The Cost of NOT Cutting Carbon
Having been involved in the design and building of Energy Efficient buildings for the last 20 years (in Portugal), and having proved that “yes we can” reduce the energy needs of a building by at least 80% without jumping through hoops nor major lifestyle changes, it’s not easy understanding this CO2 issue.
If it’s a problem…and we do have to assume that we all know that IT IS A PROBLEM, then we know we can fix it. HOWEVER, this implies some change in the way we do things. There is no point just passing the problem on to someone or somewhere else. The problem starts with each of us. The sequestration solution is the equivalent to burying our heads in the sand, so a non starter.
The Cost of Cutting Carbon in Money. The Cost of NOT Cutting Carbon is HUMANITY…I truly fear for my childrens’ children.
Carbon is a direct consequence of energy consumption. We reduce consumption, we reduce Carbon.
Approximately 40% of all global energy is consumed in Buildings. It’s therefore relatively straight forward to understand that our buildings need to be very lean and very mean.
Energy Efficiency: all buildings can consume 80% less energy…It’s possible and it’s not expensive. In the process we create major employment and EcoJobs…
Renewable Energy: Give energy the same order of priority as we do communication. Most of us in Europe pay far more for communication than we do for energy. Get the priorities right. We know we can use wind, solar, biomass, wave energies…get as much as we can out of these Renewable Energies and we are probably on track to providing most of the energy in our buildings. And we create more major EcoJobs
SmartGrids will need SmartBuildings.
Of course we still need to tackle the transport issue and I am sure after the recent debacle of Detroit we already understand that we do need to change our mobility policies.
We can do this…it’s quite easy actually. We do need to think about the environment from a sustainable perspective and not just an economic venture. After all (and as even Al Gore says), what good is all the money in the world, when we don’t have a planet to live on.
(This post responds to a question posted here)
Comments(1)
