Designing for a Regenerative Earth w/ David Gottfried

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated.

Chris Halfnight (00:00)
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Urban Green’s podcast, Building Tomorrow, where we have conversations with climate solvers. Every day we meet people who make a big difference in the built environment and are moving us closer to a low carbon future. And we want you to hear their stories. Before we begin today’s episode, I’d like to thank Carrier, our podcast sponsor. My name is Chris Halfnight, I’m the CEO of Urban Green Council. And today I’m thrilled to welcome David Gottfried to the podcast. It’s not every day I get to sit down with one of the true founders of the Green Building Movement.

Chris Halfnight (00:30)
David co-founded the U.S. Green Building Council and also founded the World Green Building Council, now in 85 countries. He is the creator and CEO of Regen 360 and hosts the Regen 360 podcast, and he’s also just published the book Regen 360, which we’ll dig into today. His previous book, Explosion Green, won the Independent Book Awards Grand Prize. He lectures at Stanford and lives in Northern California. David, welcome and thanks for joining me.

David Gottfried (00:59)
Thanks, Chris. It’s great to be here and back virtually to New York.

Chris Halfnight (01:05)
Fantastic. Welcome. so let’s start at the beginning. Can you take us back to nineteen ninety-three or or thereabouts and the dynamics of that moment? How did you get the market to show up in those early days? what were you doing? What was your journey through that time?

David Gottfried (01:22)
Yeah, that’s going back in time, and that’s really when things started. We launched the US Green Building Council in April of ninety-three at the AIA headquarters in DC. go back a few more years in ’91. We started first at ASTM [American Society for Testing & Materials] with a small green building subcommittee, and we wrote a draft standard for green building that became a standard there at ASTM.

David Gottfried (01:51)
And through the ASTM effort, we had learned that to create a rating system to define green building for the US and the world, it wasn’t one vertical. So it wasn’t just the architects or engineers or the bankers or the product manufacturers. We had to go horizontal.

David Gottfried (02:10)
But we looked for leaders, leaders in 13 sectors of the industry, like Rick Fedrizzi at Carrier, young, energetic, had this title, he was growing into environmental marketing. But we found the same in furniture at Herman Miller at

David Gottfried (02:31)
ceiling tiles at Armstrong and green cleaning. And beyond all those, we had finance people, developers, engineers, architects, and some of those early engineers, architects, nonprofits came from New York

David Gottfried (02:48)
So underpinnings come back to Urban Green, pre-Urban Green. and even the beginning is where you guys are with my folks in the Bronx.

David Gottfried (03:01)
But we got them together. These are people, when you presented a vision, an idea, we’re gonna invent green building for the US and the definition, conferences, economics, the whole thing. And there were words, but their eyes sparkled. So we got them around the table, and they’re still here today.

Chris Halfnight (03:22)
That’s fantastic. What what are the messages that resonated with that that crowd? What were the aha moments if there if there were any around that table?

David Gottfried (03:32)
You know, the people we got, these early visionaries, we went deeper. Yes, you got to talk about economics, and we didn’t have much data then. But we talked about better buildings.

David Gottfried (03:47)
We talked about recycling in buildings, We talked about health and indoor air quality. And that was just a brand new topic then

David Gottfried (03:58)
We talked about value, and value is performance. And ultimately it was economics because tenants want health in their buildings.

David Gottfried (04:10)
They want daylight, they want, and landlords want energy efficiency, lower expenses. And we talked about a vision of economics then that we later proved out, but that rents could go higher, vacancies would be lower, lease up periods would be faster, expenses down. To a developer, all that adds up into higher NOI, net operating income.

David Gottfried (04:39)
So even though we didn’t have the stats and the case studies, this is about money, this is about value, and this is about performance, and this is about life. And at a deeper level for these people at our table.

David Gottfried (04:53)
This is about creating purpose, passion, and mission in their own life, in the building industry.

Chris Halfnight (05:02)
so in the in the couple decades that followed, what are the the big milestones that stand out to you as this movement grew from a relatively modest sized group around around a table to a nationwide and and global movement now in I think eighty five countries or so?

David Gottfried (05:20)
Yeah, we have green building councils in 85 countries, but LEED is in most of Earth, like 184 countries. And beyond LEED, we’ve got BREAM and CASBI in Japan and Three Star in China and Green Mark in Singapore and Beam Plus. Everybody’s creating rating systems or using LEED or BREAM. But it it it’s gone crazy.

David Gottfried (05:48)
Milestones along the way, one was just forming, creating a board of directors across those sectors, starting annual conferences. We have Green Build in in mid-October. we’ll all be there. our first big conference was nineteen ninety-four at NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

David Gottfried (06:13)
Division of the Department of Commerce. So conferences were important, the expos to start showcasing.

