LaVerne Williams Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT:When we left off on the last tape, we were talking about about how green homes can have much more energy efficiency design built into them. And those are the things you're working on over thirty years ago but they seem to have become more critical now with climate change and some (inaudible) smaller carbon footprint.

LW: Absolutely.

DT: I was hoping you could explain that context and how you can get to a house that's extremely energy efficient and maybe entirely off the grid?

LW: Actually its, its, you have to start with the basic, you start with climate based design, you know, you design the house with a microclimate, lets just talk about houses, okay. You design, design the house to,to, or any building in this context for the microclimate of the site. And, and, you know the sun path and the breeze patterns and your views and your access, some of these kinds of things are all important, they need to be considered.

Its very easy to, to limit the amount of cooling and heating you need to have on a residence. Its just paying attention to these basics and, and not overbuilding. The problem with a lot of people who are doing this, they're building way too big of homes. We have the building site I think houses since the 1960s have almost doubled in size somewhere in that range.

Its just ridiculous, you know, how big a homes people think they need how big a home people think they ne, ne, need to have nowadays. I could talk about the biocapacity of the earth and why we shouldn't be doing that but I'll save that to later. But its imperative that we reduce the size of our homes.

We, and its imperative to reduce the amount of energy use that our homes have. We are in a crisis situation as far as the climate is concerned. We've got ten years we're actually maybe have eight years if we if the climate if we don't do something now, we can't wait, we cannot allow the earth temperature to increase another degree and a half in temperature on a centigrade scale, okay.

If we do, we are going to the, the, this world will become a different planet. It will not be the same planet that we grew up in. Wh, there will we will have coastal flooding like people are ha, will have a hard time believing. I mean, you know, all of the major cities, not all the major cities, but cities like Miami will be under water.

New York City will be, Boston, it will come up, Galveston will be under water, alright, a great extent of it. The because if we don,t stop global, if we start the car, the carbon emissions into the atmosphere in the, the CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, were going to reach a point where there,s this positive feedbacks that are taking place. They're already starting to take place in that what they call mult, multiple positive feedbacks.

Just to give you an example what we're, what's the scientists are concerned with is the melting of the,the ice caps on Greenland and Ar, and Ar, and Ar, Antarctica. If we lose the, the ice cap on Greenland, we're talking about somewhere between twenty to twenty-four foot sea rise, you know.

That brings the water almost half way up from Galveston, half way to Houston. We're only at fifty foot here, okay. All of Nassau, all of Kemah, Seabrook, all these towns are at, will be under water, all the industry that's down there, okay.

In coal fire there is a silver bullet that we can, besides doing what we need to do with our buildings and with our homes as far as making them as energy efficient as possible, but we have to eliminate the construction of any more new coal fire plants.

If the we that they are the biggest contributor to global warming out there. And just one coal fired plant, you can go to architecture2030.org, and you can read about, you know, all of the efforts that homeowners might do to, to, to change out light bulbs to cor, to, to compact fluorescent bulbs can be negated in months time by one coal power plant or something like that, I don,t remember the exact statistic you can see them on, on the site and so forth, but its they're such massive emitters and, of CO2.

And so we have to stop if we can stop that, then it buys us some time. If we dont stop it, we have, we, we have to limit the amount of, of CO2 that's going in the atmosphere. There have to be zero carbon emissions. We need to achieve that in, well not zero, we have to not increase it past what we're doing now in eight years.

DT: Can you give us an idea of, of how big of a wedge, how much percentage building is responsible for the carbon emissions?

LW: Over fifty percent, over fifty percent. The, the building industry is, is, is responsible for more than fifty percent of that and I would say homes are probably responsible for fifty percent of that fifty percent.

I don,t know have the, the exact statistics there. But, you know, you have all these little bitty probably yeah, yeah probably fifty percent because there's a lot of with your larger buildings there's, there's, less surface area exposed to the environment than you do a house.

Every house has a much larger surface area exposed to the atmosphere. So you've got a lot more energy use prob, on a, on a cubic foot basis, okay. But if we don't stop this, then what will happen is that we're going to see coastal flooding, we're going to see species extinction well we're already seeing spec, species extinction.

