| In his State of
the Union Address, President Bush called on Congress to pass
his national energy plan, which would increase domestic oil
and gas production, upgrade the power grid, develop alternative
energy sources, develop more nuclear power, and promote energy
conservation.
Passage of the national energy plan is critical
to our national security because it would decrease our dependence
on foreign oil.
The architectural and engineering professions,
along with manufacturers and producers of construction materials,
are making large strides toward the promotion of energy conservation.
The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), with its LEED (Leadership
in Energy and Environmental Design) program have encouraged
many building owners to adopt practices in building construction
and operation that are setting standards for the future of this
country that will have a long-range impact on our energy usage.
In a continuing education article that appeared
in the February ’05 issue of Architectural Record, it states
that “every year, as much as 45 percent of the U.S. energy output
is consumed by buildings; lighting, alone, accounts for roughly
20 percent of U.S. electrical consumption. It has been estimated
that, if we could reduce overall electrical use for lighting
by half, we could save more than $20 billion annually and decrease
power plant emissions by millions of tons.”
Those of you who read my column know that I
am not a classic environmentalist. I don’t believe that man-made
global warming is factual, in fact I think it is junk science.
I also don’t see anything wrong with opening ANWR (Arctic National
Wildlife Reserve) to oil production.
But I also don’t believe that we should be wasting
resources if it is not necessary or if technology can enable
us to waste less. What I don’t want to see is the rejection
of good technology or practices just because it is associated
with people who promote junk science.
Over the coming weeks I am going to be doing
a series of articles on “green” or “sustainable” design, because
the technology and resources that are rising out of this movement
are worthy of our scrutiny.
For those of you who don’t like anything associated
with the environmental movement, this will be a bit like eating
whole trout. If you’ve ever had trout for dinner, you know that
you have to be careful eating it because it is full of bones.
Some of the bones are large and easy to find, but some are very
fine and difficult to find. In order to get to the delicate
flavor or the meat, you have to push the bones out of the way.
So out of the environmental movement may come some very good
things, but we may have to push some of the junk science aside.
Perhaps one of the most important things that
has come out of this movement is that it has forced Americans
(and others) to embrace the technology that has been emerging
over the past few decades and apply it to the building industry.
Until recently, the market has been slow to respond to the concept
of sustainable design, but because of rising building construction
and maintenance costs, building owners are beginning to take
notice of the long-range financial benefit of sustainable design.
My particular interest is in churches, and I
can see how sustainable design could be of benefit to churches
who are constructing new buildings, so I hope that someone in
some church out there will take note of this subject and resolve
to give it serious consideration.
That being said, for the first meat and bones
example consider this definition of sustainability that was
embodied in the “Declaration of Interdependence for a Sustainable
Future”, written by the World Congress of Architects in 1993
just one year after the U.S. National Energy Policy Act was
signed into law. It concludes “that buildings should have a
benign environmental impact, that buildings should be minimal
consumers of energy and other resources throughout their life
cycle, should have healthy and pleasing internal environments,
foster community, be arranged with accessible green spaces in
urban areas, and that they should enable a kind of transport
infrastructure to be developed around them in a way that would
discourage the use of the automobile”.
Do you see the meat and the bones in that statement?
More next week.
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