David Gottfried (06:20)
Green products, materials, and services. And then the formation of the LEED committee, which Rob named and it grew. Department of Energy gave us like $800,000 for the pilot of LEED and the early reference guide And LEED really took us off because membership was slower in those early days, kind of like the innovation graph, pretty flat and an inflection point, Chris, and then it shoots.

Chris Halfnight (06:50)
Mm-hmm.

David Gottfried (06:50)
And

David Gottfried (06:51)
LEED could be tracked right at the end of the flat and the start of the slope, right about here. And that was around, I would say we started in 1993. It took us about five years, and those pilots of LEED 1.0 came out in 2000. And we started to grow from those visionaries, early mainstream pioneers. And at some point on that curve,

David Gottfried (07:18)
mid mainstream and then everybody’s in.

Chris Halfnight (07:23)
Yeah, absolutely. so let’s let’s turn to where we are today. you’ve just published a book called ReGen 360 that looks back at that era and everything that’s come since. It’s a a beautiful book. It’s a thoughtful book, it’s very self-reflective, there’s a lot of engaging insights. I really enjoyed reading it. Can you tell us why you wrote this book and why now?

David Gottfried (07:54)
Well, thanks for reading it. You’re one of the early readers. This is my fourth book. The other three actually all launched at Greenbuilds but they were all memoirs. Memoirs are just personal story. It’s not an autobiography. It’s just a synapse of time and a story.

David Gottfried (08:16)
So Explosion Green was our 20-year story. Before that, Greed to Green was the first 10 years of the green building movement. But it’s now like 13 years since Explosion Green. And I love to write, but I wanted to live more, to have more to say. I wanted to be my kid to get older. I wanted to see where Earth was going. I wanted to.

David Gottfried (08:45)
Go more internal inside to understand my own evolution, my own maturation, and think more broadly.

David Gottfried (08:56)
This is my offering to Earth at this juncture of my synthesis of my life, of the stage of evolution of David, having gotten to see a lot from those early days of Green Building, running around the world, creating councils, becoming a trillion-dollar world’s biggest sustainability initiative.

David Gottfried (09:17)
And then the engineering and the artist and the father and the dad and the dog lover, they all got a seat at the table to write.

David Gottfried (09:25)
And I love, love, love what we’re doing in Green Building. It’s the model for the future, but it’s not pervasive into all systems, into all health, into all humans, into all codes and governance carrots and sticks. So I took it on as a project project to offer.

Chris Halfnight (09:44)
that’s fascinating. So I I was gonna mention the quote that you just you just mentioned. So i you know, I I this book is something of a diagnosis and a prescription, and I think you it’s actually in the afterword, but you mention a speech where you say we’re putting solar panels on that Titanic as it heads straight at the melting iceberg.

Chris Halfnight (10:06)
That’s sort of the diagnosis part of it. So where what did the movement miss? Where, you know, where did what did we get wrong in that sort of diagnostic lens?

David Gottfried (10:20)
Well first I want to acknowledge what we got right because we we nailed it. This is a thousand times bigger than we ever dreamed when we started the three of us in ’92 and ASTM in 91 and the launch in 93.

David Gottfried (10:40)
But as an engineer, you hate waste. So if you have the waste, there’s still the other half. You’ve done less bad to get to the 50% reduction. You can celebrate it, but you’re climbing a mountain.

David Gottfried (10:56)
The Paris Agreement is a mountain to net zero by 2050. And this Earth isn’t getting there. No way near the 1.5 degrees C or the 2.0. We’re headed towards 2.5, 3.0.

David Gottfried (11:08)
That old survival wiring wasn’t serving us so well. That tiger is not chasing most of us.

David Gottfried (11:16)
We’re still turning that ship a few degrees. It is headed at the melting iceberg. I love what we’re doing, it’s significant, but I I I’m being playful, but I started to think: are we putting solar panels on the Titanic with batteries? Are we electrifying it on the rising ocean that’s heating up?

David Gottfried (11:37)
Yes, green buildings are growing and economic, and we’re shifting the economy. So proud of it. But we’re we’re

David Gottfried (11:46)
Only a few degrees of turning. And so I wanted a right to not do less bad, but to move into 360 regeneration. Not just buildings, but people, brains, nutrition. Our soul. What happened to the soul? The soul didn’t get a calculation and a title. It was net worth, money, assets, smaller liabilities, self-worth.

David Gottfried (12:17)
And then I invented the third leg of the stool in the book, soul worth, gratitude, service, care, appreciation, helping others, community, art, love, empathy.

