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RSS Feed Carbon offsets: do they work? w/ David Oliver
Buying carbon offsets when you take a flight or build a building can sound a little bit like cheating. Should it really be as simple as paying your way to net zero? Do these offsets actually do anything, or are they more like sustainability cryptocurrency… just tokens that only have value because we say they do. David Oliver is CEO and founder of Greenlines technology, a company that allows people to access carbon markets. He’s someone who knows where your offsetting money goes, and how the carbon market works.
Read MoreBuilt today, emissions tomorrow w/ Matt Grace
If you want to build a net zero project you need to predict its energy use. That’s where Matt Grace comes in. He’s an expert in creating virtual models of houses, extensions, or even entire communities to model the ways energy is used. This isn’t just a static input/output model. It changes with seasons, and as the climate changes they have to take into account rising temperatures and more erratic weather patterns. If we want to fight climate change, we need to use energy modeling to account for the already changing climate.
Read MoreA concrete solution w/ Rob Cumming
If it were a country, cement would be responsible for more carbon emissions than the entire European Union. More than four times as much as Canada. Reducing the amount of carbon that concrete production creates has to be part of achieving a net zero future, so we’ve brought in Rob Cumming from LaFarge to help us figure out how. He’s head of sustainability there, so he’s full of solutions to decarbonize concrete.
Read MoreUnderstanding embodied carbon w/ Luka Matutinovic
A huge chunk of a building’s emissions are baked into the fabric of the building itself. Even if its operations are net zero, the building itself might not be. This is called embodied carbon, and to truly get to net zero the industry needs to address this blind spot. That’s one of the things Luka Matutinovic works on with his company Purpose Building. Luka’s going to help us figure out how we do it for the rest of our buildings too.
Read MoreThe future is retro w/ Chris Benedetti
Achieving net zero by 2050 requires us to build differently, but what about the buildings that are already up? We can’t just knock them all down, even if they are inefficient carbon factories. We retrofit them. This can be expensive and difficult though, but it's possible. Chris Benedetti knows how to make it possible, and where the financial tools exist to make it happen. We talk to Chris in this first episode of our series “Zero by Fifty”
Read MoreBuilding Good is back! With a new season, Zero by Fifty
Canada has set an ambitious environmental goal: to have net zero emissions as a country by 2050. One of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses are our buildings, so how does the architecture and construction industry help achieve that goal? In this series Building Good speaks to industry leaders to find out how we can achieve Zero by Fifty.
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