sustainability and the built environment: michael neuman style
The built environment, including structures, infrastructures, and transportation, accounts for eighty percent of all energy consumption in the United States. The built environment for all intents and purposes is the urban environment. Over eighty percent of the American population lives in metro areas, and over eighty percent of all economic activity occurs in metro areas. Therefore, if we want to be sustainable as a society, then our cities, our buildings, and our infrastructure must be sustainable. To achieve this important yet until now elusive goal, we must retool our cities. This means concurrently retooling our economy and our lives. While this will lead to tremendous opportunities for economic growth and international leadership, first it will entail a change in the way we think about our built environment. In fact, we must begin to think about it explicitly, and not take it for granted or leave it as an afterthought, which is so common today. For example, why must buildings consume energy? Why can’t they produce energy? Why must modes of transport consume energy, instead of produce it? These and other changes of perspectives precede action. We have the knowledge, we have and are developing the technologies, and we have the incentives to do so.
Globally, according to the UN, even though only half the world’s population is currently urban, cities account for 75% of all energy consumption and 80% of green house gas emissions. So we can see that the way we plan, design, and build our cities makes all the difference in energy consumption. For example, in West Germany shortly after unification, nationwide its economic output per capita used half the amount of energy compared to the same economic output in the United States. That is largely due to their world-leading status on renewable energy use, building efficiency by design, and superb urban public transport coupled with ultra-modern high speed inter-city trains skimming the landscape at 300 kilometers per hour or more.
We must learn, or better said, re-learn, how to build intelligently. Indigenous architectures around the globe over the millennia responded to challenging climates with elegant, livable, and bioclimatic buildings to which our current standard modern building typologies of single family house, skyscraper office buildings with windows that can’t be opened, and shopping malls surrounded by seas of heat-island producing asphalt with buildings without windows.
How we design our infrastructure systems is just as critical, if not more so, as the German case attests. Did you know that 40 % of all electricity is lost in transmission and distribution through the grid? What if energy was produced locally, each building and each car producing its own power, and any surplus would be sold back to a local grid at going rates. Most houses have the surface area to support the square footage of solar panels needed to generate enough energy to support their needs. Small home-sized wind turbines cost about two to three thousand dollars today. The newest, egg-beater shaped blades can operate at wind speeds as low as 7 miles per hour, opening up vast regions of the country to efficient wind energy production.
Transportation energy demand in western Europe is projected to increase by only 0.2 percent per year, from current usage of 18.5 quadrillion Btu in 2004 to 18.9 quadrillion Btu in 2015 and 19.6 quadrillion Btu in 2030. Low population growth, high taxes on transportation fuels, and efficient high-speed rail and subway systems, plus freight rail, should slow the growth of transportation energy demand in Europe.
This compares to the rest of the world, which is expected to double in the next twenty years.
China’s energy use for transportation is projected to grow by an average of 5 percent per year, from 4.4 quadrillion Btu in 2004 to 7.7 quadrillion Btu in 2015 and 15.5 quadrillion Btu in 2030 - nearly quadrupling. Virtually all the growth in transportation energy consumption in China is projected to be fueled by oil, with significant impacts on our price of gas and on the global climate, much less urban air pollution in China.
In the US in 2005, highway vehicles were responsible for about 80% of all transportation energy use. In the US in 2005, the average total operating cost for an automobile was $7,475 per 10,000 miles. You can calculate your own costs - the average Texan drives 20,000 miles per year, and don’t forget to factor in today’s cost of gas. I could continue with statistics, how much more we spend and pollute because we ship freight by truck not rail, air not sea. How much more because we drive not zip along in a metro or a train. How much more because we live in suburban sprawl not compact towns and cities.