Buildings' Impact on Climate Change

So before we get things started I wanted to take a quick survey. So hands up who here lives or works in a building? Okay, it's an easy question. The reason I wanted to bring that up is that I would like to talk about the connection between buildings and climate change. And a lot of the discussion about climate change is very abstract. Ocean levels rising, a coal-fired power plant somewhere in the distance. But buildings are tangible. They're one of the few things that actually brings us all together that we share in common. But the problem with buildings, depending on how you slice it, is that they are contributing up to almost half. of the greenhouse gas pollution that's contributing to climate change. So when we wake up in the morning, we turn on that shower. We go turn up the thermostat when it's cold. We plug in our laptop. All those actions are going through our building, and somewhere that energy is creating that greenhouse gas pollution. So, this is a problem. We can't address climate change without thinking about buildings. Now, professionals around the world, people involved in green building, are trying to create greener options for the ways that we build. In fact, if you look at homes, you might think about what is a green home or an eco-home. And if you punch it into a search engine, you might get a bunch of images like this. You've got this great house, really perfectly oriented to catch the sunshine, really thick insulated walls. In some cases, it might even have solar panels on the roof. Something that we often refer to as green bling. It's been kind of tacked on there, but it does sometimes some great things in terms of producing energy. The challenge is that over the last 40 years, while we've been trying to create these green buildings, we've still seen this steady increase in global greenhouse gas pollution. So it starts to become evident that what we're doing isn't enough. A building like this, it's got the green features, it's got solar panels. It actually gets close to zero impact or net zero, but what we start to realize is we need something better. We need to go further. We actually need projects that can be net positive. Now to get to net positive, as we start to dig into this, we realize it's not enough to do just more of what we've been doing in the past, more solar panels, more insulation. What we need is actually a fundamental shift in the way we see and think about buildings. We can't just look at just the object or the thing, but we need to see the change that that thing creates in the world. It's only then that we can start to think about the positive change that we can have in addressing an issue like climate change. Now, to dig into green buildings, first we've got to realize there's some pieces missing from the way we see and think about buildings. And because those pieces are missing, the way we set up categories and targets for green buildings are kind of pointing us in the wrong direction. But the good news is that there are actually a lot of great examples of net positive projects that are out there that we can learn from. And once we've kind of internalized those lessons, we can really figure out how to move forward. So to start off with, I want to talk about this really amazing building built in the early 80s by a fellow named Amory Lovins. He's done a tremendous amount of work over the last 30 years in the field of sustainability. This building is incredible. It's super insulated, gets all its energy from the sun. In the middle of Colorado in the winter, they can grow bananas on the inside with no energy input from the outside. So an incredible building that has influenced generations of designers like myself. But when you look at pictures of this project, there's always something that's missing. Just out of the frame of this amazing building is the building's parking lot. This great, amazing green building is located out in the middle of nowhere. So if you want to get there, you've got to drive. You want to drive miles, if you want to get a loaf of bread, you've got to drive miles. So this is a challenge that we have when we ignore the impact of location. Now let's look at it a different way. Say you've got the exact same green building, two different locations in the region. In one location, you can walk, you can bike, you have the option of taking transit. Another location you have to drive. Maybe everybody in your family has to have a car. What this means is that this exact same building, the family on the right, may have two to three times the climate footprint of the family on the left. And this all has to do with where that building was located. Now, kind of a cool way to visualize this is to go to walkscore.com, where you can actually punch in an address, and it gives you a score for how walkable that location is. So the green zone are areas where you have the option to walk or drive to take transit. The red zone, you're dependent on a car. And this impact of location is so profound that you might actually be better off living in a drafty old house in a walkable location than living in that super eco-home out in the middle of nowhere. And this is a profoundly different way of starting to think about what that building does. So when you look at the Levin's house, great. It uses one-tenth the energy of a typical house. That's amazing. But when you put back on the additional impact from transportation, the footprint's actually a little bit bigger than what we might have thought at first glance. Now, there is another piece that we'll get to. I wanted to emphasize this bit about location with this little green icon, just so it's kind of seared in our brains, that this importance of this location. But the next missing piece, which we get from this kind of hint of this great sort of landscape that this building is nestled in, is the question... of what was there before. If it was a field, a farm, or a forest, that's what we would call a greenfield site. And on a greenfield site, nobody there was burning fossil fuels before you showed