Greenbuild 2009: Opening Plenary Remarks by Rick Fedrizzi

President, CEO & Founding Chairman
U.S. Green Building Council

November 25, 2009 - (RealEstateRama) — Last year in Boston we rallied around the idea that we were in the midst of a full blown green revolution. A revolution sparked by your ideas, your passion and your tireless efforts. A revolution with measurable, verifiable proof of advancement, specifically, the now 15 percent of Gross Domestic Product that our industry represents. A revolution that the U.S. Green Building Council has been proud to help lead in ways that are both profound and specific. USGBC has proxy for the public will leveraging green buildings for what they can do to improve our lives, heal our planet, and assure our future.

Our success is only as good as the people who want to make it their own success. And thanks to you it’s happening everywhere we look and by every metric we can imagine, even in these continued hard times. The Green Revolution, by virtue of what we do, affects everyone, everywhere. Through it, we can bring fundamental change to our planet and our people.

I don’t have to tell you that this past year has been one for the record books. We had positive change in Washington, where new leadership has given us hope that we are finally free to innovate, invent and invest in a cleaner, healthier, and more prosperous future. And a darker change in our economy. 5.5 million American jobs, lost. McMansions and starter homes alike, foreclosed. $2 trillion dollars in homeowner equity and $3 trillion dollars in the stock market — gone.

This new world order has fueled our revolution and inspired people to tell Washington that through this economic meltdown the status quo has proven its dysfunction. We not only need change we can believe in, we also need change we can “Build” on. And we’ve used this call for change to reframe the debates. We’ve reconfigured budgets. We’ve negotiated tradeoffs and turmoil with single-minded intent. What’s different in this time of uncertainty is that our movement has reached, not just a tipping point, but also a leverage point, and we finally have one long enough to move the world.

The revolution we sparked shows its strength through environmental responsibility, economic prosperity, and social equity. The old way of doing things is bankrupt. Now is our time and now we must lead.

Our theme for Greenbuild this year is “Main Street Green” and it is on the main streets of cities across the globe that action is being taken and where we must continue our focus. Because today, for the first time in human history, half the world’s population lives in cities. And that figure is expected to grow to 70 percent by 2050. Today, cities occupy just two percent of the world’s landmass but are responsible for more than two-thirds of global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Current urban development patterns will not sustain this growth. They must be reinvented. And USGBC and all of those who share our vision are doing just that. It’s maybe most visible in our work with the Climate Positive Development Program launched by the Clinton Climate Initiative. This ambitious program aims to set a new global benchmark for leadership in large-scale urban development by supporting 18 large-scale inner city projects in ten countries. Through this initiative we will demonstrate how cities can grow in ways that are climate positive and regenerative, striving to reduce the amount of on-site carbon dioxide emissions to below zero.

But as Mayors and CEOs, engineers and architects, gather in boardrooms and around drafting tables, we must always keep in mind what our work is truly about. We surround ourselves everyday with data on kilowatts and metric tons, devising calculations that can make your head spin. We think in terms of land mass and design development, infrastructure and building envelope, new materials, technologies, design tools and, yes, LEED.

But I feel compelled to tell you tonight that our work should not be defined solely by the number of LEED homes and offices, schools and neighborhoods. It really should be defined by the people inside of them. That’s why we do what we do!

It’s about the families who must weigh their power bill against their grocery bill. It’s about workers who labor in building that take a toll on their bodies and spirits. It’s about kids who spend their entire childhoods in toxic classrooms. It’s about once and for all committing to choices that work towards their comfort, not against it. Choices that ensure their health, not compromise it. Choices that protect them and improve their lives.

It is within our power to force these choices that will fundamentally change the environment and people’s lives for the better. And no one has more power to drive that change than those of us here tonight in Diamondback Stadium!

We can build places that don’t just shelter, they sustain and regenerate. We can build homes that heal, workplaces that inspire, schools that improve minds and bodies.

Our work is about Deidre Taylor in New Orleans whose new LEED Platinum home has slashed her utility bill to $30 a month. And she can now afford to send her child to dance classes. And remarkably, her child no longer needs an asthma inhaler.

Our work is about the patients at the LEED Platinum Michael Dell Children’s Hospital in Austin, Texas where healthcare and therapy includes large doses of daylight, clean air and non-toxic material. Our work is about our families, our friends, our kids, our future. And so, we must act each and every day.

We must make the case for green buildings everyday in our state capitals, and in a matter of weeks, in Copenhagen. We must fight for investment spending, not consumption spending, to build healthier, more prosperous communities – and lives. And we know our work must go far beyond Main Street USA to Main Street Australia, Main Street Brazil, India, Italy, Mexico.

The solution must be global, and one of the most powerful tools we have are the local green building councils that have been established in countries throughout the world. Nurtured by the World Green Building Council, these local GBCs are proving themselves critical to global market transformation.

Like USGBC, they are reaching into their own communities, finding leadership partners and legions of volunteers whose passion and enthusiasm for how green buildings can transform their communities, mirrors our own. Their creativity and organizational excellence is an inspiration for all of us to witness.

