Easy and cheap energy has made building designer’s environmentally complacent and for the last 100 years we have relied on brute force heating and cooling solutions to prop up building designs totally inadequate for their environment. That practice must end and I am proposing that all new buildings in this country be designed to a zero energy standard and that tax incentives be put in place to help convert our existing building stock into some semblance of energy efficiency.

The pattern of our homes, cities, and transportation systems was created in a time of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. As oil and natural gas become increasingly scarce we will have to reshape our patterns and style of living. The new plug-in hybrids that are just appearing on the market will help to replace our use of liquid fuels for driving, but this new technology will soon cause us to exceed our electrical generation capacity. Our one car, one person pattern of commuting from isolated suburbs to work and shopping centers will have to be transformed. As a start, I am proposing that all knowledge workers be allowed the right to telecommute and to write off the the use of their home offices on their individual tax returns. We must also divert much of our unproductive defense budget and aggressively invest in light rail transportation systems and in our national rail system. In addition, our residential zoning laws will have to eased so that our pattern of suburban sprawl can naturally evolve new centers and nodes of commerce within walking and bicycling distance of our population.

However difficult, we must begin to face the limited carrying capacity of earth with regard to population. As a beginning, I am proposing that our tax codes be revised to support and reflect a stable and sustainable population, and that the tax credit for dependents be limited to one child. Out of fairness this new policy will not be retroactive nor apply to adopted children.

Lastly, we must change the way we keep score. One of the reasons we are in this mess is that classical economics assumes that natural resources like oil are infinite and makes no accounting of their depletion nor of the negative environmental effects of their use. We can no longer count the clean up of a super fund site as having the same positive impact to our gross national product as the building of a 747. To make matters worse, for decades our government has cooked the books to make things look considerably better than they appear. If we were held to the same accounting standards as our fortune 500 companies our annual deficits would actually be about ten times what is normally reported and we would have had to declare bankruptcy long ago. If we are to successfully transition to a sustainable way of life in the next 20 years then we must be able to accurately and reliably measure our progress and to that end I am proposing that we upgrade our national accounting practices to comply with a more realistic and accurate ecological economics standard.

The next two decades will be extremely disruptive and difficult and it is unlikely that any of us will emerge without great hardship and sacrifice. If there was ever a time for courage, for hard work, for faith, for strength of character, now is that time. I am counting on the people of this nation, on the people of the world, and on our community of nations to meet these challenges for the benefit of our children and grandchildren and for a thousand generations to come.

Thank you all and may God bless our nation and this planet.

This “address” is obviously a fiction and although much of what I say is factual even today, I doubt that any politician would have the courage the be this honest until things were well beyond the point of no return.

The market has begun to respond and it is not by accident that plug-in hybrids will begin to appear just as the general public is becoming aware of “peak oil”. The basic story line will run its course and we may just muddle through and make the transition in time to prevent a significant die-off of the world’s population. My guess is that it will be a messy transition with much political posturing, great suffering, and considerable military mischief.

Whether or not we do manage to muddle through, in the end, the world will no longer resemble the one we know today.

“In 1946, when the American post war housing boom started, the average house was 1100 square feet and housed 5 people. Fifty years latter, in 1996 the average house would grow to 2200 square feet and house 2.6 people and by 2007, fueled by easy credit, the average American home would would become the equivalent of a Hummer, “weighing in” at super-sized 2,400 square feet.”

In 1934, during the depths of the Depression, Congress passed the National Housing Act to strengthen a deeply troubled housing market. This act created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) which was amended in 1938 to create the Federal National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) – an entity designed to help mortgage lenders gain access to capital for mortgage loans. An important element of this legislation was to make mortgage funds available to more Americans by protecting lenders from the risk of default. In its earliest days, Fannie Mae nationalized the mortgage industry by creating the first mechanism in America for selling individual mortgages (backed the U.S. government) into a secondary market.

When the FHA and Fannie Mae were created, the housing industry was flat on its back:

• Two million construction workers had lost their jobs.
• Housing finance was a fragmented, inefficient and illiquid. Mortgage rates varied considerably from region to region. In some economically distressed regions there were simply no funds available.
• Terms were very difficult to meet for homebuyers seeking mortgages.
• Lending institutions would issue a mortgage, collect payments, and file the mortgage away until the principal was paid off. A lack of available, consistently priced capital put a hard ceiling on the number of new mortgages that could be issued.
• Mortgage loan terms were limited to 50 percent of the property’s market value. Borrower’s were faced with a 50% down payment and a repayment schedule spread over three to five years and ending with a large balloon payment.
• America was primarily a nation of renters. Only four in 10 households owned homes.
• Homes were NOT considered as investments and refi’s and equity withdrawals were extremely rare.