up. The squirrels weren't driving little cars or anything like that. There was no fossil fuel being burnt. So when we look at the change that this created from before to after, even though this is a super green building, it's having a negative impact on the climate. And this is where we have to start to think about this, because there's a magical way we can make this story better. If that new green building had replaced or renovated a drafty old building, it's a completely different story. All of a sudden, we are reducing emissions, and we've had a positive impact on the climate. So this is where we have the exact same building, but two very different stories in terms of how that building impacts the climate. So It's not enough to just say it's a great building. We have to look at what was the change in the world that was created. And those are the pieces that are missing. We have to start asking, where is it located and what does it replace? And once we've done that, then we can start to set up better categories for how we benchmark buildings. Now, if you're like me and you create buildings for a living and you're trying to be green, you like to see how many points do I get? Where is it rated? How do I stack up next to everybody else? So I put together this sort of hierarchy of green building systems, and they're all asking, how good is your building? And the reason it's a pyramid is that at the bottom are all the old buildings. There's tons of them, way more. At the top are the green buildings, a relatively small amount. Now those green buildings, the lessons that are learned there trickle down through the building code and influence the way everything else is done. So this is not just a pyramid. It's almost like a wedge or an arrow. It's like pointing in the direction. This is how we are changing our entire city is by having this target. So when we look at green buildings, there's kind of two categories. The first is your typical green building like LEED. Maybe you're familiar with a building that's LEED Gold. Any of these green systems, they're always rating that building relative to some typical building. So this LEED home might be 30 or 50 percent better than a typical home of the same size. It's always this kind of abstract comparison. Now, above that, if you want to do even better, you have this category of buildings that are actually striving to not just be 30% less bad or 50% less bad, but actually get down to zero impact. And there are a lot of amazing things that are now happening all around the world in this category. One of these systems, these sort of rating systems, is called Passive House. I know, it's exciting. So. With Passive House, what a Passive House is, is a building that's so well insulated, has such great windows, is so airtight, that it doesn't need a central heating system. Even in the middle of winter, it can run off the heat of your body, heat from the sun, that's all it needs. And there's thousands of these things now being built around the world. Again, emphasizing with this little green icon that says Passive House is all about the building envelope, the shell. The other piece is this green energy technology. solar panels, windmills, the green bling that we can kind of tack onto any building. But if you put it onto a really good building like a passive house, you can actually get to net zero impact where this building doesn't have a carbon impact like your typical building would. And this is, that's pretty great. That sounds like what we should be doing. But if we take a second and zoom out to the big picture, we go back and we look at that growth in greenhouse gas emissions. over the last 40 years and think about what's going to happen going forward. Now, of course, if we just build code minimum buildings, if we keep sprawling out building new code minimum buildings, those emissions just keep on going up. So what if we build everything to a LEED gold standard or some other green rating system? We're still growing, but not as fast. We're being a little less bad. Now, if we're net zero, every new building that gets built is net zero. We still are seeing it's not getting us quite where we need to be, because if we are expanding outward, building onto greenfield sites, even if they're zero-impact buildings, they are not zero-impact. And all of this is quite substantially different from where we actually need to be going in terms of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. So what do we need? We need actually a new target at the top of this hierarchy, something better than net zero. It's what I'm going to call net positive. These are projects that are going beyond net zero to actually make a measurably positive impact on the world. But it's a different type of category. All these other green building systems say, how good is your building? They're just looking at the thing. But net positive asks the question, how good is your building? Where is it located? What does it replace? Net positive is about the whole story. And this is the shift we have to make. So we have this toolbox, or it's a lens, this kind of lens that we can now use to look at a project and ask the question, is this actually making a positive change? And fortunately, there are great examples of this already happening. It's happening all around the world. We don't need new technology. We don't need a whole bunch of money. It's stuff we can do now. But let's look at how that actually starts to play out in practice. I'm going to go back to Amory Levin's house, an amazing house. We're going to look at this through the net positive lens. So to begin with, yes, great envelope, super windows, amazing shell of a building. But... It's on a greenfield site, so we're not getting any credit for replacing an old building. And maybe perhaps worse, a walk score of zero. That's pretty bad. That's about as bad as it gets. So we are out in the middle of nowhere. So we have this kind of deficit, and we can get to net positive, but we've got to make up with a whole lot of green bling. A whole lot of solar to offset those