Green Building Makes Sense
The reports pointing out the wisdom of green building seem to be thick on the ground, but it never hurts to point out when a new one crops up. The reports themselves are invaluable, especially taken together where the sheer weight of them can often work to convince the skeptical or uncertain. So far, though, green building skeptics are hard to find and these kinds of reports serve to reinforce the underlying premises of the green building movement.As the report states, one of those key premises is that adoption of green building techniques could save huge percentages of energy usage over the next twenty years if broadly adopted.Andrew Burr, writing at CoStar Group, suggests that rising energy prices have “buoyed” the green building industry, and in one sense he’s certainly correct. The alarming rise of energy prices over the past few years have placed an urgency on the questions of efficiency and conservation that were not there as recently as the Kyoto Conference in 1998. Some believed that the situation was urgent, but a new energy crisis had not yet made it urgent on multiple fronts. So there’s little surprise that many more are looking for options, other than giving more of their money to big energy companies.But there’s also an inevitability of sorts to green building. Even if, for instance, you believe that global supplies of coal, oil, and natural gas are effectively unlimited, there’s still a) a growing demand for them and b) a finite rate at which they can be extracted, transported, and processed. In some ways, this is what is happening already, though OPEC tends to place artificial controls on the flow of oil. One way or another, then, it’s likely we would have been faced with an energy bottleneck at some point, and a move into cleantech and green building the only reasonable course to maintain standard of living and economic growth.Meanwhile, the movement seems to be producing unexpected solutions, such as the use of geothermal in Illinois. Far from the traditional geothermal “hotspots,” like the American West and Indonesia, Illinois nonetheless has found geothermal to be an effective and affordable alternative for over 65 installations statewide.Green building makes sense and will continue to do so, even if fuel prices were to level off or, unthinkably, decline over the long term.
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