In the 1940’s after WWII, the FHA and the GI Bill helped finance millions of homes for returning veterans and their families. This post war period would mark the peak of American economic dominance. We were still the world’s major oil producer AND exporter and due to the devastation of the European manufacturing base, we dominated the world in virtually every industrial and manufacturing sector.

Fueled by cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy, this period would also mark the beginning of an American landscape built around the automobile and the “American (suburban) Dream”. These were “heady” times and the freedom of movement afforded by the automobile combined with affordable housing for millions of returning GI’s would prove seductive. We would build cars and homes as if the gasoline, natural gas, fuel oil, and electricity that made driving and comfortable home dwelling possible would be cheap and abundant forever. The big lumbering gas guzzling V8’s of the forties and fifties would be driven home to the energy guzzling, thinly insulated, drafty homes of a new suburbia. The cars would last about 5 five years. The homes however would last an average of 75 years.

In 1946, when the American post war housing boom started, the average house was 1100 square feet and housed 5 people. Fifty years latter, in 1996 the average house would grow to 2200 square feet and house 2.6 people and by 2007, fueled by easy credit, the average American home would would become the equivalent of a Hummer, “weighing in” at super-sized 2,400 square feet. The peaking of U.S. oil production in 1971, the formation of OPEC in 1973 and the associated energy crisis’ of the 1970’s would force much needed improvements in our building codes. However, today’s homes are still grossly under-insulated and 1/3 of their energy losses are still the result of air leaks through poorly constructed exterior walls! Our home energy standards are possibly worse than our car and truck CAFE standards (federal mileage requirements).  Look underneath the hood of our homes and you’ll 500 HP, super charged forced air furnaces lumbering away in our basements and holding the cold at bay with the brute force of natural gas and oil. We are still behaving as if cheap energy sources are forever.

Adding to the problem is the current culture of “homes as investments” and average ownership cycles of only 5 years. We are a culture with a myopic time horizon where granite countertops, super-sized floorplans, and home-equity financed SUV’s trump energy efficiency and solar hot water systems. This “housing bubble” culture may soon be going the way of the dinosaur with the fall of the sub-prime loan market, the collapse of Wall Street’s sleazy and toxic secondary market for home mortgages, and the first serious decline in home values since the great depression. However, the final death blow will come with the peaking of fossil fuel production, fuel shortages, blackouts, and the obvious and urgent need to transform our housing stock into some semblance of energy efficiency.

 ”All healing is essentially the release from fear.”- A Course in Miracles

If you’ve been my reading previous posts you know that I believe that “sustainable” in the context of “home”, can only mean “net zero” or “energy zero” construction. What that means in practical terms, is that the thermodynamics of the building design (insulation levels, window performance, tightness, solar gain, etc.) must be good enough to allow the reasonable application renewable resources like solar or wind power to render the building a net zero energy consumer. By net zero, I mean that the home may have PV system that uses the grid as a storage device and although it may draw power from grid at times, on average the home delivers at least as much power to grid as it consumes.

The HERS Index is a good metric to help quantify the design performance required to meet this standard. I my opinion, the design of the home prior to the application of renewables, to be “good enough”, must have a HERS Index score of 25 or better to be “net zero ready”.

Unfortunately of the million or so homes built every year, my guess is that less than a thousand (perhaps less than 100) meet this standard. These are the hardy souls that build Earth Ships or are determined enough to find the few professionals who know how it’s done, regardless of the climate or any bias toward a specific building system. But in the long run it’s not the new homes that will be the challenge, it’s the over 100 million existing homes that grace the HERS Index scale from 130 to 150+. Some of these will of course be lost causes, economically not worth the effort, however the vast majority can be reasonably retrofitted, if not to 25 threshold, at least to below 50.

Stay tuned, I’ll be writing a series of “Zero Energy Home” posts that will cover the thermodynamic basics and strategies for retrofitting our existing housing stock.