additional impacts. So this idea of the green building that we've held in our mind is actually the hardest, most expensive way to get to net positive. And this is maybe where we need to shift away, because let's look at something quite different. This project maybe doesn't even look like a green building. What this is, is a renovation to a brownstone in Brooklyn, and it was renovated to the Passive House standard. So if we look at this really cool thermal image, you've got all the old buildings that are just leaking heat out everywhere, and that heat is producing greenhouse gases. This building, it's not leaking heat. This is a radical transformation to an existing building. On top of that, walk score of 100. You have the option of living here without a car. If you move here from anywhere else in the country, you're going to be producing less pollution in your transportation. Now, on top of that, this project is also cool. They renovated the existing brownstone, but they also did an addition on top. So not only were they renovating, but they were actually creating more living space, more living space for the families that were growing. And so what we have is before and after the existing building, The new building, this is a radically net positive project. And if we could just start doing this type of thing, we'd be well on our way to starting to address climate change. So we look at it through the lens, great building envelope, replaces an old building, walkable location. We don't need to do the solar panels, the windmills, all that other kind of stuff, the green bling, don't have to do it. We can do a project that's affordable, is something that we can do today, and have a positive change on the world. Now, let's take those ideas back over to this coast. This is a project that our team is working on here in Vancouver. We've actually got two of these projects on the go right now. What this is, is a passive house duplex. Walls are 17 inches thick, great windows. It's replacing an old bungalow. And in Vancouver, we're also able to build a little extra house, a laneway house, facing the alley. So we've gone from one unit of housing to three units of housing. This is the existing bungalow that it's replacing, and it's being done at a location with a great walk score. So there was one family, now there's going to be two new families living there, and they're probably coming from somewhere where they drove more. So we're having a positive change on the transportation, but also the buildings. So one unit of housing to three, double the square footage on site, but still having a net positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Again, looking at this project through the lens, great envelope, walkable location, replaces an old building, doesn't have to have the solar panels and other expensive features. So these have all been kind of small scale. I want to jump up a scale and say, okay, what about our downtown cores? This is a great, amazing project in Seattle called the Bullet Center. Five-story, mixed-use office building, has this kind of crazy hat, this kind of visor at the top, which is the solar array that powers the entire building. The reason it's five stories tall is because that's how tall they could go for the amount of sun that they could catch on their property. So this building produces all its own water, processes waste, does all these really cool things. But on top of that, it's got a great walk score. It replaces this old building, so we're getting a credit for taking away the emissions from this old building. And we're doing everything. This project, it's sort of version 1.0. but it shows us what's possible in our downtown course. So we can do this. We can take this lens and realize that it's also a toolbox. We can pick different pieces. So if you've got a rural site, if you're downtown, if you're in a walkable neighborhood or not, there are ways that you can do net positive projects. We always start with a really good building envelope. We add the green bling as it's needed. But we also look really carefully at where is our project located. We often ignore this, but that is an incredibly important piece of it. And then asking the question, what does it replace? Because as a designer, when I see that Greenfield site, it's so tempting. You know, great view, sunshine, I can totally design whatever I want to do. But as you start to think about what we need to do to be net positive, you realize these old buildings... are actually gold mines of potential carbon reduction. And so now we actually hunt these out, and we look, and we say, how bad? Oh, that building is really terrible? Oh, that's great. This is an opportunity to change things for the better. So this is where I'm trying to get at the shift. For the last 30 or 40 years, this idea of this stand-alone, self-sufficient building has been the direction we've been thinking about for green building. But we need to shift. to something that's a little bit different in terms of our vision. Something that asks those three questions. How good is it? Where is it located? What does it replace? Because then we can actually start to create a positive change in the world. Now, as you go out, walk out the door today, go home, maybe you're not in the building industry, maybe you're a renter, that's okay. Go to walkscore.com, punch in your address and see what your walk score is. Your choice of where you live, where you work, is important. And if you can move to a better place with a higher walk score, that's a profoundly, profoundly net positive action and something that everybody here can do. Now, if you are in the building industry or in any way connected to building projects, maybe you're in finance, maybe you're an urban planner, if you are an architect or engineer or a homeowner, you have the opportunity now to be a leader, to go beyond green buildings. to create projects that aren't just trying to be less bad, but actually make a positive contribution to the world. And I think you'll find that when you start doing that, it feels pretty damn good. Thanks.

