IPCC to Building Industry: Tag, You're It

So, this is it. The shoe has dropped. The Fourth (and final) Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is out, and people seem to be paying attention. It got prominant coverage in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and a zillion other places—would have had even more impact if it were not on a Saturday, but what can you do? Apparently emboldened by their shared Nobel Prize, the scientists on the Panel reportedly stood their ground against attacks from the big polluters (that's us, and China) and from Saudi Arabia. They released a final Synthesis Report and a Summary for Policy Makers that doesn't mince words in laying out the likely consequences of various levels of warming. It's scary stuff. The warming has already started. Some more is inevitable. How much is hard to say. At low levels the impacts are severe, especially on those populations (both human and other) who can least afford to adapt. At higher levels predictions get fuzzy, because unforeseen secondary and tertiary effects of the phenomena that can be predicted could prove overwhelming. If the ice shelves in Greenland and Western Antarctica melt, all bets are off—the Panel won't even hazard a guess as to how much sea levels might rise. Hopefully that part got the politicians' attention. They meet in Bali next month to figure out what act follows the bag of hot air that was the Kyoto accords. More hot air is not what we need. But thanks to a press release that came today from the energy modeling tools company IES, I was drawn to another part of the report. Working group III, on mitigation strategies, has gone through and explored the options throughout the global economy, sector by sector. Guess which one counts the most: That's right, buildings (see chart, stolen from page 11 of Working Group III Report's Summary for Policymakers). Buildings account for the largest share of CO2 emissions. The good news is that in buildings resides the biggest opportunity for cost-effective carbon reductions. Much of those reductions can be achieved with a net gain in economic value. Amory Lovins has been telling us that for years. It's nice that the Panel of scientists noticed. So, the future is in our hands. Sitting on our hands is not an option—if we in the buildings industry don't do our part, the rest won't be enough to make a difference. Of course, the other sectors still have to do their parts (and, as we've seen in Alex's work on the transportation intensity of buildings, the sectors are not really all that isolated). But in buildings, we still have a chance to reduce carbon emissions and save money in the process. Money that can be spent on better things than importing more oil or digging more coal.