“By their own follies they perished, the fools.” 
- Homer, The Odyssey

The growth of civilization has been intimately linked to our ability to harness energy since man’s discovery of fire. Our reliance on biomass (wood) and eventually, the wind and hydro power of mills would limit our growth until the use of coal and the invention of the steam engine would launch the industrial revolution. However, it was the discovery of energy dense, crude oil in 1859 that would catapult us into a whole new age of growth, mobility, and abundance.

What is “sustainable” is based on carrying capacity, and every human advance in the use and amount of available energy would serve to increase both the population and economic carrying capacity of the earth. The shear abundance of cheap oil over the last 150 years would change the face of architecture and our built environment. Architects and building designers no longer had to consider local climate conditions, they could let their imaginations and ego’s run wild (or lazy) and rely on brute force heating and cooling to save the day. Architects like Phillip Johnson would build their design fame and fortune with glass homes in Connecticut and glass skyscrapers in Houston. Buildings that reply for their very existence on cheap and abundant energy.

Phillip Johnson - Glass House Connecticut

Phillip Johnson - Houston Skyscraper

Mass housing in the U.S. would follow a similar path. Not only would the buildings themselves be inefficient statements of style over substance and function, but the sprawling pattern of development based on cheap oil and the automobile, would create a formula for maximum energy consumption.

The OPEC engineered “oil shock” of the 1970’s would bring about some much needed building energy standards, but vested interests continue to play the “politics of energy codes” and keep us far from anything remotely sustainable. The recent Green movement is a positive step, but new standards such as Energy Star and LEED for Homes do nothing more than tweak the status quo in the direction of sustainability.

If we assume cheap and abundant energy will be with us forever, then the critical constraints to the carrying capacity of our current way of living and building are environmental degradation, water, and global warming. Observing the behavior of many our politicians and policy makers this would seem to be case. Unfortunately, because these issues are hard to economically quantify and the consequences can be conveniently be passed on to future generations, actions tend to come in tepid half measures like raising the CAFE standards to 35 miles/gallon over several years.

But what if cheap and abundant energy will NOT be with us forever? What if the critical constraint to the carrying capacity of our current way of living and building where the peaking and eventual depletion of fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal? What if this constraint was not off in some nebulous, non-renewable resource future, but was now or very close to now? What if this where the eleventh hour? How would this change the way we build?

Based on data published by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) the worldwide production of conventional crude oil peaked in May of 2005 and is currently in an undulating plateau. If we add unconventional sources (deep water, oil sands, etc.) worldwide production peaked in February of 2006 and is also stuck in an undulating plateau. Matthew Simmons, advisor to the Bush administration, author of “Twilight in the Desert”,and investment banker to the energy sector, says that “Serious peak oil analysts all agree that peak oil is 0 to 10 years away.“

The U.S. production of conventional easy-to-get natural gas peaked in the early 70’s and we have only just been able to keep our supply versus demand heads above water with imports from Canada and Mexico and the aggressive exploration of unconventional, hard to get sources like shale and coal methane gas.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that we will be facing a supply crunch sometime in 2010. Big oil executives, speaking in “peak oil code”, are now stating publicly that the “era of cheap oil in over”. There have been more than a half dozen Peak Oil related documentaries released since 2003 and Leonardo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour documentary debuts this month.

Peak oil changes everything. It is a hard limit to carrying capacity to both population and economic growth. As consumption and depletion widens the gap between supply and demand, we will become supply constrained and as supply declines economic growth must follow. Building design will be climate driven and zero energy buildings will soon become a matter of necessity, not choice. Not in some nebulous green future, but by the end of this decade. This is the eleventh hour.

The current state of our green, sustainable building “movement” may amount to nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Seeing the words “sustainable” and “green” used without much precision and diluted more and more as advertising adjectives, I’ve been a little obsessed recently with what these words really mean or should mean.

For me “sustainable building” speaks to the balance of inputs and outputs within a closed, and resource limited, eco-system, whether it be an island, a continent, or planet earth. It’s all about carrying capacity.

Sustainablity recognizes limits and in the context of our homes and built environment, it should be taken from the meaning of sustained yield used in forestry and agriculture. Used with precision, sustainability must mean capable of being sustained for millennia in the context of a closed eco-system, and limiting factors must include both population size and available resources.

It is usually only politically correct to speak of population growth as being a problem in the context of third world countries, but population growth in any country is eventually unsustainable and in the U.S. we have only been able to sustain our own growth by importing our “carrying capacity”. Economist Kenneth Boulding postulated an interesting and sobering set of theorems on population growth.

