Perspective: Let's Not Forget About Energy Use

Perspective: Let’s Not Forget About Energy Use

Here at EBN, we’re as guilty of it as anyone. We’ve tended to give short shrift to energy conservation in part because there are other excellent publications that focus just on energy. But we did put energy at the top of our

Checklist for Sustainable Design and Construction. And that's where it belongs.

It’s easy to get distracted by all the other important issues connected to construction and the environment, but when you stack them up side-by-side, energy efficiency almost always turns out to be the most important element to address. The environmental problems associated with excessive energy use are manifold. Air pollution and global warming from the burning of fossil fuels are the most obvious. But there’s also water pollution from transporting oil. Even without major spills, an estimated 300 million gallons of crude—30 times what the Exxon Valdez spilled—are routinely leaked or rinsed into our oceans. The methane leaking from natural gas pipelines is a large contributor to global warming. And what does it mean to render a site “uninhabitable for 200,000 years,” as our nuclear reactor sites will be after their 30-year tenure is over? Or to flood the valleys that are home to indigenous people and fragile ecosystems so we can generate “clean” hydroelectricity? Even electricity itself, in our buildings and communities, is becoming suspect as a source of potentially harmful electro-magnetic fields.

When you consider all these factors, the environmental costs of energy use easily outweigh those associated with most other resources. In short, if using a recycled-content material means worse energy performance over the long term, it’s not worth chasing the arrows.

As we think about buildings and the environment, near the top of every list should be energy conservation. Especially operating energy that we sign up for when building or renovating, and pay for every month in dollars and environmental damage.

October 22 marks twenty years since the OPEC oil embargo. That event woke us up to the need for conserving energy. We’ve come a long way in energy efficiency since then, but we can do much more. It’s the most important thing that we can do in the design and building industry to keep our planet healthy.

–Nadav Malin