And a lot of the discussion about climate change is very abstract. Ocean levels rising, a coal-fired power plant somewhere in the distance. But buildings are tangible. They're one of the few things that actually brings us all together that we share in common. But the problem with buildings, depending on how you slice it, is that they are contributing up to almost half.

of the greenhouse gas pollution that's contributing to climate change. So when we wake up in the morning, we turn on that shower. We go turn up the thermostat when it's cold.

We plug in our laptop. All those actions are going through our building, and somewhere that energy is creating that greenhouse gas pollution. So, this is a problem.

We can't address climate change without thinking about buildings. Now, professionals around the world, people involved in green building, are trying to create greener options for the ways that we build. In fact, if you look at homes, you might think about what is a green home or an eco-home.

And if you punch it into a search engine, you might get a bunch of images like this. You've got this great house, really perfectly oriented to catch the sunshine, really thick insulated walls. In some cases, it might even have solar panels on the roof. Something that we often refer to as green bling.

It's been kind of tacked on there, but it does sometimes some great things in terms of producing energy. The challenge is that over the last 40 years, while we've been trying to create these green buildings, we've still seen this steady increase in global greenhouse gas pollution. So it starts to become evident that what we're doing isn't enough.

A building like this, it's got the green features, it's got solar panels. It actually gets close to zero impact or net zero, but what we start to realize is we need something better. We need to go further. We actually need projects that can be net positive.

Now to get to net positive, as we start to dig into this, we realize it's not enough to do just more of what we've been doing in the past, more solar panels, more insulation. What we need is actually a fundamental shift in the way we see and think about buildings. We can't just look at just the object or the thing, but we need to see the change that that thing creates in the world.

It's only then that we can start to think about the positive change that we can have in addressing an issue like climate change. Now, to dig into green buildings, first we've got to realize there's some pieces missing from the way we see and think about buildings. And because those pieces are missing, the way we set up categories and targets for green buildings are kind of pointing us in the wrong direction. But the good news is that there are actually a lot of great examples of net positive projects that are out there that we can learn from. And once we've kind of internalized those lessons, we can really figure out how to move forward.

So to start off with, I want to talk about this really amazing building built in the early 80s by a fellow named Amory Lovins. He's done a tremendous amount of work over the last 30 years in the field of sustainability. This building is incredible. It's super insulated, gets all its energy from the sun. In the middle of Colorado in the winter, they can grow bananas on the inside with no energy input from the outside.

So an incredible building that has influenced generations of designers like myself. But when you look at pictures of this project, there's always something that's missing. Just out of the frame of this amazing building is the building's parking lot.

This great, amazing green building is located out in the middle of nowhere. So if you want to get there, you've got to drive. You want to drive miles, if you want to get a loaf of bread, you've got to drive miles.

So this is a challenge that we have when we ignore the impact of location. Now let's look at it a different way. Say you've got the exact same green building, two different locations in the region. In one location, you can walk, you can bike, you have the option of taking transit.

Another location you have to drive. Maybe everybody in your family has to have a car. What this means is that this exact same building, the family on the right, may have two to three times the climate footprint of the family on the left. And this all has to do with where that building was located.

Now, kind of a cool way to visualize this is to go to walkscore.com, where you can actually punch in an address, and it gives you a score for how walkable that location is. So the green zone are areas where you have the option to walk or drive to take transit. The red zone, you're dependent on a car.

And this impact of location is so profound that you might actually be better off living in a drafty old house in a walkable location than living in that super eco-home out in the middle of nowhere. And this is a profoundly different way of starting to think about what that building does. So when you look at the Levin's house, great.

It uses one-tenth the energy of a typical house. That's amazing. But when you put back on the additional impact from transportation, the footprint's actually a little bit bigger than what we might have thought at first glance. Now, there is another piece that we'll get to.

I wanted to emphasize this bit about location with this little green icon, just so it's kind of seared in our brains, that this importance of this location. But the next missing piece, which we get from this kind of hint of this great sort of landscape that this building is nestled in, is the question... of what was there before. If it was a field, a farm, or a forest, that's what we would call a greenfield site. And on a greenfield site, nobody there was burning fossil fuels before you showed up.

The squirrels weren't driving little cars or anything like that. There was no fossil fuel being burnt. So when we look at the change that this created from before to after, even though this is a super green building, it's having a negative impact on the climate. And this is where we have to start to think about this, because there's a magical way we can make this story better. If that new green building had replaced or renovated a drafty old building, it's a completely different story.

