On sufficiency, upfront carbon and Passive House

A quick summary of my recent presentation to the International Passive House Conference

Thanks Ken Levenson for taking the photos!

In 2002 I was invited to speak in Los Angeles at a conference on prefab sponsored by Dwell Magazine. It was my first international speaking gig and I was a nervous wreck, rehearsing my talk over and over, with it backed up on CD-ROM and paper.

I felt like it was 2002 all over again when I was asked to deliver the keynote at the closing plenary session of the 27th International Passive House Conference in Innsbruck. Only it was worse this time; I was completely torn about what to say. The title of my talk was published in the brochure as “Why Fabric Remains First,” a relatively obscure issue being discussed in the Passivhaus world, and where I am not really on solid ground. But I was so honoured by the invitation to speak at the Passivhaus conference that I felt I should try and talk their language and not be too controversial.

Going to Paris changed everything. I had been invited there to speak about sufficiency, and was very well received. I had a new book on upfront carbon coming out, and the theme of the Passivhaus conference was Retrofit, something I have been writing about for years through my work with the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario and the National Trust for Canada. Why wouldn’t I talk about what I know?

Upfront carbon and sufficiency are a bit problematic for some in the Passivhaus world but I thought, what the hell, this is what I do. I may never get invited back, but let’s close this conference with a bang. I should be controversial and challenging! I thought about it all month and came to Innsbruck a day early, locked myself in my hotel room for about 14 hours and redid the entire talk. The presentations were recorded and will be put online at some point, but here are the key points I tried to make:

-The problem of retrofit is huge. As Lori Ferris of Architecture 2030 noted in Paris, there are 220 Billion square meters of existing buildings in the world that have to be upgraded.

-Forget 2030 and 2050 targets for reducing emissions, they are irrelevant and distracting. The whole point of statements like “we have to cut our emissions in half by 2030” was to set a pathway to meeting the estimated remaining carbon budgets in the IPPC report table shown above, but everyone is just using 2030 and 2050 as a way of avoiding doing anything now.

The hard truth is that every tonne, kilogram, pound or ounce that we add to the atmosphere goes against the carbon budget. These are NOW emissions, not 2030 emissions. This is why the carbon and greenhouse gas emissions from making everything, what have been called the embodied carbon, are so important now.

This is also why embodied carbon is such a stupid name. It’s not embodied, it’s in the air now. Embodied carbon doesn’t have a sense of urgency and people don’t get it. A 2019 twitter conversation among myself, Elrond Burrell and Jorge Chapa settled on “upfront carbon emissions” which Jorge worked into a critical document, “Bringing embodied carbon upfront.”

People still don’t get it. Hyundai says its electric cars have the same emissions as a bicycle and gets corrected with graffiti, noting the “carbon embodied in the materials.” I gave other examples from high end kitchens to New York office buildings.

But this is why we have to do retrofits instead of demolition and new construction. As Larry Strain of the Carbon Leadership Forum (who I was thrilled to meet in Paris!) demonstrates, renovations have a fraction of the carbon emissions per square meter compared to new construction.

As Laszlo Lepp of the Passive House Institute demonstrated with his signs in the opening plenary, Passivhaus is serious about efficiency and the switch to renewables.

But I suggested that Laszlo needed a third arm for Sufficiency, and showed Yamina Saheb’s SER framework, and quoted Samuel Alexander’s great line, Efficiency without Sufficiency is lost.

I then threw in my two favourite slides to show why efficiency is lost, at least in North America, where the 60s dream was the big house, the big car, and the big boat;

And the 2024 dream is a bigger house, a bigger car, and a bigger boat. Without sufficiency, we just keep consuming more stuff.

And I can never do a presentation without showing Elon Musk’s idea of “the future we want” the big suburban house with solar shingles, a big battery and a pair of Teslas in the garage. Except it is not a future we can have; there isn’t enough land, enough lithium, or enough money for such an idea to scale.

In the end I can just throw my books and slideshows out and simply put up Will Arnold’s slide with the three words: USE LESS STUFF. It applies to everything.

I went on to look at some of the problems we have to face. As Australian architect Jennifer Crawford noted, our business model is broken; building professionals get more fees by specifying more stuff. Our standards are broken, measuring everything on a per square meter basis when our carbon emissions are measured on a per capita basis. I threw in a few slides about “fabric first” and will publish my section submitted to the proceedings which will explain them in greater detail.

I ended by picking up on IPCC Vice-Chair Diana Ürge-Vorsatz’s fabulous opening plenary talk where she quoted the 2022 Mitigation report, which laid out what the realistic and achievable solutions to climate change are.

I am also a fan of that positive, optimistic report and quoted climate journalist Amy Westervelt’s comment about it, and concluded:

“It’s clear that we know what to do. Many of the people with the solutions can be found in this room. The politicians and fossil fuel interests are powerful but together, so are we.”

There was some applause and a few cheers when I finished, but I thought I had bombed, particularly when Dr. Jurgen Schnieders of the Passive House Institute questioned whether we should be telling people how much they should consume or if we should measure per capita instead of per square meter. But he came up after, thanked me, and noted that there was much to discuss.

The comments from the audience continue to be positive and encouraging. It was a marvellous month, starting with Paris and ending with Innsbruck. I am still digesting it all, so there will be more to come. In the meantime, it’s great to be home!