1st Theorem: “The Dismal Theorem” If the only ultimate check on the growth of population is misery, then the population will grow until it is miserable enough to stop its growth.

2nd Theorem: “The Utterly Dismal Theorem” This theorem states that any technical improvement can only relieve misery for a while, for so long as misery is the only check on population, the [technical] improvement will enable population to grow, and will soon enable more people to live in misery than before. The final result of [technical] improvements, therefore, is to increase the equilibrium population which is to increase the total sum of human misery.

3rd Theorem: “The moderately cheerful form of the Dismal Theorem” Fortunately, it is not too difficult to restate the Dismal Theorem in a moderately cheerful form, which states that if something else, other than misery and starvation, can be found which will keep a prosperous population in check, the population does not have to grow until it is miserable and starves, and it can be stably prosperous.

All this sounds more than a bit depressing, however commenting on the work of Thomas Malthus, Boulding puts the population issue in a more positive light. “… the [Malthus] essay, punctures the easy optimism of the utopians of any generation. But by revealing the nature of at least one dragon that must be slain before misery can be abolished, its ultimate message is one of hope, and the truth, however unpleasant, tends not to create despair, but activity of the right kind.”

In looking for other works that might inform my search for a better definition and understanding of sustainability for housing, I ran across the work of A. A. Bartlett. In his paper Reflections on Sustainabiity, Population Growth, and the Environment (2006), Bartlett postulates twenty some Laws of Sustainability. In the Bartlett Laws that follow, where appropriate, I’ve added my own sustainable housing corollary in italics.

First Law: Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

U.S. urban sprawl and the growth in home sizes and the associated energy and resource consumption is not sustainable

Second Law: In a society with a growing population and/or growing rates of consumption of resources, the larger the population, and/or the larger the rates of consumption of resources, the more difficult it will be to transform the society to the condition of sustainability.

Retrofitting over 100 million (mostly energy inefficient) homes in American to a condition of sustainability will be a monumental task.

Third Law: The response time of populations to changes in the human fertility rate is the average length of a human life, or approximately 70 years. (Bartlett and Lytwak 1995) [This is called "population momentum."]

Since our housing stock could easily double in 70 years, new and retrofitted homes should only be built to net zero energy standards.

Fourth Law: The size of population that can be sustained (the carrying capacity) and the sustainable average standard of living of the population are inversely related to one another. The higher the standard of living one wishes to sustain, the more urgent it is to stop population growth.

The size of population that can be sustained (the carrying capacity) and the sustainable average size and resource consumption of our homes are inversely related to one another.

Fifth Law: One cannot sustain a world in which some regions have high standards of living while others have low standards of living.

The U.S. cannot sustain average home sizes that are more than twice the average size of other developed country’s.

Sixth Law: All countries cannot simultaneously be net importers of carrying capacity.

Seventh Law: A society that has to import people to do its daily work (“we can’t find locals who will do the work.”) is not sustainable.

Eighth Law: Sustainability requires that the size of the population be less than or equal to the carrying capacity of the ecosystem for the desired standard of living.

The importation of such a large percentage of our carrying capacity makes the U.S. sprawling suburban style of living extremely vulnerable.

Ninth Law: ( The lesson of “The Tragedy of the Commons” ) (Hardin 1968): The benefits of population growth and of growth in the rates of consumption of resources accrue to a few; the costs of population growth and growth in the rates of consumption of resources are borne by all of society.

The benefits of suburban sprawl accrue to the developer and auto companies; the benefits of poor energy efficiency accrue to energy companies and utilities; but the costs are borne by us all.

Tenth Law: Growth in the rate of consumption of a non-renewable resource, such as a fossil fuel, causes a dramatic decrease in the life-expectancy of the resource.

Inadequate U.S. building energy standards are contributing to a rapid depletion of our natural gas and other fossil fuel resources.

Eleventh Law: The time of expiration of non-renewable resources can be postponed, possibly for a very long time, by:

• technological improvements in the efficiency with which the resources are recovered and used
• using the resources in accord with a program of “Sustained Availability,” (Bartlett 1986)
• recycling
• the use of substitute resources

Net zero building energy standards will be necessary to slow the depletion of fossil fuels in a post peak oil and gas world.

Twelfth Law: When large efforts are made to improve the efficiency with which resources are used, the resulting savings are easily and completely wiped out by the added resources that are consumed as a consequence of modest increases in population.

