Kelly: (00:06 )
Welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb: (00:09 )
The podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment.

Kelly: (00:13 )
By focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb: (00:18 )
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19 )
And I’m Kelly Westby. Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards. Several weeks ago we ran an episode on New York City’s new existing building carbon bill. This bill did not come from nothing and in order to translate this legislation to other cities around the country and the world, we need to look at the series of policies that brought us here. Today, we are going to take a step back to dive into the initial steps towards sustainability policy and then look to the future to see how other cities are or can be getting on the road to carbon neutrality. And I don’t think there’s a better person to take us on this journey than Laurie Kerr. Laurie is a national leader in urban sustainability policy as deputy director for green building policy at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Longterm Planning and sustainability under Michael Bloomberg. Laurie helped develop plan y c New York’s influential sustainability plan and spearheaded the development of New York’s innovative green building and energy efficiency policies. Subsequently, Laurie conceived and launched the city energy project at the National Resources Defense Council, which is assisting 10 major American cities from Los Angeles to Chicago, Houston and Atlanta and developing large scale efficiency projects similar to New York. She is now the president of LK policy lab. Speaking of carbon policy, remember to join us on June 27th 28th at the 2019 North American Passive House Network Conference, which will be at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City featuring presentations from industry experts on cutting edge strategies for achieving low carbon, high performance buildings. This year’s conference is gearing up to be the best to date and even includes sessions from my cohost, Robb Aldrich, among other SWA folks. And of course don’t forget to sign up for some of the incredible pre conference workshops. These will take place on June 25th and 26th. I’ll be talking about commissioning, how to make sure your high performance building actually performs. You can also hear the buildings and beyond acoustical director, Dylan Martello and plenty of others. Use the code n a p h n 19 star s w a to receive a 10% discount on the standard two day conference and expo pass for more Info on the 2019 n a p h n conference visit. The show notes page for this episode.

Kelly: (02:47 )
Thank you Laurie from for being on this podcast with me today. We actually just had an episode on the basically groundbreaking carbon caps for buildings. But obviously it didn’t come out of nothing. You’ve done a lot of work over the past 13 years, over a decade, looking at what we should do to kind of get on the path to low carbon. So that’s what we want to talk about today. We obviously focus on buildings, our podcast is called buildings and beyond, but can you give us a little background on why New York City has decided to have a pretty big focus on buildings or at least looking at buildings and energy use and what the impact is on the environment?

Laurie: (03:38 )
Well, before I went to the mayor’s office, I got a sneak peek of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory and what I saw was really surprising. 75% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions came from energy used in buildings. We didn’t know that before that and that really focused our mind. I also did the math on our growth rates and figured out that about 85% of our buildings in 2030 were buildings that we already had in 2005. So that meant clearly that if New York wanted to address climate change, it would have to focus on its existing buildings. But there were no models. What do you do? The energy codes are all designed around new buildings, existing buildings, unless they’re making some improvement are allowed to run inefficiently forever. That’s just the way it works. So I remember pouring over the data and trying to figure out what we should do. And Maryland Davenport, who was th