Towards a Rapid Shift to Healthy and Climate Safe Buildings
By Yu Ann Tan, RMI, and Carmi Orenstein, SEHN
"The house is a machine for living in," famously said Le Corbusier, a pioneer of architectural modernism and a major influence on the field of urban planning, in his 1923 manifesto, Towards a New Architecture. And that house “is only habitable when it is full of light and air..." In his Radiant City plan in the 1930s he foresaw the indoor and outdoor air pollution risks of “the exhaust fumes” of cars, asking what harmful health effects they may have on inhabitants since they “seem to destroy all trees down the street.” Le Corbusier was interested in urban housing problems, access to nature, and functionality for human comfort and well-being. He was interested in a dwelling’s relationship to the climate, though the climate crisis has forever changed what that may connote to us.
The metaphor of the machine—something designed to make processes more efficient—was meant to illustrate the need for science- and logic-based standards for housing that would address the problems of the day. Those standards would relate “not only to individual bodily comfort but also related to the wider issues of healthy living.”
Regardless of the ultimate successes, failures, controversies, and contradictions of these 100-year-old ideas, they are an interesting frame for discussing a significant source of indoor and outdoor air pollution and threat to our climate now: buildings. In the United States, exposure to poor indoor air quality remains a significant health threat, especially for low income households and communities of color. Outdoor air pollution from burning fuels in buildings (gas, oil, wood, biomass) is now linked to more negative health impacts than coal in many states, according to research from Harvard School of Public Health. And the burning of fossil fuels in the building sector is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, at about 10 percent of US carbon emissions.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the sources of those greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants usually come down to just a handful of a building’s appliances and equipment. Fossil fuel powered water heaters and furnaces that generally vent outdoors are sources of outdoor air pollution, including nitrogen oxides (NOx), particulate matter (PM2.5), carbon monoxide, and ozone. Indoors, gas stoves are a main source of air pollution, especially as stoves are not required to be vented outdoors in every state, and building codes can vary substantially, even from one county to the next. Health research shows that children living in a home with a gas stove have a 42 percent increased risk of having asthma symptoms compared to children in homes with electric stoves.
Of growing concern to many of us, gas combustion pollution is also a health equity and climate justice issue. In the United States, 26 million low-income households burn fossil fuels inside their homes. Communities of color are disproportionately burdened by pollution from burning fossil fuels, as well as energy costs and poor housing quality. Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities are exposed to nearly twice as much PM2.5 pollution from gas combustion in residences than whites. This is due in part to structural racism throughout our housing and economic systems. Many of these communities are also highly vulnerable to the extreme weather events brought on by climate change. They lack comparable access to cooling and resilient infrastructure, as well as the financial means to relocate.
“Decarbonizing” our building stock through an equitable approach is a multi-solve of sorts, addressing many urgent interrelated health, environment, and climate problems, all of which have strong justice dimensions. African American and Latino households bear disproportionate energy cost burdens—three times as high as other homes. Decarbonization by shifting from fossil fuel-powered to zero-emission electric appliances will lower overall housing costs, improve housing quality, create safe and healthy indoor environments, enable buildings to easily manage energy demand, and reduce climate pollution. Building electrification is even a powerful job creator.
There is significant work to do. In the United States, more than 60 percent of households still heat their homes or water with fossil fuel, and about 35 percent of households cook with gas. The impacts of climate change are being inflicted on a world already stressed in many other ways. And as it worsens, its interactions with existing vulnerabilities will deepen. They will expose them, worsen them, and make action to relieve them harder. This does not mean there is nothing to be done.
As the IPCC stated in their latest climate report, we can still secure a 1.5°C (2.7°F) future, but only if we act now at unprecedented scale and speed. There is already evidence that we are on the cusp of a seismic shift in how we approach our relationship with combustion in buildings. Mothers around the nation are taking a stand, health professionals have proven to be trusted and valued spokespeople. Momentum is building around the necessary public awareness and realigned perceptions of gas appliances in our homes, including calls to action from health professionals, significant mainstream media attention, increasing awareness of indoor air quality, and continued innovation of electric appliances. Diverse sources are calling out the gas industry’s aggressive and misleading tactics, spanning popular news outlets, ad campaigns, late-night television segments, YouTube videos, and podcasts.
As decision makers take steps to transition off fossil fuels, they have created a range of policy solutions. Steps taken to decarbonize our building stock can be seen at all levels of government and via various organizations:
Policies to restrict gas system expansion and accelerate clean energy retrofits vary in form and detail based on the local context, illustrating a wealth of paths to eliminate climate and air pollution in homes and businesses;
The two broadest policy levers are all-electric new construction policies, and policies aiming to retrofit existing buildings with gas infrastructure (around 70 million buildings);
A report from the Environmental Law Institute shows how states, localities and tribes can benefit from building codes and other policies to reduce indoor air pollution;
At the federal level, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has started a task force to look at gas stove pollution;
The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced that gas appliances won’t make the cut for the Energy Star’s “most efficient” rating;
Air agencies have a particular role to play. For example, the California Air Resources Board unanimously voted on a groundbreaking resolution committing the agency to take significant action on gas appliance pollution.
In addition to the American Medical Association, state local medical societies in Massachusetts and Washington have all passed resolutions recognizing the health harms of gas appliance pollution.
State and local governments must play the lead role in creating this change, and in a growing number of cases, they have stepped up to the plate. Seventy-nine cities and counties across the United States have adopted policies that require or encourage the move off fossil fuels to all-electric homes and buildings. Twenty-eight million people across twelve states now live in a jurisdiction where local policies favor fossil fuel-free health buildings. Local action is powerful. It signals a clear and decisive desire to shift away from burning fossil fuels in buildings, which can be contagious: one city’s policy can inspire others to follow suit, as well as providing a blueprint.
A building need not be harmful to human health, as early advocates for the urban poor knew. The harms buildings can cause have continued in age-old respects but have also expanded in ways people like Le Corbusier and his cohort could not have predicted—harms now extending out to the climate system. We have the science and technology to change course and we only require the public policies and the collective buy-in to do so. It is urgent that we lend our citizen and professional voices to electrifying 1 billion actual machines and meeting our building decarbonization goals.
Image credit: Rewiring America
Please follow the links in this article for more information and opportunities, and watch this page for upcoming events: https://rmi.org/events/. Also watch for a Networker piece in the future on New York State-specific building decarbonization efforts!