Why we can’t save the planet without a massive building retrofit program.

The planet may be warming, but where I work in Colorado, our bean counters are in permanent freeze-thaw. Downstairs in the finance department, almost everyone has at least one inefficient electric space heater on in the winter. In the summer, sometimes the heat sticks on. I have seen our CFO typing in fingerless gloves and marketing staff in shorts and muscle shirts. Why? Our office building's heating system doesn't work so well, at least down there.

This situation may sound like an unfortunate inconvenience; a reader's suggestion might be that I stop whining. But it's nothing so trivial. This building—with our justifiably grumpy cold accountants, our overheated marketing team, and Barb at the front desk with the door open and the heat on (not her fault)—represents ground zero of the climate wars; our very future depends on fixing structures just like this one. 

Buildings account for 43 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions and consume 48 percent of all energy produced. They consume a whopping 76 percent of all the energy produced by coal. Scientists agree that emissions from coal are the one thing we need to eliminate if we want to have a prayer of solving climate change. And we need to solve this thing. Jim Hansen, the world's leading climatologist and the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has said that "we are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption." Weather Channel climatologist Heidi Cullen says, "[W]e know that there are nearly 6.7 billion people on the planet that spill out 2.2 gigatons of carbon; if we continue to spew at that same rate, the climate is going to get a hell of a lot warmer."

In this context, building new buildings properly is important, but fixing the old ones is crucial and is supposed to be an important part of the Obama administration's stimulus package. There are 130 million hogs like the one I'm typing this in throughout the United States, the vast majority built to very lame energy-efficiency standards. So what's our problem? Let's get on it!

Here's the problem: It's almost impossible. Here, for example, we have "gotten on it." Half of my job involves fixing old buildings. In the next year, we'll spend more than $300,000 doing just that. For most of the buildings, though, like this one, we've found that using any rational financial metrics, the cost of the fix is outrageous and offers little to no return on investment. It's hard for a variety of reasons. Engineers disagree on the correct fix. Each one has a different perspective. Who's right?

Sticker shock causes managers like me to approve multiple Band-Aid solutions instead of more complete fixes. Simultaneously, the pool of money we'd use is being competed for by perhaps more critical projects—like replacing broken water pipes or fixing leaky pools. As a result, we find ourselves crippling along, trying to make it another year rather than spend the quarter million to half a million dollars it's going to take to make everyone slightly more comfortable and save some (but not all that much) energy.

But wait: We're a motivated company with an environmental policy statement, private ownership that cares deeply about the environment, complete senior management buy-in, and a track record that, if we say so ourselves, puts us at the forefront of the sustainability movement. And yet we're having trouble fixing just one of our buildings.

Society clearly needs to address every piece of the climate challenge, not just the most lucrative, accessible, or high-impact ones. But how is the world, which operates on a fixed setting of "business as usual," going to deal with this overwhelming challenge?

The short story is that it isn't. We aren't going to solve the conundrum of existing buildings, and consequently the climate problem, without a comprehensive national program to finance this work. We need such a program—cobbled together through government, nonprofit, and foundation funding—because right now, with these financial hurdles, very few individuals or companies will do anything at all, and the vast majority of building owners, no matter how well-intentioned, will sit on their hands. We need a program that literally pays for a portion of these retrofits, donating cash so that the return on investment becomes acceptable or at least so the price of the fix isn't prohibitive.

This program has to happen soon, almost instantly. Scientists are telling us we have a decade to replace the inefficient infrastructure that is hobbling our climate. They are speaking, in part, about our buildings—about the building you're sitting in right now. More practically, our finance department can't take it much longer. It's not the cold that bothers them. It's the money we're wasting. That hole in the balance sheets is enough to turn our normally placid accountants into planetary activists.