That's never happened before inas far as the scientists are concerned we're, we're in we're in the, the, the sixth the period of the sixth ex, extinction of species and this is by far the quickest its ever occurred on the face of the earth, okay. And thats' why the reason why we have declared a moratorium on not building anymore homes.

We people, we will not involve our self with any projects now between zero and ten foot sea elevavation, sea elevation because in 1986, the earth, the population of, of the earth, the co, the, the, the use of the earth biocapacity reached equilibrium about what the earth could, could supply and what were using up.

And since 1986, weve been in overshoot. In other words instead of being in Equilibrium, were in overshoot. And unless we reduce our consumption dramatically, especially the people in the United States who the world is looking to for leadership, there is, I, there's, there's there can be there's going to be some catastrophic events going on.

So that's the reason why we've declared a moratorium to sort of help people wake up to the fact that we can no longer afford to utilize the resources to build in areas we know are going to flood.

I am certain, I am dead certain that within the lifetime of any building that I design that would be from zero to ten foot elevation, there is a really good chance that it's the sea is going to come up and to its, to its, to its base and make it unusable.

We can no longer afford to waste the resources, not only the materials it takes to build these things but the energy involved in building them. And then abandoning them. It may be a hundred years from now, it may be a hundred and twenty, it may habe a hundred in fifty but they will be abandoned because you can't you're not going to live there, okay.

We just can't afford to do that. So that's the reason why weve declared a moratorium. I dont think people understand the gravity of the situation and how soon we have to address it. So, you know, we can talk all we want to about greening our homes and greening buildings but we, really its just an interim step, we have to go far beyond that.

We have to go far beyond that. We have to get to the point where we are not generating any waste, where we're not generating any CO2, where everything that we use is based upon renewable energy. Saving those fossil fuels that took billons of years to create.

Do you realize those fossil fuels, the coal, the oil and so forth, came from the cretaceous period somewhere between seventy-four and 144 million years ago when the earth drastically overheated, okay, from CO2, okay, and basic the whole earth was a big green house, okay.

I don't think there was any ice on the earth at the time and over this period of time, the plants and animals, you know, the, the, this is the dinosaur age, okay, they absorbed these and this turned into coal.

They absorbed the CO2, that's what took the CO2 out of the air and deposited it into coal, deposited it into oil and it took, and, and this has happened before, okay, this the last time was was the crustaceous period but but its happened in the past several times, okay, that's the reason why some of these deposits are really deep in the earth, alright.

What we're taking is that CO2 that we took out of the atmosphere that was heating up the earth at that time, we've taken it out of the atmosphere so it cooled down, now we're putting it back in, into the atmosphere at a much quicker rate than it's ever been done before. And we have to stop it.

DT: Well as, as an architect, and if you want to stop it, where would you go from the buildings that you were designing in the in the seventies to those that would be almost to net zero carbon design?

LW: What you have to do is you have to drastically reduce the size. You need to, to make them out of durable materials that will last for at least a century, instead of something that's made to last only twenty years or so.

There is a video out there, and I wish I could remember the name of it, but, but it goes into the history of how we got onto this, what is the name of the term, disposable planned obsolescence. It was actually discussed and actually put into plan back in the fifties about planned obsolescence and all of industry and everything, the whole United States, sort of adopted this, okay.

And that is, that philosophy, is part of what's leading us to where we are today. So how do you create, how do you create buildings that, that have zero energy use? Well, its not as easy as what it sounds, you know. We've done straw bale homes and I'm, that's not the answer because we shouldn't be taking the straw off the land that should be going back into, going into the land to add hula, humus and so forth, okay.

We really shouldn't be using it to, to build homes out of but you can do it. We've done straw bale homes. They work very well in this climate. We've got one in Montgomery. It's basically, what we did, we put up a pole barn instead, but instead of using round poles, we used square poles and we put a concrete slab in there and put, built the straw bales up on top it well after the roof was in place so it wouldn't get wet.

People are still living there, there, they, they, they, they they've raised their family there, raised four kids there and this was done in 93 is when we completed it. And they built it for less than forty dollars a square foot, cash out-of-pocket, move-in at the time, about half the cost of what other homes were being built a,t at the time of comparable quality.

There's a, you can use a lot of recycled materials in, in homes. The basics though come from the actual design and using materials that can be reused when the, the, the useful life of the building is no longer there. What we don't want to create is waste.

