Think the CO² coming out of your car’s tailpipe is the primary source of global climate change? Think again. While the sickly obese Hummer has become the poster child for global warming, our homes and office buildings have been silently spewing out between 50 and 55 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Our focus on the transportation industry as the primary culprit in this global warming nightmare has distracted us from the core of the problem. Yes, transportation is problematic, and will remain so in the future. But the debate seems to rage on about bumper to bumper traffic and single driver SUVs, which actually only account for about 6% of total greenhouse gas emissions (transportation also includes shipping, air travel, and the like).

The real opportunity to drastically reduce CO² emissions is in the building sector. In the lovely state of New Mexico, innovative engineers and architects have been designing and building emissions neutral homes for the past thirty years. Emissions reductions of 80%, purely through sensible design practices, are well within our technological and methodological reach.

The other 20% could be reduced through distributed energy production, like solar, wind, and biodiesel. For you see, our homes suck up huge amounts of energy simply because they are poorly designed. I’ve seen passive solar homes in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (a cold place indeed) so well designed that the use of a heater was entirely unnecessary in the winter. In such cases, the standard of living remains the same while total energy consumption is drastically reduced.  These changes can make distributed energy a more affordable and practical option.

I have heard estimates that the built environment, through remodels and new construction, is recreated on a cycle of about every 20 to 30 years. The opportunity is now. But the question that we all must ask: what will it take to get architects, builders, developers, and real estate brokers to agree on an issue they hardly know anything about? And lest we forget, moral imperatives are meaningless to a society that sees things purely in terms of dollars and cents.
This article was inspired by a blog post in Social Design Notes on Edward Mazria’s new organization.