David Gottfried (12:34)
It was missing.

Chris Halfnight (12:39)
Let’s pull that down to the level to pull it down to green building and to the level of a specific project, for example. So take take a new office tower. I mean it it sounds like you were talking about a something of a paradigm shift where we are better incorporating the values and better accounting for the externalities and and wastes. So if we if we take a new office tower, what are the the inputs and the wastes that aren’t aren’t being accounted for, aren’t making it in the

Chris Halfnight (13:09)
Press release.

David Gottfried (13:11)
We’re we’re getting much better at it with LEED version 5.0 EPDs, HPDs. We’re we’re moving in the right direction, the the whole building LCA methods, absolute progress. And we’re doing much better with new construction than existing buildings. There’s just a ton of carbon in these existing buildings, and we’re not getting there.

David Gottfried (13:41)
and even LEED, which I love, and that L is for leadership. And it and the early vision of that committee was the lowest LEED certification is the top 25%. But what about that bottom 75%?

David Gottfried (14:00)
So if you want to save carbon, get them all in the game. And the utilities have tried with incentives. In California, we have savings by design. They know those buildings.

David Gottfried (14:11)
but how do you get them all in the game? That requires carrots and sticks. It requires things like the PACE program. Fantastic where you can get these PACE loans to make your building energy efficient. And the securitization for the loan is the property tax. It was brilliant.

David Gottfried (14:30)
Now we have to go into the positive. We have to turn deeper We need batteries in the codes.

David Gottfried (14:40)
We need solar hot water, which is great for our homes in a lot of jurisdictions. We incentivize photovoltaics with tax credits, and some of those went away.

David Gottfried (14:50)
Which is kind of not the best thing in the world. but solar thermal just didn’t get the love and it should have. We could go much deeper in passive.

David Gottfried (14:59)
House, passive solar design with the daylight. We never get shading control right, even in the big buildings. I once gave a keynote in Japan.

David Gottfried (15:10)
And I sat in this home that was built, I don’t know, 600 years ago, maybe more, It was a very hot, humid summer day, no electricity. I sat in the center of the home on the wood floor, put together with tongue and groove, no nails, no air conditioning, no lighting.

David Gottfried (15:28)
And it was cool. And there was a breeze. I got on that stage and said, Why the hell did you hire me? You guys got it right. I’m learning from you.

Chris Halfnight (15:40)
They they already had it figured out. let’s dig in on measurement there. So we often often talk in in Green Building about how you you can’t manage what you don’t measure. We we hear that all the time. It’s been central to energy benchmarking and water benchmarking and otherwise. You talk a lot in the book about how measurement matters. So what are we failing to measure, or what are we failing to measure adequately?

David Gottfried (16:11)
Well, we’re not measuring all the externalities. We’re starting to get to it. We’re we’re starting to get to embodied carbon, although we’re early on in those measurements

David Gottfried (16:25)
We can measure so many things with air quality, VOCs, thermal comfort, everybody in a building. We can know their temperature preferences and and

David Gottfried (16:39)
Where they’re sitting, where how often they come in during the week, and that flow changes building design,

David Gottfried (16:46)
For all the tenants, the occupants, and the neighborhood, all inputs and waste, not just the ones we measure, but there’s so many we don’t measure.

David Gottfried (16:56)
WELL, WELL came into health, but I want to go into that third leg of the stool, into the soul, to why are you here, Chris?

David Gottfried (17:07)
What’s what’s driving you?

Chris Halfnight (17:10)
Yeah, so a much more holistic, values driven style of measurement or approach to measurement.

Chris Halfnight (17:17)
We’ve got time for one more question. Let’s let’s wrap up with what we usually end with, which is what is one message that you’d like to leave our listeners with? And in particular for you, now that your book is or will soon be available to the public, what what’s one message you would leave our listeners with?

David Gottfried (17:35)
One is hard for me. but

David Gottfried (17:41)
If what you’re doing, working on, thinking, ask yourself if it accelerates hope.

David Gottfried (17:53)
Capital H O P E Health on Planet Earth. Does that accelerate hope or degrade it?

Chris Halfnight (18:07)
That’s a wonderful theme to end on. Thank you so much to our guest, David Gottfried. I really enjoyed our conversation today. All the resources from today’s episode will be linked in the description. We’d like to again thank Carrier for sponsoring this podcast. And thank you to Urban Greens members and sponsors. If you would like to become a member, please visit UrbanGreen Council.org. Thanks for tuning in today. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please consider subscribing so that you don’t miss out on any of the great conversations. We’ll see you next time.

Resources

Learn more about the book: Regen360 by David Gottfried.