The retrofitting our existing housing stock to a much higher energy standard will be completed negated by even a modest growth rate in new homes, however energy efficient those new homes may be.

Thirteenth Law: The benefits of large efforts to preserve the environment are easily canceled by the added demands on the environment that result from small increases in human population.

Smart growth is an oxymoron.

Fourteenth Law: (Second Law of Thermodynamics) When rates of pollution exceed the natural cleansing capacity of the environment, it is easier to pollute than it is to clean up the environment.

Fifteenth Law: (Eric Sevareid’s Law); The chief cause of problems is solutions. (Sevareid 1970)

Sixteenth Law: Humans will always be dependent on agriculture.

Building should restricted on agricultural land. The highest and best use of land is for agriculture.

Seventeenth Law: If, for whatever reason, humans fail to stop population growth and growth in the rates of consumption of resources, Nature will stop these growths.

Energy shortages due to peak oil and gas will stop housing growth and force the transformation of our existing housing stock.

Eighteenth Law: In local situations within the U.S., creating jobs increases the number of people locally who are out of work. (Newly created jobs in a community temporarily lowers the unemployment rate (sayfrom 5% to 4%), but then people move into the community to restore the unemployment rate to its earlier higher value (of 5%), but this is 5% of the larger population, so more individuals are out of work than before.)

Nineteenth Law: Starving people don’t care about sustainability.

People living in slums don’t care about sustainable housing.

Twentieth Law: The addition of the word “sustainable” to our vocabulary, to our reports, programs, and papers, to the names of our academic institutes and research programs, and to our community initiatives, is not sufficient to ensure that our society becomes sustainable.

The addition of the phase “sustainable housing” or “sustainable development” or “green” to our vocabulary is not sufficient to ensure that our built environment becomes sustainable.

Twenty-First Law: Extinction is forever.

The current state of our green, sustainable building “movement” may amount to nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

“People cannot stand too much reality” - Carl Jung

I’ve been musing lately about exactly what it means to be sustainable in the context of residential building. Since words are the symbols we blogger’s use to communicate, I checked my American Heritage dictionary and found that “sustainable” in today’s lexicon means “capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment” as in “sustainable agriculture”. That didn’t quite do it for me. It’s the kind of feel good definition that allows people to build 10,000 SF homes with bamboo floors, dual flush toilets, and a HERS index of 85 and call themselves “green”. So I continued looking and found that one of the definitions for “sustain” is “to support from below; keep from falling or sinking; or to prop.” Since our built environment has been “propped” up and shaped by cheap oil for about a 100 years, I found that definition more on the mark.

Getting back to our friend Dr. Jung, our not so sustainable residential lives are about to be turned upside down by three major reality checks. At the risk of being labeled as a “crazed and raving doomsdayer”, let just say, it is going to be painful.

Reality Check #1 – Global Warming

“When applied to material things, the term “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron.” - A.A. Bartlett

Thanks in part to an “Inconvenient Truth” global warming has already penetrated our collective consciousness, and for the 20% of the population that’s in denial it is already “too much reality”. American is responsible for about 25% of the green house gases that contribute to global warming. Buildings in America account for about 42% of that total and our homes contribute about half of that total or 21% of this country’s GHG emissions. But that’s just part of the story, because of the sprawling suburban pattern of WHERE we build our homes, our automobile lifestyle compounds the problem. According to the Energy Information Agency, in 2001 107.4 million households logged 2.3 trillion miles commuting, shopping, and schlepping the kids to school, consuming 113.1 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel in the process.

Fortunately for our Jungian psyche’s, global warming is a slow moving water torture kind of crisis that we can safely ignore until Disney World Orlando is an underwater attraction.

Reality Check #2 – Peak Oil

“The time when we could count on cheap oil… is clearly ending.” - David O’Reilly, Chairman, Chevron, 2005

Peak Oil has yet to enter our collective consciousness, in fact most people don’t even know what it means. Peak Oil is the date when the peak of the world’s (crude oil) production rate is reached. After this date the rate of production will enter a long, painful and terminal decline. Peak oil in the U.S. was reached in 1970 and in N. America sometime in the early 1980’s. There is a growing consensus that global Peak Oil either already occurred (as early as 2005) or will happen sometime between now and 2010. Does that mean that production will fall off a cliff and there won’t be any oil? No, but it does mean that demand will very shortly exceed supply and that there will be shortages, rationing, and major economic upheaval and other changes to our “cheap and plentiful oil” lifestyles.

