Without regulation, we might have Metropolis

A large portion of the building market these days centers around three types of structures: hospitals/health care, universities, and high-rise residential.  Among the potential market sectors, these have the most capital on hand, the most demand, and the greatest buying power.

And they still mostly do the bare minimum when it comes to human health.

As long as we continue to develop new buildings that require fossil energy inputs, someone’s life will suffer to provide comfort to another.  If three of the most well-capitalized market sectors cannot choose to build in such a way as to alleviate this condition, then the market will not ever achieve a socially just outcome on its own.  The best we can hope for, with no other intervention, is a world where one class of people has comfortable, life-supporting infrastructure, and another class deals with the impacts of that lifestyle.

We have the knowledge and ability to change this.  We know how to design buildings so that they use only the energy naturally occurring on the property.  We have technologies that eliminate waste and instead recycle nutrients into another process.  We developed transportation technologies and strategies that nearly eliminate the negative impacts of the energy use.

But the market alone will not bring these into wide acceptance.

For at least a decade, we have had vehicle technologies that improve miles per gallon by twenty to thirty percent at almost no additional cost.  It took a projected change to the CAFE standards to force vehicle manufacturers to incorporate those technologies into their current offerings.  We will see the 2025 target for average fuel efficiency by the year 2020 because we already knew how to make it happen, we just needed a push.

The same is true for buildings.  If today, we established in law that any new building built in 2025 had to use no fossil fuel energy sources for its operation, we would easily achieve that by 2020.  This would happen for two reasons.  First, many designers and builders already know how to make this happen, and the investors who want to gain first entry into the market will find them and make it happen.  Second, everyone else will know that any building they build in the next decade will eventually have to compete with a building that has no energy cost.  Even though energy costs fill a relatively small portion of an organization’s budget (5-12%), that difference creates enough competitive edge to change the market.

I do not want my children living in a world like the movie Metropolis (or for those who are a little younger, The Hunger Games).  I want everyone to have an equal chance at high quality of life, and I want no one to have to suffer because of the comfort of another.

We know better, and should expect better.