So I’ve invited some of my friends from green building councils around the world to share their stories with you tonight. From the land “Down Under, please welcome my friend and CEO of Green Building

Council Australia, Romily Madew.
From the UK, Paul King
From South Africa Nicola Douglas
From Canada Thomas Mueller
From New Zealand Jane Henley
From Germany Christian Donath
From Italy Mario Zocatelli
From India S Raghupathy
From Mexico Cesar Trevino
From Taiwan Chillin Chang
From Brazil, Jose MoulinThomas

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking our international colleagues for their vision their passion and unique contributions and for helping to create a healthier built environment for us all. Clearly it’s at the global intersection of the built environment and humanity that we are redefining our world and our nation. The idea that we can have sustainable main streets anchoring communities from California to Curitiba is nothing short of a remarkable paradigm shift.

We’ve finally figured out that our communities are living systems, that they have unique and important properties that must interrelate so they can thrive. When natural systems and built systems are in synch, they can begin to heal the damage done to our land and our culture and begin to regenerate our neighborhoods and communities.

We’ve finally begun to think about the things that really matter:

• Quality and thoughtfulness,
• Integrity and transparency,
• The health of our families, our communities, and our planet. That’s a change of perspective that every one of us believes in. A McKinsey study released just a few months ago points out that a national, integrated approach to energy efficiency could produce $140 billion dollars in annual savings:
• 1.1 Gigatons in annual greenhouse gas reductions,
• And the creation of close to 900,000 new green jobs that won’t ever be outsourced.

We are actually at a leverage point where green building no longer needs to be proven, but implemented. The potential of green building, when green design, green technology, and green materials come together is undeniable.

But green buildings are only as efficient as their operation. A Prius driven badly won’t perform any better than a Hummer no matter what EPA’s miles per gallon label says. And if a facilities management team is untrained or the occupants not educated as to how much energy and water they are using, there’s no way a LEED building will ever perform to its potential, no matter how well it was designed.

I think a lot of us have simply been hoping that the buildings we build and operate will perform exactly the way we want them to. But hope is not a strategy. It’s not how we will deliver on the energy efficiency promise that we know our buildings hold. We must commit to proactive engagement, by insisting on obtaining immediate and measurable performance data so we can intervene when those performance expectations are not being met.

What we must do is make a transition in our minds, and in our practice, to a system that moves us away from aspirational green to informational green.

We can’t expect facility management teams to use advanced electronic controls systems if we don’t also ensure that they have the adequate training to run them. And we can’t expect tenants to use less energy if they don’t know how much energy they are using in the first place.

This is the difficult work in front of us. We have to convince our landlords and tenants, our facility managers and homeowners, that they aren’t part of the problem, they are part of the solution. We need to give them the information, the experience and the tools they need to become full partners in our mutual success. This is a big job and we can’t do it alone.

Along with our global partners, we must use our growing influence in the halls of Congress, state legislatures, city councils and school board meetings. We must use that proxy we’ve been given to advance the greening of America’s schools because our kids hold the key to our future and they deserve better.

We must use our research agenda to always prove our health and productivity assumptions along with our business case. We must make our deep expertise in building science and policy available to the White House, state houses and to affordable housing advocates. We must make it easier for our elected officials, our corporations and our communities to do the right thing, and harder to do the status quo.

And while we encourage folks to use LEED to raise the bar, we must continue to work on raising the floor so that even the most cursory of building codes begins to move us towards more sustainable solutions. We must also aggressively continue research and technology development. Our industry has developed solutions that are now scalable, practical, affordable and smart. And we can do so much more.

Venture capitalists know this. They are currently investing a large percentage of global venture capital in “Green Tech.” Those are dollars invested in our work. Those dollars will fund companies that can create affordable meters that tell us how much water we’re using and how much money we’re spending every minute we stand in the shower. Those dollars will fund companies that make smart controls to help us monitor and manage our electricity, water, daylight and air quality.

Buildings will give us what we want, when we need it, and save energy when we don’t. And we can invest the savings in other things that will continue to improve performance enhance our comfort and protect our children’s health. And those investments are creating jobs from which we will grow our new green economy. Yes, the current time is one of great upheaval and at the same time mind numbing opportunity.

We see the power of our mission being invoked every day on every Main Street in every Country, on every Continent in the world. We now, finally, have global consensus that climate change is real.

That the solution to the problem is global, that green, high performing, energy and water efficient buildings are not our last hope, but our first salvation. In fact, it’s the idea that we’re finally beginning to really think about these issues that gives me the greatest hope of all.

It’s taken a perfect storm of circumstances to get our brains in gear and make us really begin to just think. The devastations of natural disasters like hurricane Katrina, wars fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and powerful leaders, like our next speaker, who have helped us articulate the consequences of our actions. And finally, understand some very Inconvenient Truths.

From this day forward we can demand no less of our leaders, political or otherwise, because the stakes are just too high. We can’t go back and start a new beginning, but we can seize this day and start to make a new ending. And there’s no better day to start than today, Veterans Day.

Across America today we are honoring the 23 million men and women who have gone to war to protect and secure our way of life, our right to choose a government, to speak our minds, to worship freely, to be a free and proud people.

And part of that life we want to secure is one that makes it a fundamental, basic human right to live within a built environment that works in harmony with ecology and humanity and makes our lives better. Abraham Lincoln once said that people should be proud of the place in which they live, and that we should also live so that our place is proud of us. I am convinced more than ever that as long as we start every conversation about green building with a conversation about the needs of the people, this country and this planet will be very proud of us indeed!

Thank you!

Tagged as: green building

 

 

 

USGBC - U.S. Green Building Council

HUD - U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

NAR - National Association of REALTOR

RealtyTrac

FHFA - Federal Housing Finance Agency

Freddie Mac

MBA - Mortgage Bankers Association