In a tour-de-force presentation at Ecobuild, John Picard, a founding member of the US Green Building Council and former member of President Clinton’s Greening the White House program, energetically explained how he had been won over to sustainable living strategies, dubbing insulation “the next Big Bang”.

Green building is raising the value of property portfolios, he insisted, claiming the UK is now “At the centre of the earth on sustainability.” And in the US, “the same people who financially backed Google are now backing green building, starting in San Francisco.”

Now an advisor to many US CEOs on sustainable materials use, Mr Picard said he had a huge debt to pay to Ray Anderson, CEO of environmentally-responsible modular carpet makers Interface, and author of sustainable materials book Confessions of a Radical Industrialist.

Mr Picard’s father had led the NASA moon landing project, he revealed, and this left him and his brothers with an unattainable goal to match, but he has been driven over the past 20 years to transform building design and use.

“In the near future, everything to do with energy is going to get an IP address,” he argued, and carbon neutrality will be the new driver for success. The green building movement will have to “mine the inefficiency of the existing built world,” he opined, pointing out that Los Angeles is the “sun capital of the US, but all the roofs are dark, just waiting to be solarised!” In future “the key variable will be not what it costs to build a building, but what it costs to run it.”

Mr Picard argued that we will need “80% better resource efficiency to continue to live on this planet.” He said it was a major planning error to try to link all properties up to a centralised power grid system, which has mitigated against the development of decentralised energy systems.

Right behind the energy revolution will come the dominant resource battle of the 21st century, over water.

He revealed that presently about a third of all venture capital is now in the sustainable building sector, concluding with a rallying cry: “The second industrial revolution is right now!”

http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Sustainability-in-Action/Energy.aspx  

http://www.johnpicard.com