News

May 28, 2023

The War on Carbon

Magazine Ambasz Essays Leah Aronowsky Jul 26, 2023 A carbon dioxide molecule These days, carbon dioxide has a bad rap. Everywhere you turn, it seems someone wants to sell you on their plan to

Magazine

Ambasz Essays

Leah Aronowsky

Jul 26, 2023

A carbon dioxide molecule

These days, carbon dioxide has a bad rap. Everywhere you turn, it seems someone wants to sell you on their plan to eradicate this pest of a greenhouse gas—reduce it, reuse it, sequester it, suck it out of the atmosphere, store it deep underground, or net-zero it out.

To date, architecture’s strategy for waging war on CO₂ has been to focus on energy efficiency. By developing technologies and construction techniques for making buildings that consume ever less energy, the logic goes, we can design our way to carbon neutrality. As a result, today we have architects, engineers, and building scientists to thank for everything from heat pumps and solar panels to the LEED certification and the Passivhaus.

But it’s worth remembering that many of these technologies were originally dreamed up with a different kind of crisis in mind. Beginning in fall 1973, countries in North America and western Europe experienced significant disruptions to their oil supply—the effect of an oil embargo imposed by OPEC in retaliation for US support of Israel during the Arab-Israeli War. As oil became an increasingly scarce commodity, the price of gasoline skyrocketed while drivers queued for hours for a chance to refuel. In response, governments imposed measures to encourage citizens to conserve fuel—including gas rationing systems, reduced speed limits, a three-day workweek, moratoriums on Sunday driving, and bans on stores leaving their lights on overnight. Meanwhile, a generation of designers began to develop technologies to reduce buildings’ unnecessary or wasteful energy consumption and alleviate some of consumers’ financial pain. In other words, when it comes to energy-efficient design, lower heating bills—rather than a cooler planet—was initially the goal.

If you plan to buy new windows for your home anytime soon, for instance, chances are you’ll come across something called “low-emissivity” coatings. Low-emissivity, or low-e, coatings significantly improve the energy efficiency of windows, preventing heat from escaping during the winter and keeping it out during the summer. Pioneered by US scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the 1970s in response to the ongoing oil crisis, windows with low-e coatings today represent more than half of all sales in the commercial windows market and over 80% in the residential market. In the US, building with low-e windows is all but required to ensure compliance with energy efficiency laws in states like California and, more recently, New York.

The oil crisis also gave rise to innovations in home insulation techniques. For much of the 20th century, when heating oil was cheap, home builders gave little thought to insulation. Typically, walls were insulated with a mere six inches of fiberglass; if occupants were cold, they could simply turn up the thermostat. But with the squeeze on the global oil supply, a home’s ability to effectively store heat was now a pocketbook issue. In response, the 1970s saw the construction of a number of demonstration “superinsulation” houses, or houses with extremely tight construction and thick, well-insulated walls. These included the Zero Energy House in Copenhagen, Denmark (1975), the Low-Cal House in Urbana, Illinois (1976), and the Saskatchewan Conservation House in Regina, Canada (1977). In 1977, in a sign of how quickly superinsulation techniques had advanced, Sweden introduced building codes requiring homes to meet stringent insulation and air-tightness standards. And in 1982, to incentivize superinsulation, the Canadian government launched the R-2000 program, which provided builders with free training sessions on superinsulation construction techniques, rewarded them financially when they completed superinsulation builds, and established standards and a certification program for the superinsulated buildings.

Renewable energy also experienced a surge of interest in the 1970s. Architects’ attention to solar energy predated the energy crisis, as architecture historian Daniel Barber has shown. But in the wake of the oil embargo, solar research and development got a major boost from the US federal government via federal research programs to spur innovation in solar technologies and a series of tax credits and subsidies to incentivize the installation of solar panels on residential properties. Meanwhile, with oil now scarce, a number of Nordic and Western European countries, including Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, and Sweden, adopted aggressive measures to facilitate a transition to geothermal electricity and geothermal heating and cooling. Iceland in particular accelerated its efforts to build out a national system of district heating and geothermal power stations. Today, 90 percent of all homes in Iceland are heated using geothermal.

The Saskatchewan Conservation House. 1977. Courtesy of Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC)

Why does it matter that these technologies were invented to tackle the energy crisis rather than the climate crisis?

Passivhaus (Passive House) model

Why does it matter that these technologies were invented to tackle the energy crisis rather than the climate crisis? For one thing, it has resulted in an approach to climate-sensitive architecture that centers on the consumer rather than on the supply chain. That shiny new tower with its curtain wall of low-e windows might be supremely energy efficient, but building such a structure requires tons and tons of carbon-intensive steel and concrete. And while a superinsulated home is guaranteed to translate into ultra-low energy bills for its inhabitants, achieving the air-tightness required to trap all that heat requires a whole range of petrochemically derived products—including sealants, adhesives, polyethylene vapor-barrier sheets, and Tyvek house wrap (not to mention the polystyrene foam boards and polyurethane foam sprays that are themselves used as insulation). In other words, the energy crisis–inspired vision of sustainability has led architecture and design to become deeply attuned to the carbon footprint of some aspects of the construction process but not others.

In recent years, designers have tried to address this oversight through the concept of “embodied carbon,” which attempts to account for the carbon emissions of construction materials across their entire life cycle—from their initial raw extraction, processing, and manufacture as finished products to their transport to the warehouse and construction site up through their eventual demolition and disposal. It’s a good start, and a number of efforts are currently underway to standardize the methods for calculating embodied carbon, and to include embodied carbon considerations in energy efficiency ratings programs. But for architecture to win the war on carbon, it will need an arsenal of tactics that are developed first and foremost with the climate crisis in mind. I’m reminded here of economist Milton Friedman’s famous quip that, when crisis strikes, “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Friedman, the godfather of neoliberalism, was of course working at the level of ideology, sharpening his free-market-fundamentalist knives for the day when radical privatization could be offered up as the common-sense alternative to Keynesian social policies and the welfare state. But Friedman’s never let a good crisis go to waste philosophy can also be wielded for less cynical aims.

If the triumph of neoliberalism taught us anything, it’s that in times of crisis anything is possible—as long as the right ideas are lying around, ready for the taking. And so as the climate crisis takes hold in the architectural imagination, and as the limits of energy efficiency become increasingly apparent, perhaps the time has come for some new ideas.

Leah Aronowsky is a historian of science at Columbia University. She is writing a book about the twin histories of the climate and energy crises.

On the occasion of Earth Day, architect Kunlé Adeyemi talks about reimagining buildings to coexist with people and the environment.

Kunlé Adeyemi, Carson Chan

Apr 19, 2022

An architect and an expert in sustainable real estate strategies discuss sustainability at the new MoMA.

David Benjamin, Jean Savitsky, Paola Antonelli

Jan 24, 2020

Follow a photographer’s three-decade journey through Juneteenth and Emancipation Day celebrations.

DaeQuan Alexander Collier, Daniel S. Williams, Megan Paulson, Peter Williams

Jun 16, 2023

Follow a photographer’s three-decade journey through Juneteenth and Emancipation Day celebrations.

DaeQuan Alexander Collier, Daniel S. Williams, Megan Paulson, Peter Williams

Jun 16, 2023