[All] Avoidance of Deck Chair Rearrangements on “Unsinkable” Vessels: Room for Improvement on “Green” Building Codes with respect to “Transportation Energy Intensity”

[Peter Kofler]

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/02/net-zero-internet-is-wrong.php?campaign=th_rss_design?campaign=TH_sbr_design#
 
Transportation Energy Intensity:
 
The significance of this metric of building performance first became clear to me when I heard a presentation by Dan Nall, FAIA, P.E. Dan, of Flack and Kurtz, in New York City. Dan is both an architect and engineer, and a leading expert on energy use in buildings. He told us that some back-of-the-envelope calculations he had done suggested that an average office building in this country accounts for more energy use getting people to and from the building (commuting) than the building itself uses for operations. This was a shocker--a real slap-in-the-face wake-up call. In Environmental Building News, I set out to do somewhat more sophisticated calculations--mining statistics on commuting distance, modes of commuting, vehicle miles-per-gallon, and square footage used per employee--to be able to compute the energy use per square foot of office building per year (the same metric used in reporting operating energy use by buildings). This analysis allowed me to compare the operating energy use of a building with this new metric of "transportation energy intensity." And, indeed, based on the statistic I found, Dan was correct. We use more energy getting to and from commercial office buildings than those buildings use for heating, cooling, lighting, and such.
 
Financial institutions actually do exert an enormous amount of influence in determining how and where urban/suburban development occurs. The claim that evolving towards higher density, more traditional, mixed-use urban/neighbourhood designs will harm development profits would seem to be myopic and short-sighted. 
 
It is estimated that peak oil will render much of American and some Canadian suburbs problematic from the perspective of functionality, serviceabilty and livability because of their estimated much higher embodied infrastructural energy and materials intensity per unit population. 		 	   		  
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