The Melting Earth, an ice sculpture. The tiny objects inside are glass sculptures that represent what we will lose if the earth warms too much.
The NESEA building green 07 conference is over and the dust has settled but that doesn’t mean I am done reporting about all the amazing people and products that I saw there. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to be highlighting some of these people and products.
The first of the many amazing people that spoke this year was Edward Mazria. Mr Mazria is the senior principal of Maria Inc, senior fellow of the Design Futures Council and founder of Architecture 2030, not to mention a very effective speaker and all around cool guy.
Mr Mazria spoke about the large amount of energy used in the building industry. Of the industries that consume energy building operation is the largest at 48% (40% to run them 8% to build them), compared to 25% industrial and 27% transportation. Obviously a green building revolution would create a radical difference in the way energy is used in this country.
“Things are changing so quickly that even people ahead of the curve, like the building industry, may soon be behind, even blamed for the problem” said Mr. Mazria. He then went on to highlight why it is so important that we start building structures that use dramatically less energy.
We know the threats of global warming, we know for instance that our energy use is slated to increase by a third over the next few decades. For every 1% increase in energy use we will need to build the equivalent of 40 1000MW power plants. The question arises, what kind of power plants do we build? Its not oil plant, oil is on its way out. Its not nuclear, at least not right now, many people things its going to be coal. Coal is the only substance that we have a lot of and is cheap enough to bother digging out of the ground. If we use coal however we will most surly be signing our own execution order.