Forget about 2030 and 2050 targets; let's talk 2025.
This year I will be teaching and writing about NOW emissions.
It’s that time when we make our resolutions and plans for the year, returning fresh after a break. It is also only a week until I start teaching Sustainable Design at Toronto Metropolitan University again.
I have been trying to refine my thoughts about what my fundamental message is this year, both in class and on this site. Last year, my goal with my book, The Story of Upfront Carbon, was to take the discussion of embodied and upfront carbon to a larger audience. Architects Journal editor Hattie Hartman described it as “not a book for architects, but for their clients.” It didn’t find its audience, so this year, I will try to take the messages from the book and distill it down to its essentials for my readers and my students.
1. Forget about 2030 and 2050! NOW Emissions Matter Most
In 2022, the IPCC wrote, “limiting warming to around 1.5°C (2.7°F) requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by 43% by 2030.” Here we are in 2025, and we can see how well that is working out. The 2030/2050 targets were extrapolations from the table setting out the remaining carbon budgets and the paths to reducing emissions enough to stay under those budgets.
The trouble is that many are using 2030 and 2050 as an excuse for delay, treating them as starting points, not endpoints. Look at Juraj Mikurcik’s (he of a wonderful straw Passivhaus) post, “remember, we don’t need to wait until 2030 or 2050 to design low carbon buildings.” He gets that NOW matters and that every tonne, every kilogram, every gram of carbon emissions adds to global heating.
As architect Larry Strain notes: “When we evaluate emission reduction strategies, there are two things to keep in mind: the amount of reduction and when it happens. Because emissions are cumulative and because we have a limited amount of time to reduce them, carbon reductions now have more value than carbon reductions in the future.”
What matters are NOW emissions, more so than LATER emissions.
2. UPFRONT Carbon Emissions Matter More
Currently, most of our carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels, but as we electrify everything and decarbonize the electricity supply, emissions from upfront carbon, the NOW carbon emitted when making things, will increasingly dominate and approach 100% of emissions. For example, the carbon emissions from an electric car in Québec running on hydroelectricity are almost entirely upfront emissions from its manufacture. The same applies to iPhones or heatpumpified buildings like Evelyne Bouchard’s house.
UPFRONT emissions are NOW emissions and matter most as LATER operating carbon emissions shrink due to electrification and heatpumpification.
3. Sufficiency Matters
The best way to reduce upfront carbon emissions is to USE LESS STUFF. This is the key concept of SUFFICIENCY, defined by Yamina Saheb in the IPCC Mitigation report:
“Sufficiency is a set of policy measures and daily practices which avoid the demand for energy, materials, land, water, and other natural resources while delivering wellbeing for all within planetary boundaries.”
If making anything from an iPhone to a car or a building generates upfront carbon emissions, we must ask- Do we really need this? Can we make choices, such as e-bike instead of car? Can we make it smaller and simpler? Can we fix what we have and make it last longer? Can we just use less stuff?
This is why I push for retrofit and renovation first but have written that new buildings should be designed for compactness and flexibility, using low-tech solutions to maximize comfort with minimum water and energy use.
4. Efficiency without Sufficiency is Lost
For fifty years, we have been preaching EFFICIENCY to use less energy, but we also need SUFFICIENCY to use less stuff or the efficiency is lost; as Samuel Alexander noted, “What is needed, at a minimum, is for rich nations to stop redirecting efficiency gains into production and consumption growth. Instead, efficiency gains must be used to reduce overall energy and resource consumption.”
RENEWABLES should power everything we make, and to the greatest extent possible, we should make things from renewable materials. Yamina Saheb calls this triad of Sufficiency, Efficiency, and Renewables the SER Framework.
We need all three to get out of this mess, which is why I push BIKES and E-BIKES for transportation sufficiency, PASSIVHAUS for building efficiency, MASS TIMBER and other materials that we harvest instead of mine for renewables.
5. Now is the new 2050
These are depressing times. We have 2030 deadlines that are slipping into 2050 deadlines into “how about never?” deadlines. People are voting for climate arsonists who promise cheap gas. Corporations are walking back their carbon commitments; fossil fuel companies are drilling, fracking, and LNGing like there’s no tomorrow. We are going backward and wasting time when we know that every gram of CO2 or methane or leaking fluoro refrigerant contributes to global heating now.
What possible positive and hopeful message can I give to my students? Fortunately, they are mostly designers of interiors, cities, fashion, and other creative fields. My messages this year are summarized:
Now emissions matter more than later emissions. It’s the Time Value of Carbon.
Upfront carbon emissions are Now emissions and matter as much or more than operating carbon emissions.
Sufficiency is the way we reduce upfront carbon. As Will Arnold notes, Use Less Stuff. As Kelly Alvarez Doran notes, Less is Less. As Samuel Alexander notes, efficiency without sufficiency is lost.
Individual actions and behaviour change still matter. But as Bill McKibben notes, “The most important thing an individual can do is be a little less than an individual. Join together with others in movements large enough to make change.”
Design matters. As Built Environment Declares notes, "If we are to reduce and eventually reverse the environmental damage we are causing, we will need to re-imagine our buildings, cities and infrastructures as indivisible components of a larger, constantly regenerating and self-sustaining system."
I suspect that’s enough to keep me busy for the term.
UPDATE: Since I wrote this I discovered that George Monbiot talked about targets five years ago.
“It’s not just the target that’s wrong, but the very notion of setting targets in an emergency.
When firefighters arrive at a burning building, they don’t set themselves a target of rescuing three of the five inhabitants. They seek – aware that they may not succeed – to rescue everyone they can. Their aim is to maximise the number of lives they save. In the climate emergency, our aim should be to maximise both the reduction of emissions and the drawing down of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. There is no safe level of global heating: every increment kills.”
From my apartment in Calgary, Alberta, I look across 1970s SFDs to the University of Calgary, the city centre, and three major hospitals. Today, at -17°C & 84% relative humidity, I see great plumes of water vapour rising in the sky until they reach a stable state and form low clouds in the still air. Even brand-new buildings are burning vast quantities of methane/fossil gas for heating. I feel very frustrated at the more-than-sufficient use of gas heating – oh, wait, this is Danielle Smith's UCP jurisdiction, which is fuelled by and promotes the fossil fuel industry. Now, the UCP imposes high annual registration fees on electric cars "because they wear out the roads faster" than enormous, heavier pick-up trucks and SUVs.
I guess each one of us must do what we can on the drop-in-a-bucket principle and hope...
hear, hear. but you knew i would say that 😉. i think we are living on the border of a revolutionary moment--the point where all of those personal choices coalesce into an actual movement and revolt against deranged reactionary policy and propaganda. by placing the responsibility on the consumer, one also unleashes the masses, should they choose to seize the opportunity. good luck on the new semester! Maybe it will make it up to Ontario this year (was Quebec-heavy last year...)