Source: peakoil.ie

“It’s no secret anymore that for every nine barrels of oil we consume, we are only discovering one.”
- British Petroleum Statistical Review of World Energy

“…we don’t have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.” - Howard Kunster The Long Emergency (2005)

“Such a peak would require sharp reductions in oil consumption, and the competition for increasingly scarce energy would drive up prices, possibly to unprecedented levels, causing severe economic damage. While these consequences would be felt globally, the United States, as the largest consumer of oil and one of the nations most heavily dependent on oil for transportation, may be especially vulnerable .” - 2007 GAO (U.S. Government Accountability Office) Peak Oil Report

“The U.S. food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy. This disparity is made possible by nonrenewable fossil fuel stocks.” - Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels, 2003

Source: Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas

Since only 9% of our housing stock is heated directly by oil, the most painful impact of Peak Oil on our residential lifestyles will be on our one car, one person commutes.

Expect a major increase in walking, bicycling, carpooling, telecommuting, the use of public transportation and an end to suburban sprawl and strip malls.

Expect globalization to take a backseat to localization.

Expect some people and governments to behave badly.

Expect “victory gardens” in the front and back yards of suburbia.

Expect 10 to 20 years of unrest while we make the painful transition to a new world order

Unlike Global Warming, Peak Oil will be an “in your face” crisis, impossible to ignore or deny.

Reality Check #3 – Peak Natural Gas

“It seems obvious to most viewers the [U.S.] future production will decline in a cliff in the near future…” - Jean Laherrere, ASPO Berlin, 2004

As if Peak Oil were not enough “reality”, we also have to get our Jungian heads around Peak Natural Gas. According to Energyfiles Ltd., natural gas will peak in N. America about 2010 and globally between 2030 and 2035.

Unfortunately, natural gas is different animal from oil. Oil is a nice viscous, not very volatile liquid that can be easily shipped around the world and processed locally into to gas, diesel, fertilizer and other products. Natural gas however, must be refrigerated to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit to convert it to Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and shipped in very expensive container ships that amount to small nuclear bombs. Because the global LNG infrastructure (ships and docking facilities) is relatively undeveloped, the impact of Peak Natural Gas is basically confined and defined locally by a geographical network of pipelines. For us that network includes Mexico and Canada, and our “reality” is that we may be facing shortages by the end of this decade or sooner.

So how bad is this new energy reality? How does energy flow into our homes, and how will shortages affect our lives? Let’s first take a look at electrical generation in the U.S. Unfortunately, just about every power plant built after 1980 was designed to run on natural gas, so we’ve spent the past 25 years adding to the problem.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Agency 2005

The good news is that thanks to venerable coal, Peak Oil & Natural Gas only impact about 22% of our current electrical generating capacity. The bad news is that is more than enough to cause brownouts, blackouts, and rationing, especially during the summer when air conditioning loads peak.

As we painfully replace a 20% plus shortfall over the coming two decades, expect phenomenal growth in nuclear, coal, solar, wind, and geothermal power plants.

The next chart shows the relative residential energy consumption by energy source. Since over 55% of our homes and some 70% of new homes are heated by natural gas, shortages caused by Peak Natural Gas are going to be a major problem!

Source: U.S. Energy Information Agency 2005

Given this new energy reality, homes built to our current energy code or even to an Energy Star or LEED standard amount to nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The energy train wreck we face demands that we only build and retrofit homes to a Net Zero Energy Standard. Homes that can be completely served on-site by wind, solar, hydro or geothermal power sources. This will require a new energy standard based on a HERS index of better than 25%, well below the current Energy Star/LEED minimum standard of 85%.

“We’ve invented the system that has given us this rise in life; now we begin the descent. We’ll either have to invent our way out of it, or go back to the way it was before.” - Byron King, Agora Financial Symposium, 2007

”We don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A large part of the collective dynamic that shapes our environment is embedded in the American culture of the individual. A culture enshrined in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” As a result, our American built environment has been largely shaped by the opposing forces of our individual “pursuit of happiness” no matter what the environmental or social cost and the countervailing forces of our communal needs for health and well-being.

Today we find ourselves directly in the cross-hairs of those opposing forces. Global warming has reached a tipping point of no return and we can now only mitigate the longterm effects, not reverse them. Peak Oil, declining worldwide production, and the point at which demand exceeds supply is expected within the next decade. With 120+ million housing units in the U.S. contributing 21% of our greenhouse gas emissions and consuming over 35% of our electricity, our “individual pursuit of happiness” has to be trumped by the needs of “our communal health and well-being”.

