No, but looser zoning codes can. We need more multi-family housing and less single-family housing, both because sharing walls between units saves energy on heating and cooling and because walkable dense development saves energy on transportation.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Right? If since 1988, 100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions, then housing codes are gonna do fuck all.
That's not what I was saying at all.
What I was saying is that single-family house in a car-dependent neighborhood, even one that's a net-zero passivehaus, is likely to cause more overall greenhouse gas emissions than an apartment in a walkable city center, even an old, uninsulated one, simply because the former forces the occupants to drive everywhere but the latter doesn't.
Sure, we need to regulate industrial emissions at the source instead of transferring blame to consumers, but housing and transportation emissions have nothing to do with that. Increasing energy efficiency of housing really would do a lot to lower emissions, but ending car-dependency of housing would do even more.
"That's not what I was saying at all."
Oh that's too bad. Good that both things can be true.
"Increasing energy efficiency of housing really would do a lot to lower emissions, but ending car-dependency of housing would do even more."
And yet still be a drop in the bucket.
And yet still be a drop in the bucket.
That's not true. Housing and (car) transportation are a large fraction of total greenhouse gas emissions.
it seems unlikely. could probably help and i figure the issue we've been having is more complicated than what can be accomplished with building codes alone.
yeah I'm thinking if anything it's maybe a step to prevent greedy real estate people from making matters worse in the interim. this sort of thing could force them to follow "green" rules during the transition to a larger more systemic overhaul.
No, law of headlines that end in a question and all that, but they might help in some small way.
yeah, it's not gonna be one-thing solution, it's gonna take this plus a whole bunch of other stuff
Could Tougher Building Codes Fix Climate Change?
No.
The only way to no longer fix, but try to avoid the worst of, climate change, is to abolish capitalism.
No band-aid on a symptom of a cancer will fix the cancer, and as warm and fuzzy it might make some people feel to think we can just regulate or reform our way out of this shit, that's never going to happen, and clinging on to these futile notions is not just ridiculous, but actively counterproductive (by shifting focus away from the only solution).