Mark Twain created some wonderful sayings – some of them very relevant to this project, such as: “Architects cannot teach nature anything”, and perhaps most pertinent of all: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.”
The reason I mention Twain is that the EEB project recently spent a valuable afternoon in the new (LEED certified) Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford is also the home of United Technologies, an EEB co-chair. The company hosted a meeting of the EEB group. An afternoon session in the museum brought together 17 “thought leaders” representing key stakeholders from the U.S. building sector. They included developers, architects, policy-makers, academics and NGOs.
We had an intensive debate on where the US is going and what needs to be done, beginning with behavior change. Energy efficiency is crucial but people will not change their behavior if they don't perceive a threat. And today most American people still feel very comfortable. They are concerned about the price of gasoline at the pump, but they do not know their energy use and they do not perceive climate change as a sufficient threat to provoke action.
There are positive signs. The LEED bandwagon is rolling fast. Tenants are asking for LEED-certified buildings, so this is a demand-driven development. Discussions have started to introduce policy aiming at having all buildings certified. That would push the developers in the right direction. Developments beyond LEED would need to be implemented nationwide. And while LEED involves very little change from existing energy practices it is an evolving standard.
Surprisingly, most of the “thought leaders” stressed the need for corporate America to take the lead. They could not see the politicians going first. Corporate America is saying it is possible and starting to construct or retrofit buildings to make them green: The “show me how” approach.
But we have learned in previous discussions with American policy-makers that corporate America reacts much better to the notion of “ pay me”. Positive financial incentives are the best way to provoke change in the US.
The EEB members tried to introduce our vision-driven pathway to zero-net energy use in buildings, but without great success. The thought leaders were falling back either on“crisis“ or “grassroots” pathways. The former sees that the US will only start to move after experiencing a crisis situation like the one after Katrina hurricane in 2005. By "grassroots” we mean fragmented change through individual and small-scale developments. Even though we repeated the need for dramatic and aggressive change, we got very little response. These stakeholders do not feel the “heat” nor the threat from the CO2 build up.
The “thought leaders” responded with a challenge to EEB (and other) companies to use their powerful marketing skills and tools to persuade people to act in the right way towards a CO2-managed way of life.
Difficult? Yes and No. As one of the attendees pointed out, companies that succeeded for years in persuading people to buy stuff they may not be able to afford should succeed in leading people to need and invest in useful habits and sustainable goods. But as some suggested, perhaps it means that companies need to change their business models to adjust to an EEB world.
It was a fascinating meeting but another Twain quote sticks in my mind: “All good things arrive unto them that wait – and don't die in the meantime.”
Blog posting co-authored with Didier Bridoux of ArcelorMittal
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