All of a sudden, we are reducing emissions, and we've had a positive impact on the climate. So this is where we have the exact same building, but two very different stories in terms of how that building impacts the climate. So It's not enough to just say it's a great building.

We have to look at what was the change in the world that was created. And those are the pieces that are missing. We have to start asking, where is it located and what does it replace? And once we've done that, then we can start to set up better categories for how we benchmark buildings.

Now, if you're like me and you create buildings for a living and you're trying to be green, you like to see how many points do I get? Where is it rated? How do I stack up next to everybody else?

So I put together this sort of hierarchy of green building systems, and they're all asking, how good is your building? And the reason it's a pyramid is that at the bottom are all the old buildings. There's tons of them, way more. At the top are the green buildings, a relatively small amount.

Now those green buildings, the lessons that are learned there trickle down through the building code and influence the way everything else is done. So this is not just a pyramid. It's almost like a wedge or an arrow. It's like pointing in the direction.

This is how we are changing our entire city is by having this target. So when we look at green buildings, there's kind of two categories. The first is your typical green building like LEED.

Maybe you're familiar with a building that's LEED Gold. Any of these green systems, they're always rating that building relative to some typical building. So this LEED home might be 30 or 50 percent better than a typical home of the same size.

It's always this kind of abstract comparison. Now, above that, if you want to do even better, you have this category of buildings that are actually striving to not just be 30% less bad or 50% less bad, but actually get down to zero impact. And there are a lot of amazing things that are now happening all around the world in this category.

One of these systems, these sort of rating systems, is called Passive House. I know, it's exciting. So.

With Passive House, what a Passive House is, is a building that's so well insulated, has such great windows, is so airtight, that it doesn't need a central heating system. Even in the middle of winter, it can run off the heat of your body, heat from the sun, that's all it needs. And there's thousands of these things now being built around the world.

Again, emphasizing with this little green icon that says Passive House is all about the building envelope, the shell. The other piece is this green energy technology. solar panels, windmills, the green bling that we can kind of tack onto any building.

But if you put it onto a really good building like a passive house, you can actually get to net zero impact where this building doesn't have a carbon impact like your typical building would. And this is, that's pretty great. That sounds like what we should be doing. But if we take a second and zoom out to the big picture, we go back and we look at that growth in greenhouse gas emissions.

over the last 40 years and think about what's going to happen going forward. Now, of course, if we just build code minimum buildings, if we keep sprawling out building new code minimum buildings, those emissions just keep on going up. So what if we build everything to a LEED gold standard or some other green rating system? We're still growing, but not as fast.

We're being a little less bad. Now, if we're net zero, every new building that gets built is net zero. We still are seeing it's not getting us quite where we need to be, because if we are expanding outward, building onto greenfield sites, even if they're zero-impact buildings, they are not zero-impact.

And all of this is quite substantially different from where we actually need to be going in terms of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. So what do we need? We need actually a new target at the top of this hierarchy, something better than net zero. It's what I'm going to call net positive. These are projects that are going beyond net zero to actually make a measurably positive impact on the world.

But it's a different type of category. All these other green building systems say, how good is your building? They're just looking at the thing. But net positive asks the question, how good is your building? Where is it located?

What does it replace? Net positive is about the whole story. And this is the shift we have to make.

So we have this toolbox, or it's a lens, this kind of lens that we can now use to look at a project and ask the question, is this actually making a positive change? And fortunately, there are great examples of this already happening. It's happening all around the world. We don't need new technology. We don't need a whole bunch of money.

It's stuff we can do now. But let's look at how that actually starts to play out in practice. I'm going to go back to Amory Levin's house, an amazing house.

We're going to look at this through the net positive lens. So to begin with, yes, great envelope, super windows, amazing shell of a building. But...

It's on a greenfield site, so we're not getting any credit for replacing an old building. And maybe perhaps worse, a walk score of zero. That's pretty bad. That's about as bad as it gets.

So we are out in the middle of nowhere. So we have this kind of deficit, and we can get to net positive, but we've got to make up with a whole lot of green bling. A whole lot of solar to offset those additional impacts. So this idea of the green building that we've held in our mind is actually the hardest, most expensive way to get to net positive.

