Local Governments Get Serious About the Environment

In the absence of serious national action, state and local governments and the private sector are taking the initiative in confronting the interlocked problems of global warming and energy conservation.

The most dramatic example is the legislation California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed last week mandating reductions in the state’s emissions of the gases associated with global warming. But city governments and the private sector are also formulating some of the most innovative responses to a problem the federal government still refuses to confront head-on.

Exhibit A is a recently announced partnership between the American Institute of Architects and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The two groups have committed to an exhilarating goal: cutting in half by 2010 the amount of fossil fuels used to construct and operate commercial and residential buildings -- and then achieving steady further reductions. By 2030, they want to produce “carbon neutral” buildings that will rely on conservation and renewable energy sources to completely eliminate their use of fossil fuels.

With this effort, the architects and the mayors are spotlighting an often overlooked element of the global warming challenge.

Discussions about controlling global warming usually focus on reducing the greenhouse gases produced by vehicles and factories. But the best evidence is that the energy used to heat, cool and light buildings (as well as the energy used in their construction) generates more greenhouse emissions than either transportation or industry. Depending on the estimates, buildings contribute anywhere from more than a third to nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

Those figures define the challenge. Another number frames the opportunity. “Between now and 2035, three-fourths of the built environment will be new or renovated,” says RK Stewart, a principal with the architectural firm Gensler, and the incoming president of the architects institute. “So the opportunity to change the energy profile of the built environment in this country is right there. We have the opportunity to drastically reduce our energy consumption.”

In communities across the country, developers, architects and local governments are already pursuing that goal. One of the most aggressive cities has been Chicago. Under the spur of Mayor Richard M. Daley, the city is pursuing a remarkably comprehensive program to encourage green development.

The city has retrofitted hundreds of city facilities to reduce energy use and committed itself to constructing new municipal buildings to the highest standards of energy efficiency established by the U.S. Green Building Council, a private group that has set the most widely respected benchmarks in the field.

Chicago is also using more renewable energy in its buildings. And it is constructing dozens of “green roofs” -- extensive rooftop gardens that dramatically lower roof temperatures (from 160 degrees on a summer day for a conventional roof to about half that) and thus reduce buildings’ need for air conditioning.

Just as important, the city is encouraging private developers to move in the same direction. It offers attractive incentives for builders who commit to green development -- not only grants and loans but something even more precious in a place like Chicago: a fast track through the city bureaucracy.

“You get a building permit faster if you are building a green building,” says Sadhu Johnston, the city’s environment commissioner. Among those who found the offer too good to refuse was Wal-Mart, which constructed a 70,000-square-foot green roof on the new store it opened last week.

In San Francisco, another milestone project is nearing completion. Sometime this winter, the first tenants will move into an 18-story federal office building there that offers a brilliant “back to the future” response to the challenge of reducing energy consumption.

Through an innovative design conceived by the Santa Monica architectural firm Morphosis, tenants in most of the building will rely on natural ventilation, rather than air conditioning, to control the temperature.

On the building’s upper floors, the architects devised a sophisticated system of windows and vents that will open at night to capture the city’s cool evening air and allow wind to push out the warm air that accumulates during the day. (For security reasons, the building’s five lowest floors will operate with conventional air conditioning.)

The final step was to design a heavy concrete structure for the building that will hold the cool air during the day. “It was a very old idea in the architecture,” says Morphosis principal Tim Christ, the building’s project manager. “It’s why buildings in the Southwest have very heavy walls: The structure stores the cooling energy.”

Washington isn’t entirely a bystander in this effort. The federal government commissioned the Morphosis design (under the Clinton administration). Last year’s energy bill included a tax credit for developers who significantly reduce energy consumption in new buildings. And the Department of Energy is funding useful research into energy-efficient building materials, lighting and heating systems.

What’s missing is a clear signal from Washington that reducing greenhouse emissions and increasing energy efficiency are national priorities. That’s what it will probably take to make green development a truly mass phenomenon.

“The top performers are doing some very exciting things,” says Judith Greenwald of the nonpartisan Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “But we need to bring the bottom and the average up more.”

The real message of the green development movement is that American ingenuity can meet the test if the federal government challenges us to combat global warming by using energy more efficiently. Now all we need is a government with the confidence and foresight to issue the challenge.

ronald.brownstein@latimes.com

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Sunday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ website at www.latimes.com/ brownstein.