The Energy Information Administration (EAI) projects that the United States will fall far short of its commitments to greenhouse pollution reductions, putting the future prosperity of human civilization at risk. To give humanity a chance of keeping climate change at levels compatible with modern industrial civilization, global emissions need to peak before 2020, with the developed world peaking well before.

In its 2012 Annual Energy Outlook, the EIA forecasts that natural gas consumption will surge as coal and oil use remains strong. Greenhouse gas emissions fell by 8 percent from 2005 levels in 2009, but that progress will reverse. The EIA projects that climate pollution will start rising again, leading to only a 7.5 percent reduction in 2020 and a 3.2 percent reduction in 2035:

The White House website, describing how President Obama’s leadership is allowing the United States to “meet the climate change challenge,” writes how President Obama negotiated the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In that document, the United States committed to cutting its greenhouse pollution by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

In 2011, climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing said the United States was still “committed” to the 17 percent target, but “cannot yet tell you how close we are to meeting the 17 percent reduction levels.”

“The United States takes seriously the commitments first made by our Leaders in Copenhagen and reaffirmed in Cancun,” US climate envoy Todd Stern declared at the international climate talks in Durban, South Africa last December. “We are making progress toward our target of reducing emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020 through an array of domestic efforts.”

According to the EIA, the United States will lose ground already achieved when the pledge was made, and fall 56 percent short of its 2020 target. This year’s projection is more optimistic than the 2011 report, which estimated an 80 percent shortfall.

The United States is nowhere close to meeting even the insufficient target set by the administration. Without major, immediate changes in national policy, human civilization will be locked on a path of catastrophic global warming. The White House would do well to be honest about that reality.

A central component of solving the climate crisis is our built environment — the homes in which we live, the buildings in which we work. Forty percent of energy consumption in the United States is related to buildings, especially heating and cooling. On Thursday and Friday, the T.C. Chan Center is hosting the United Nations Environmental Programme – Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative (UNEP-SBCI) Symposia at the University of Pennsylvania.

This conference brings together the different players linked to the built environment from around the world, with the goal of finding solutions that can feed to the international meeting in Rio de Janeiro on climate change and global sustainability next year, twenty years after the seminal conference that set up the international framework for fighting global warming pollution in 1992.

The T.C. Chan Center, founded by Dr. Ali Malkawi, researches and develops technology to “create healthier, productive, energy efficient strategies that will lead to high performance buildings and sustainable environments.” In an interview with ThinkProgress Green, Dr. Malkawi explained why this sustainable building conference is so important, and what are the exciting developments in the world of green architecture.

“The main problem that we have is measuring the performance of buildings,” Malkawi said. “Most of our research is built toward finding solutions that can predict energy consumption of buildings.”

At first glance, the problem of figuring out the energy consumption for buildings doesn’t seem that hard, at least in developed countries like the United States. We have metered electricity and heating use, and clear metrics of energy production. However, when it comes to actually making buildings more sustainable, this aggregate information is insufficent. To design or retrofit an energy-efficient building, Malkawi said, one needs to look at lighting, heating, and cooling systems separately, potentially floor by floor. Most buildings are not submetered. Without sufficiently granular information, it becomes impossible to guarantee clear results:

The rule of thumb is if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.

The rewards of data-driving green building design are huge. According to Malkawi, you can save 50 to 60 percent of energy consumption during the design phase. A good example is the Monterrey International Airport, where a new terminal was designed with the idea to lower energy consumption even before systems were put in. Major improvements can also come from ensuring efficient operation of existing systems, the equivalent of making sure that a car’s tires are properly inflated and its sensors calibrated. At the T.C. Chan Center’s home, the University of Pennsylvania, they’ve worked with facilities managers to find problems that exist in systems and optimize systems behavior, using computational models that allowed them to pinpoint individual problem buildings. They’ve achieved 15 to 25 percent reduction in energy use just by getting the best use from existing systems.

The challenge of sustainable buildings is greater than just one of designing good structures. “There’s work that’s underway that looks at the behavior of urban environments and the interaction with individual buildings,” Malkawi said. If buildings are placed away from urban infrastructures, that will require more energy consumption by its users, including the costs of increased transportation. A good rating system for green buildings takes into account the “neighboodscape,” as Malkawi described it.