What we don't want to create is toxic waste is really what, what we don't want to create. Nature does not create toxic waste. All waste is recycled by some other creature down the line, okay. Its all recycled; its all reused and so forth.

Human beings are the only people that are creating toxic waste and we are creating a lot of it with the buildings that we, we, we build and the manufacturing process. So part of the process of getting to sustainable architecture, to net zero energy homes to all these things is to eliminating waste so that the, so that there, so there is not any waste.

And everything that a house is built out of can be use, reused later on or remanufactured or whatever. Our automobiles shouldn't be lay, ending up in the landfills. Our our I mean parts of the automobiles, anything, our cell phones shouldn't be ending up in, in the, in, in the landfills neither should our computers and all this.

I'm getting a little bit off subject here but I just want to, in fact all of industry has to start looking in this direction. We have to quit reducing, we have to reduce, eliminate waste entirely. And I, I guess because my parents grew up in the, the Great Depression and, and the way I was brought up I'm I understand this because we, were taught not to, to, you know, waste not want not, you know.

They weren't we weren't poor but we weren't rich either. We we made do with what we had and we lived very well. And so, you know, it's building for your, you know, you're keeping, think of the the roof of your house as being an umbrella to keep climate off of your house, keep the sun and the wind off of your house and the sun and, and the rain off of your house because its a combination of the sun and the rain moisture is what creates a deterioration, you know.

Rainwater is your universal solvent and once it starts working and so forth, it starts taking things down. So you want to keep it off of there and using like metal roofs or durable roofs, something that you can mount a solar system on and not have to worry about it deteriorating during its lifetime.

And you the high pe, you got all this high performance glass out there nowadays which may or may not be problematic late, on, on a long term basis. I am a firm believer in this umbrella, having your roof shade your windows when you don't want the heat coming in them.

Putting up trellises on the outside and to make sure that you know, you, we could have west windows but you got to have long horizontal overhangs or long trellises out keeping that sun from coming in underneath of it in the late afternoon. But it, it, use some vegetation to do that with, then in the wintertime the sun is never over on that side so you don't need the vegetation there. It's not going to grow there anyway so you can re-grow it every year.

They're just renewable things. We've done several passive solar greenhouses for homes that require zero energy, zero energy, not net zero, but zero energy for heating and cooling. I mean they, they're self heating and they're self cooling, depending upon what time of the year you want it to be.

DT: What are some of the latest techniques for getting to this net zero goal?

LW: Well, I've talked about some of them already its, its, you now, siting of the house using materials that store the mass, using insulation at the roof line rather than at the ceiling line.

I haven't talked about that but we rare, we don't ventilate attics anymore. All of our projects are insulated at the roof so that it create, part of the things, part of the problem that we have in this part of the country is that no one can build, can have basements.

I mean, they can have them but its going to get moldy and mildewy down there. And so everybody tries to store things up in their attic that's ventilated and it never lasts up there, okay.

Well, with, with insulating at the roof line youre creating an envelope, an insulated envelope that gives you that extra space that you may want to have that's relatively dust free and it, and like this one home we demonstrated it that doesn't reach over eighty-four degrees in there so the candles don't melt, your Christmas decorations don't melt when you store it up there, you can put, you know, you can put all sorts of things up there right now.

The cli, that particular client even had his workshop up there for a while until, until they got the co, the house finished, they longer had a need for the workshop up there. So youv'e got air conditioning system, you know the air conditioning systems, the lighting, the, we, one of the things that we have to eliminate is air leakage on houses.

Not only in the, not only in the envelope of a house but also the air conditioning system. They should be made airtight so that you're getting the air where you want it to where it needs to be. And, and youre not having outside air come in. Half, half your energy bill in the Houston area is just taking humidity out of the air.

So during the summertime and the early spring and I mean the, the late spring and the early fall, if you can, if you can, you, if you have a non-leaky home, you can greatly reduce the amount of energy bills that you have on it. But its not hard to achieve a net zero home.

Its just a matter of the principles size, using fluorescent lighting, using day lighting, having porches on homes so that you can spend a lot more time outdoors, alright, and locating that porch where its in the breeze instead of in the wind shadow of the house. All just basic principles working with the d, with, with the site.