The way we build (and finance) housing in this country is no longer sustainable. Our model energy codes are still a triumph of the individual over community, and Energy Star and LEED for Homes merely tweak the status quo in the direction of slightly better energy efficiency.

The truth is that truly sustainable homes (even net zero energy homes) are economically feasible. The cost premium for homes that exceed our current energy standards by 75% or more is only 5 to 15%. At that point (given a sunny climate) it only takes another 10% to reach “net zero”. If you consider that average new home sizes have increased 20% (400SF) to 2,434 SF since 1990, then rolling back average sizes to a very comfortable 2,000SF more than pays for a truly sustainable energy standard. Roll that back to a comfortable 1,800SF and the cost to have a net zero energy home becomes FREE!

Too much of a sacrifice? By comparison, the average home in Japan is 1,000 SF, 930 SF in Ireland, and 815 SF in the U.K.

“Green or environmental accounting describes an effort to incorporate environmental benefits and costs into economic decision making.” - Gernot Wagner

If you didn’t think economic and accounting theory were important in our lives, consider this.

Much of what enters our national model energy codes is a some point filtered through a cost benefit analysis (CBA). CBA’s are subject to the principle of “lies, damn lies, and statistics”, in that much like statistics their end product is subject to underlying assumptions like the future cost of energy and discount rates (see CBA Failings). For example, the requirements for insulation levels in our codes is decided by cost benefit analysis which mysteriously always results in requirements that correspond to the exact thickness fiberglass batt that can fit into a 2×4 or 2×6 wall cavity or a 2×10 ceiling cavity.

Green, environmental, or social accounting would add in other factors to a CBA such as:

• the cost of air pollution
• the cost of climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions
• the benefit of insuring energy supply security

This would give us a “sustainable” Green CBA methodology that would transform our code requirements.

The EU and even China has already started moving in this direction, but the politics of vested interests have blocked progress in the U.S. Back in 1993 the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the official bookkeeper of the U.S. economy, did began working on a green accounting system called Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounts. However, the initial results released in 1994 showed that GDP numbers were overstating the impact of mining companies to our nation’s economic wealth. Mining companies didn’t like those results, and it didn’t take long for Capitol Hill to react. Alan Mollohan, a Democratic House Representative from West Virginia’s coal country, sponsored an amendment to the 1995 Appropriations Bill that stopped the Bureau of Economic Analysis from working on revising the GDP and that’s where things stand today.

You can imagine Owen Corning’s response to the application of a Green CBA approach to our current insulation requirements. Consider for a moment the effect a carbon tax would have on the our national requirements for insulation. I’ll use Sweden as a model. In an effort to account for the environmental costs of fossils fuels, in 1991 Sweden enacted a carbon tax of $100 per ton (raised to $150 in 1997) CO2 emitted. If the U.S. were to enact a $100/tCO2 carbon tax it would increase the current cost of natural gas by about 75% and current cost of coal fired electricity by about 70%.

Since the basis for code requirements for insulation are primarily driven by energy costs, if the social and environmental costs of energy were included in a “green” CBA analysis, insulation requirements would increase by the order of 70%.

… more on Sustainable Economics

“To understand what sustainable economics is, and why it would be superior to conventional economics, we need to start with a brief recap of conventional economics. I’ll need to go through a number of definitions and distinctions, but this is far more than an academic exercise. The conventional economics concepts I’ll be describing provide the basis on which those in power all over the world (which to some degree includes most of us in the rich industrialized countries) justify the destruction of the Earth. It would be hard to find a more pervasive, pernicious and powerful evil than the seemingly innocent concepts that currently rule our economic lives. Let me be more precise, it is not so much the concepts on their own - they have served an historically useful role. The real evil is the continued dominant use of these concepts long after they have become seriously outdated and destructive. This is indeed the belly of the beast, and until we can replace these concepts with a more Earth-friendly approach, our prospects are grim.” - Robert Gilman

“To impact the energy use of all new homes and prevent the resultant environmental degradation due to ever-increasing home sizes and escalating urban sprawl, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began its new homes initiative in 1995.”

The Energy Star for New Homes program is a voluntary program aimed at promoting energy efficient construction in the residential sector through the strength of the Energy Star “brand”. Since it’s inception in 1995, the program has attracted more than 90 utility partners, 2,900 builders, and 360 providers and rater (verification) organizations.