The UN symposium deals with the technology, policy, and financial issues of sustainable building. There needs to be meaningful, performance-based policy to encourage green buildings, as well as a way to finance these measures. “There’s a need for both top-down and bottom-up policy,” Malkawi said. Without mandatory policies that set objective standards and technology to measure results, the financial sector won’t be able to ensure that efforts to decrease energy consumption have guaranteed value. Policies that set clear thresholds, Malkawi believes, “would drive the financial sectors and technologies.”

Unfortunately, the United States is lagging behind, Malkawi said, although our strong university system is keeping us in the game:

At the moment, research and development is in good shape. We’re much further than other countries because we still have the best universities in the world — but not in deployment and practice, which is best in best in northern Europe and Japan. It’s being hindered here by lack of enforced standards that would require developers to erect energy efficient buildings. Pretty soon, if you don’t put these issues up front, even the areas of research are going to be lagging behind.

Rebuilding our living and working spaces to be sustainable is both one of the world’s greatest challenges but also an incredible opportunity. The housing crisis, jobs crisis, and climate crisis are linked by our built environment. Whichever nation leads the way will reap the greatest rewards.

Our guest blogger is Jake Schmidt, International Climate Policy Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The House is scheduled to vote today on HR 2594 which would seek to stop the European program to control aviation’s carbon pollution and push the U.S. closer to a trade war with Europe. This bill should be rejected by the House, never even considered by the Senate, and rejected by the Obama Administration. Now is not the time to start a trade war with Europe.

The bill would tell the U.S. government to work with U.S. companies to break another country’s law. And it tells the U.S.-based airlines to break the law in another country. Could you imagine the outrage if another country told its companies to break the U.S. law when they operate in the U.S.? Well that is exactly what this law directs the U.S. government and U.S.-based carriers to do — break the law. That isn’t a principle that the U.S. should implement. Here is what the bill says:

The Secretary of Transportation shall prohibit an operator of a civil aircraft of the United States from participating in any emissions trading scheme unilaterally established by the European Union. [...]

The Secretary of Transportation, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, and other appropriate officials of the United States Government shall use their authority to conduct international negotiations and take other actions necessary to ensure that operators of civil aircraft of the United States are held harmless from any emissions trading scheme unilaterally established by the European Union.

This is not a vote for or against action on global warming — it’s a vote to tell U.S. companies to break the law in other countries and move the U.S. closer to a trade war. Proponents of this bill are outlining many mistruths. Here are the facts:

1. The Europeans only acted after waiting 15 years for a global solution which never materialized. For almost 15 years, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) — the U.N. body tasked with coordinating international aviation — has failed to come up with mandatory global actions to significantly reduce aviation’s carbon pollution. After this failure, Europe took the reasonable step of passing a law to require carbon pollution reductions from flights that use European airports. The Europeans tried to get a global solution, but a global solution never materialized.
2. The European program is legal. Independent assessments have concluded that the inclusion of greenhouse gas emissions from international aviation in the EU’s program “is consistent with all relevant international provisions and therefore permissible under international law.” In fact, a preliminary court finding from the EU courts has found that the law is legal.
3. The EU program will not lead to massive price increases and will not have huge impacts on airline travel and the airline industry. When the Europeans had this system independently evaluated they found that the program would add a mere $11-57 to a roundtrip ticket — less for shorter flights. On a ticket that easily costs $800-1400 this is a very marginal price change. In fact, it is about the same as the price that airlines charge per checked bag on a domestic flight in the US. Instead the E.U. program will provide an incentive for airlines to find the best way to reduce their fuel use and encourage them to purchase the most efficient aircraft that are already rolling off the production line. These are investments that will spur savings to American consumers as US-based carriers improve the efficiency of their aged fleet.
4. US companies are already competing to produce better airplanes. US-based aircraft and engine manufacturers are already making strides to produce more efficient airplanes. For example, Boeing and Pratt & Whitney tout the fuel saving benefits of their aircraft and engines.
5. The European program regulates only carriers that use their airports. They aren’t applying an arbitrary program targeted at the US or one that is different for flights from another country. Their program applies the same standard for all flights that land at and take-off from European airports — regardless of where that flight takes off. Indeed the EU program allows completely exempts foreign carriers whose own governments take any comparable measures. But rather than clean up carbon pollution here at home, the House wants to prohibit American carriers from complying with other countries’ laws.

What proponents fail to acknowledge is that the only thing this bill will do is move the U.S. closer to a trade war with one of our major trading partners. Given the state of the economy, why would the United States want to risk such an outcome?

This bill is wrong and should be rejected by the House and never taken up by the Senate. It will move the U.S. closer to a trade war with Europe and tell U.S. companies to ignore E.U. laws when they operate at European airports.