DT: As, as somebody with allergies and with a family history of, of, I guess, asthma, I'm sure you're very sensitive to how houses and, and workplaces can contribute to peoples health. And I was wondering if you could talk about how those can be go, designed in a way that, that you avoid some of these toxic exposure problems.

LW: We've a, I've actually had several clients co, that have actually have huge problems with chemical sensitivities that I've, that I've helped. Some are so sensitive to chemicals that if ever anybody here today were to be wearing any fabric softener or they had their clothes fabric softened or if they were wearing any sort of cologne or perfume, she would, if she, as soon as she'd walk in that door, she'd change color in front of us.

They're that acutely sensitive to chemicals in that, that environment. These have been some of my clients and this is a huge challenge and it, it makes you aware of all the, of, of aware of all the toxins that, that we are building into our homes.

Most your manufactured materials contain chemicals we have no idea what they are because they're trade secrets. And we, and, and this, and like let's say carpeting, you have some light that comes in and hits carpeting, it, the, the carpeting breaks down and goes into the air stream.

We've got sunlight that's maybe hitting Formica, could be hitting some sort of plastic material. It emits these, emits these chemicals in the air. Particle board is, is a huge factor in, I, I've, the formaldehyde and other toxins that are in particle board are just very problematic and I, we, we rarely use them in our projects.

What happens is that we know that things like formaldehyde are toxic, we know that its a carcinogen, okay, its just been cla, classified, finally it'd been classified as a carcinogen, okay, after, you know, many years of debate like lead was never, it took decades or almost a century for it to be declared a toxin.

But when all these chemicals mix together in the air inside of our home; we have no idea how toxic this chemical soup is. You know, we know how toxic certain chemicals are but what is the, what is the, how toxic are these culmination of things, okay.

So what we attempt to do and what I attempt to educate my clients and other architects and any, anybody who wants to listen in the profession is to eliminate as many manufactured materials from the building, you know, composite materials from the interior of a home.

Limit the amount of plastics that youre using, limit the amount, don't use any carpeting unless its made out of a natural material and it's certainly not wall to wall you, something you can take outside and clean, you know, like they used to do a long time ago. Use natural woods for your flooring, not not engineered wood.

The engineered woods have a lot of toxins in them from the glues if nothing else, okay. Then some of the engineered floors have, actually have particle board. Theyre made out of particle board, okay, with a, with a very thin laminate on top of them.

So we don't want those in our projects either. We don't like to use, you know, wood frame isn't that problematic. It's the sheetrock that can be somewhat problematic so there's other materials out there now that are just, I don't want to name them because they're just now coming in the United States and there's very limited supply and hopefully there'll be a manufacturer in the United States before too long that it will be manufactured in, but it doesn't support mold and it doesn't, and you literally can use this material not only on the inside of your house but you can use it on the outside.

So and you can finish it off just like sheetrock. So and I'll span the studs and so forth. But we have gotten to the point where with, if people really want to have a very healthy home we don't use wood frame. Not that it's wood frame is that bad, okay, its just that there are better ways.

Unfortunately they're more expensive. One of them is using AAC block, aerated autoclave cement blocks, and there, there's, there's an AC block and, and an aerated block now that's available that we are just now investigating and, and we may be using it on a house that we just, that we just finished the design on, the construction documents on.

But this is literally all it is, is cement, air and water thats to make it, and a little bit, a little bit of aluminum I think to create the bubbling aspect of when the, when the autoclave process, and it, and it makes it, I could, if I walked over here I could pick up one if it had a handle on. Just this block is eight inches by eight inches by two foot tall; you would think it would be real heavy.

You know, I mean, it would really, but I could, I could pick it up with my little finger if it had a handle on it. It's, there's so much air in it that creates, it creates this insulation. Its an insula, its a massive, its a low mass but it's, it's, it's higher than stone, I mean than, than, excuse me, than wood but there's also lots of insulation.

And were making this is just the wall, I mean, we, one house we did in Austin that was a five star built in 2000 in the five star, in the Austin Green Building Program, their highest rating is a, made out of this AAC block. And the exterior walls are just eight inches thick. And we plastered the inside and just stuccoed the outside and we had large overhangs on it on the roof.

We have a concrete tile roof on this. We used wood framing for the, for the, for the, for the attic, I mean for the roofs, and that's in a solid, full insulation at the roof line. We, there's not a ventilated attic in this house. All the floors in the house are either, are tile or stone tile. All the cabinets are made out of natural wood. There's no laminated woods or anything like that, made of just solid wood.

Any flooring that was put, any wood flooring was, was made out of solid wood flooring. The paints were no VOC paints that were used on the interior. The air conditioning system is all metal ductwork thats aligned on the outside not on the inside of the ductwork which is typical for what we do because we want the ducts to be cleanable.

I don't care how well you build a air conditioning system or how well you build a house, you will eventually, there will be mold that will grow in your ductwork just, just you can't avoid it, that's just going to happen just, and I, I can get into technical reasons but this takes too long.

But you're going to have this mold growing in there. You want to be able to clean your ductwork and you don't want to use, you don't want to use flex duct, you don't want to use fiberglass duct, you want to use metal ducts that can be cleaned and, and put your insulation on the outside on the supply side, okay.

So that's part of what we do and, and this home, you know, this 3400 square foot, built in 2000, hottest in that, that year they had the hottest months on record at that time. I'm not sure if it hasn't been broken since then, but 3400 square foot. Their highest utility bill in September was ninety-two dollars to cool that home to supply all the energy it needs for the refrigerator and everything else, ninety-two dollars, okay.

So you're talking about homes that become very, you know, youre getting close to being, you know, all they have to do is add a solar system that a, an active, what they call a solar water system on, on the exterior. That could easily be a net zero home.

That's one thing that I haven't talked about as far as designing a home. When you're designing for the microclimate of the site, you're generally elongating the, the, the home on a east-west axis. This puts your roof, a good amount of roof facing south and if you put that at the right angle, depending upon the latitude that you're at, that's where youre going to mount your solar system.

And typically youre going to have more than enough roof to get you there as far as being a net zero energy or maybe even a net energy producer fairly easily. We just completed a home up in Austin which we hope will be the, the first platinum LEED home in the birthplace of green building and that's in Austin.

That's, I don't know if people realize that, but Austin is the birthplace of all the green building programs in the United States. And we just completed a home up there that we're, as soon as the paperwork, it will either be a gold or it will be a platinum in the LEED process, that LEED program in Austin. And it will also be a five star Austin Green Building Program home.

And we use, we basically used the same materials and its got, and, and its got a, a carport and a workshop and a greenhouse that's a addition to the house and a covered walkway and several, and got two porches on the house and so forth.

I mean, you, when you look at the, the net coverage square footage of the house, costs less than 140 dollars a square foot to build. I mean its, its phenomenal what these, what, what we're able to achieve on the building cost of the house.

And its their 3.3 KW solar system is going to supply a good amount of the energy, and they can eas, and its, we have more than enough room for it to be, become net zero energy when they can afford to add more solar collectors to it and prob, and it can easily become a net energy producer so we can sell off the excess.

DT: Well, let's switch gears for a moment, if you dont mind. You, you talked about how to design and build a house that is a low energy user. And you talked about how to use materials that don't have toxic exposure problems. Maybe you can talk about another aspect of green building that I'm sure will be interesting, and that's water conservation.

LW: Oh, absolutely, certainly, certainly. Well, that's another aspect of why you don't want to use composition shingles on your roof because there isn't a house that we're designing nowadays that we're not putting a water harvesting, a rain water harvesting system on.

They're going to have some sort of, if its nothing more than a barrel but most of these people are putting ten thousand gallon tanks and so forth. This particular house I just described in Austin doesn't, isn't even connected to the, the water and sewer of the subdivision.

It doesn't even have a well. Theyre completely, it's completely going to be, all their, all their rain, all their water needs will be made, met by rainwater harvesting, not only for the house but also for all their gardening and they've got extensive gardening.

We even designed some special fence to keep the deer out and so forth so they wouldn't get into their main, their main garden. And, but what you do is that, there are several things you can do as far as the house to conserve energy, you know, there's, there's, and, and energy star and in the Austin Green Building Program they have all these wonderful resources where you can go online and, and, and discover these things, you know.

