Giving Compass' Take:

• Lloyd Alter explains the principles of sustainable building: don't build, build minimally, and use the right materials. 

• Alter emphasizes not building when avoidable. What are viable alternatives to building in your community?

• Learn how U.S. cities can advance the SDGs. 

I was invited to speak at the Solutions Summit for Drawdown Toronto, a group trying to implement the ideas listed by experts in Paul Hawken's book Drawdown.

The World Green Building Council, in their recent document Bringing Embodied Carbon Upfront, has recognized this, that making anything has an impact. Their first principle is to Prevent, to "question the need to use materials at all, considering alternative strategies for delivering the desired function, such as increasing utilisation of existing assets through renovation or reuse." That's what we have been calling Sufficiency: What do we actually need? What is the least that will do the job? What is enough?

Principle 2 is to Reduce and Optimize, to "apply design approaches that minimise the quantity of new material required to deliver the desired function." This is what we have been calling Radical Simplicity: Everything we build should be as simple as possible.

The key point is that these principles apply to everything, not just buildings. The two important questions are, 'Do we really need this?' and 'How do we achieve this end with as little means as possible?'

It's not just buildings. We have to apply the principles of upfront carbon to everything. The Union of Concerned Scientists has shown that over the life of an electric car, there are dramatic reductions in total CO2 emissions, including Upfront Emissions. But the UCE of a Tesla Model 3 is still 27 tons of CO2. Replacing all 24 million vehicles in Canada would generate 648 million tons of CO2. Given that a regular gasoline powered car puts out 4.6 tons of CO2 per year, the CO2 burp from replacing the gas cars is equivalent to the output of 141 million cars driving around. There is simply not enough steel, aluminum, lithium and whatever else goes into cars to even think of this, and certainly not in the kind of timeframe that we have to do it in.

Read the full article about the principles of sustainable building by Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger.