HVAC professionals take another look at IAQ since so many of us are spending more time at home.

Clean-energy systems are less expensive at scale, project teams are more educated, and data collection is completely integrated.

Pssst! Want to know a secret? It’s not going to be that hard to construct clean energy homes at scale.

If engineering superiority and cultural stigmatism don’t persuade you, the compelling economics of electric vehicles likely will.

My last two columns have, instead, reviewed the critical modern technologies shaping our 2010s and 2020s built environment. It’s time to return to some actual projects.

As we prepare to welcome a new decade, let’s take a look back at the key clean building technologies that began to emerge in our industry — and that may be critical to our health and wellbeing in the future.

During Climate Week in New York City in late September, while millions of schoolchildren marched in the streets in more than 1,000 cities to protest lack of action on climate breakdown, their leader, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, was in New York telling adults to stop acting like children. 

The decarbonization of buildings is no longer an aspirational idea. The biggest cities and most progressive states in America, and in the world, have begun to finalize concrete plans to phase out fossil fuels in building systems and on the electricity grid. 

Although the private sector is the primary landscape for economic and cultural disruption, we are becoming less naïve about the role of governments, especially local governments, as catalysts for the needed changes.

Crazy weather has become the norm everywhere, which is part of the reason for the Montreal Protocol and the Kigali Amendment, under which nations have agreed to move toward natural, global-warming-friendly refrigerants.