There is no question the the Energy Star New Homes program has been a huge success. According to conservative estimates, the program could save 0.70 quads of electricity by 2010 and forty billion pounds of CO2 could be prevented from entering the atmosphere if only 10% of US homes were able to meet Energy Star’s guidelines for new construction.

All of this has been accomplished on the strength of Energy Star’s “brand”. A brand which is widely known in the marketplace is considered to have acquired “brand recognition”. When brand recognition builds up to a point where a brand enjoys a critical mass of positive sentiment and trust in the marketplace, it is said to have achieved the status of a “brand franchise”. Energy Star has clearly become a brand franchise with strong recognition within the American buying public. Consumer’s have come to trust the Energy Star label to mean that they are getting the best in energy efficiency.

Builders (usually large builders catering to a large suburban market) have signed on to the program because they want the marketing power of the Energy Star brand to help them sell homes. They also want to do and spend the minimum required (with notable exceptions) to win the Energy Star label. As a result, because the EPA is subject to politics, the Energy Star New Homes requirements tend to get watered down by the lobbying power of vested interests which includes the builders. The end result is undeniably positive, but it is not the “best in energy efficiency” that consumer’s think they are getting.

Green building specifications like Energy Star come with about a 2 to 3% cost premium and merely tweak the status quo by reducing energy consumption over existing U.S. code requirements by a minimum of 15%. By contrast, European green standards like PassivHaus in the UK and Germany come with a 5 to 10% premium and if applied in the U.S. would reduce energy consumption by more than 80%. (see chart for a graphic comparison)

My point is that consumers having been lulled into complacency by their trust in the Energy Star brand are blissfully unaware of what’s possible.

“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”

Dr. Albert Schweitzer

“Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature …
but man is a part of nature and this war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
Rachel Carson

Many of us in the building professions find ourselves chafing at what sometimes seems to be an unnecessary or arbitrary requirement in our building codes, but the truth of the matter is that our codes represent over a hundred years of priceless “tribal knowledge” focused on keeping us and the built environment safe and healthy. It’s no accident then that our national building codes have also evolved to include requirements for energy efficiency. However, in today’s perspective, the code development and adoption process has three major problems:

1. Codes are reactive and change comes slowly and often only in the face of a serious problem and/or cases of mortality. A child dies and we change the requirements for deck railing. Someone is killed in a fire and we change fire rating requirement for a door or wall. We stand in line to buy gas in the 70’s and suddenly we get religion about insulation. As a result, the codes are especially ineffective for a slow moving crisis like global warming.
2. Codes changes are political. The process itself is public, open, more or less dominated by building code officials, and attempts are made to keep vested interests from unduly influencing the process. However, the actual code development and change process looks and feels a lot like our state and national legislative process with corporations hiring paid consultants and lobbyists in an attempt to add or protect code language that supports their bottom line.
3. Local jurisdiction’s are often slow to adopt the latest changes, and may not even bother to adopt the energy code or subject to their own politics, dumb down the codes to cater to local vested interests.

I was in the middle of writing about our building codes when the story broke on a joint study by NASA and Columbia University that concluded that we may be reaching a global warming point of no return, a “tipping point” in as little as ten years. The cause of this acceleration can be observed now in amplifying feedbacks such as disappearing sea ice and melting tundra. According to the report, “these feedbacks all produce more heat, … reinforcing each other, leading to evermore thawing … and more releases of natural greenhouse gases (including CO2 and methane) in a viciously accelerating circle”.

Which brings me back to building codes. Buildings in the U.S. account for over 50% of greenhouse gas emissions, but changing that statistic will require significant changes to codes which evolve very slowly and only respond with any sense of rapidity to a major crisis, not to reports by NASA. I’m sure the response in ten or twenty years from now, when the water is lapping up against the second story windows in Brooklyn will be dramatic, but by then it will be too little, too late and we’ll be too busy building levees and dikes.

So it will take a tangible crisis of the pocket book like a tax on carbon emissions along with tax incentives on the purchase of products and technology that reduce those emissions to create the national sense of urgency required to keep our heads above water. Oh yeah … a little leadership at the national level would help as well. Something on the order of the Apollo Program, Manhattan Project, and WWII Victory Garden campaign combined. Given that we have another two years left with the current administration, that means we’ll only have 8 years to get our act together before NASA’s predicted tipping point.