You can use very low water usage like dishwashers and washing machines and you can use the low flow shower heads and the toilets that use, some are getting down to about a gallon per flush now, you know. You can, you can get waterless urinals.

You can get urinals for houses if you want to, you know, if you want to, if people want to do that ,but, or you can get dual flush, you know, you got, you push one button or one of the other, one of the two buttons down for depending on what you're trying to, to flush either urine or black water you might say.

So there, and then there's, then there's, the, the, the water distribution system in the house. W'ere use, we're using these manifold system that uses PEX piping a lot more nowadays and it cuts down on the amount of, of it doesn't really cut down on the amount of piping but it just gets your water use, the water to, to the source a lot quicker and you have less waste of water, okay.

And then they have re-circulating systems where you can capture the water. When you turn on thethe faucet, it sometimes, you know, you have to wait for it, wait for a while. They have a capture system for that water that will, that that, that will keep it in the system rather, rather than it going down the drain.

And there's, there's these other things. I, we really haven't got into the exotic things. And there's a, you know, in some houses, and you have, this is a case by case, you can do some grey water systems on it, too.

The da, the the laundry is about the only place where they'll allow you to really, off the, off the washing machine is about the only place you can really use grey water in most of Texas. But then you have, there's some specifics you have to go through to, to make sure you can do that.

DT: Do you also get involved in the landscaping for houses and trying to use xeriscape and sort of drought tolerant local spaces?

LW: We don't actually get into the landscaping. We advise people. We try to preserve as much of the native landscaping that we can and we connect our clients with people that specialize in lands, in native landscaping and permaculture design and get into the, get into the varivarious specifics and all of that.

We know the basics of it and, and, and we just try to steer people to the, the people, that's a, that's something you, you got to keep up with on a day-by-day day basis and we got enough to keep up with otherwise, so and. . .

DT: Well, you told us a good deal about how you design these houses and use good materials and technology. I was hoping that you could talk about some of your educational efforts now. You've, you've talked to different groups and I, I was curious how, when you talk to say the National Association of Homebuilders or the American Institute of Architects or the American Society of Heating and Refrigeration Engineers, how do builders react? How do architects react? How do engineers react to what you're trying to explain to them about green building?

LW: You know, I used to do that back in I, I those, those groups I talked to was something like fifteen, twenty years ago. I learned that, that really who I needed to be educating was the general public so to do, so that they would be demanding this what, they would be knowledgeable and start demanding it because I, I was there was, there was some interest from the professionals, okay, out there but they really weren't serious interests, okay, not like there is now, alright.

So yeah, it really back then it was not a serious interest. These people, you know, they, we would get, we wouldn't really get the turnout that we'd like to have and then, then even though we would educate them there would be interest, they couldn't implement, they couldn't talk their clients into it.

So what happened is that I started shifting my focus to educating the public and about the, then a few la, years later, the LEED came along and the combination of this has led to a lot of this, this now this focus upon green building and so forth. And that's, that's really a big, you have to, the public has to demand it especially on a residential level.

The public has to demand it. Otherwise the, the, the people out there aren't going to deliver it. You, we've got a, for instance, I'm not sure I want to talk about this or not, you may have to cut this, okay, but I'm going to, you now, okay. I, I, I want, I want to have discretion on whether it gets, gets published or not.

We have a very, very nice home that we designed that was going to be a platinum LEED home that, designed to withstand hurricanes, they could stay there during a hurricane, made out of ins, made out of insulated concrete forms, construction, laminated glass in the windows, okay, solar system, living roof.

Now a roof where they can grow their garden and be secure at because they got three foot high parapets lined with concrete all the way around it up there where they can be up there, you know. They watched what happened in Katrina well, well whatever it was, was Katrina hit, the one that hit New Orleans?

Yeah, okay, I get them confused all these K's and so forth. And they watched what was happening, the chaos that happened in that city when a hurricane hit. They said, you know, we want to be secure and they had the, and, and they felt like they wanted to spend the money for it. And so and they alsobute they also wanted the house to be very toxic-free and so on and so if they still had teenage children and so forth, you know, they wanted all these things and so forth.