And this is maybe where we need to shift away, because let's look at something quite different. This project maybe doesn't even look like a green building. What this is, is a renovation to a brownstone in Brooklyn, and it was renovated to the Passive House standard. So if we look at this really cool thermal image, you've got all the old buildings that are just leaking heat out everywhere, and that heat is producing greenhouse gases.

This building, it's not leaking heat. This is a radical transformation to an existing building. On top of that, walk score of 100. You have the option of living here without a car.

If you move here from anywhere else in the country, you're going to be producing less pollution in your transportation. Now, on top of that, this project is also cool. They renovated the existing brownstone, but they also did an addition on top. So not only were they renovating, but they were actually creating more living space, more living space for the families that were growing.

And so what we have is before and after the existing building, The new building, this is a radically net positive project. And if we could just start doing this type of thing, we'd be well on our way to starting to address climate change. So we look at it through the lens, great building envelope, replaces an old building, walkable location. We don't need to do the solar panels, the windmills, all that other kind of stuff, the green bling, don't have to do it.

We can do a project that's affordable, is something that we can do today, and have a positive change on the world. Now, let's take those ideas back over to this coast. This is a project that our team is working on here in Vancouver. We've actually got two of these projects on the go right now.

What this is, is a passive house duplex. Walls are 17 inches thick, great windows. It's replacing an old bungalow.

And in Vancouver, we're also able to build a little extra house, a laneway house, facing the alley. So we've gone from one unit of housing to three units of housing. This is the existing bungalow that it's replacing, and it's being done at a location with a great walk score. So there was one family, now there's going to be two new families living there, and they're probably coming from somewhere where they drove more. So we're having a positive change on the transportation, but also the buildings.

So one unit of housing to three, double the square footage on site, but still having a net positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Again, looking at this project through the lens, great envelope, walkable location, replaces an old building, doesn't have to have the solar panels and other expensive features. So these have all been kind of small scale. I want to jump up a scale and say, okay, what about our downtown cores?

This is a great, amazing project in Seattle called the Bullet Center. Five-story, mixed-use office building, has this kind of crazy hat, this kind of visor at the top, which is the solar array that powers the entire building. The reason it's five stories tall is because that's how tall they could go for the amount of sun that they could catch on their property. So this building produces all its own water, processes waste, does all these really cool things. But on top of that, it's got a great walk score.

It replaces this old building, so we're getting a credit for taking away the emissions from this old building. And we're doing everything. This project, it's sort of version 1.0. but it shows us what's possible in our downtown course.

So we can do this. We can take this lens and realize that it's also a toolbox. We can pick different pieces.

So if you've got a rural site, if you're downtown, if you're in a walkable neighborhood or not, there are ways that you can do net positive projects. We always start with a really good building envelope. We add the green bling as it's needed.

But we also look really carefully at where is our project located. We often ignore this, but that is an incredibly important piece of it. And then asking the question, what does it replace?

Because as a designer, when I see that Greenfield site, it's so tempting. You know, great view, sunshine, I can totally design whatever I want to do. But as you start to think about what we need to do to be net positive, you realize these old buildings... are actually gold mines of potential carbon reduction. And so now we actually hunt these out, and we look, and we say, how bad?

Oh, that building is really terrible? Oh, that's great. This is an opportunity to change things for the better. So this is where I'm trying to get at the shift. For the last 30 or 40 years, this idea of this stand-alone, self-sufficient building has been the direction we've been thinking about for green building.

But we need to shift. to something that's a little bit different in terms of our vision. Something that asks those three questions.

How good is it? Where is it located? What does it replace? Because then we can actually start to create a positive change in the world. Now, as you go out, walk out the door today, go home, maybe you're not in the building industry, maybe you're a renter, that's okay.

Go to walkscore.com, punch in your address and see what your walk score is. Your choice of where you live, where you work, is important. And if you can move to a better place with a higher walk score, that's a profoundly, profoundly net positive action and something that everybody here can do. Now, if you are in the building industry or in any way connected to building projects, maybe you're in finance, maybe you're an urban planner, if you are an architect or engineer or a homeowner, you have the opportunity now to be a leader, to go beyond green buildings.

to create projects that aren't just trying to be less bad, but actually make a positive contribution to the world. And I think you'll find that when you start doing that, it feels pretty damn good. Thanks.

Transcript for:Buildings' Impact on Climate Change

Transcript for:
Buildings' Impact on Climate Change