I brought the builder on almost two years ago. And I've been out there with Cultivate Green and all these other places teaching classes on how to become green building and green so forth. And and it's mainly, you know, its oriented to whoever wants to show up, I'm not, we haven't been, it's through Cultivate Green.

We weren't, weren't oriented towards the builders, we weren't oriented towards the homeowners. We were just out there educating people and we were sending out the notices to everyone. And we were getting good turnouts. Sometimes we'd have 300, 300 people there during the week at these seminars. And I don't think this builder ever showed up for one, okay. We got the prices back on this house, three times the cost of what we just completed that home in, in Austin, platinum.

And it's like, and this is the reason why we probably can't tape this, I mean, it can't, this it's unless maybe part of it. He didn't take leadership for himself, for his company, for all his subs. He saw all the green specifications and so forth and he just said, oh my, you know, sort of like, you know, he said, oh my gosh, all these subcontractors and so forth were coming back with all these prices that are ridiculously high. It's because he didn't put forth the leadership.

Its like a mother or parents of children in a crisis situation, you know. If you react wrongly as a parent, your children go hysterical, okay. That's sort of what happened in this case. They bumped their prices up way more than what they needed to be and so the client has happened to take all the green stuff out to get the bill.

And it's a real tragedy and its, you know, and, and, you know, you can't you can go out there and, what I found out during the seventies and this just confirmed it, you can go out there and educate people all the time but if they're so busy they're not, and they're not, they don't have the interest to learn, you can't, you can't lead a horse to water, I mean you can't make, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink it.

And tha'ts what we did and we couldn't make him drink it so, you know, I don't know what it's going to take to get these builders. But we have a real problem with the building industry, especially in the residential arena about being able to deliver green homes at a reasonable cost.

It's not because they can't be built for reasonable costs, it's because the building community doesn't want to deliver them at a, at a reasonable cost. The, the NAHB has to take responsibility for this. They've taught seminar after seminar on a national scale, green is gold folks, do green, its gold. You can charge more for it, okay.

So what we've got now is that we've got a whole building industry that's, that's, that's out there thinking that they can charge more for green on a residential arena.

And, and, and, and, and they're going about pushing their green, the Homebuilders Association is pushing their green program and saying, well LEED programs are too costly because they require a third party verification and so forth. No it's not LEED program. It's what y'all, you idiots, what you taught your builders, your whole community to believe, alright.

But they thought, you know, they were just, but, in other words, and I ca'nt really blame them for going that route. They were, they wanted to build green, they could see the leadership and NAHB could see that they needed to build green. They just chose the wrong ta, tactic to teach the builders.

Instead of doing it out of consciousness, out of it being the right thing to do, about doing what you need to do for future generations, you know, it, it was about money, you can make money from doing this, okay. It's just, just the wrong motivating factor. So how did I get off onto that?

DT: Well, you're telling the, trying to educate folks, and, and we'd spoke about educating builders and engineers and architects. I guess another group that, that you've just spoken about educating is, is the customers, the clients themselves.

LW: Oh, absolutely.

DT: Tell me what, how you try to teach, or what resonates with your clients and what some of their hesitation might be from?

LW: Once ponce, the clients go to these seminars and they begin to understand not only what needs to be done but why, they buy into it and they want as much as they possibly can afford. The problem is we don't have the, we don't have the people out there to deliver it. We have it on a, on a, well were getting it more and more on design site but we don't have it on the construction site.

DT: Well, how do you teach a client who might actually be a landlord, not somebody who's going to occupy the building but somebody who owns an apartment house or owns a commercial building where they may not recognize the health savings or the cost savings?

LW: The only way on the, the one thing or argument they can use is they're going to have less, less turnover. They're going, their, their people are going to have to stay there longer. They're going to realize that they have a much more comfortable place to be living in, it doesn't cost, from an energy standpoint as much to live there.

They feel better living there because the indoor air quality is better assuming they go in to build, making the house more, or, you know, the apartment or the building more healthy. Those are part of things. The produc, you know, when you get into schools and office buildings, they have proven that, that green buildings actually enhance the productivity.

You get more output from your folks that are being in these buildings than they do if theyre in a regular building, that their people are happier, they're more comfortable. So, you know, these are just, these are part of it.

You thought al, always you can't always put in dollar figures but you can't, but there is prits, proven fact that these, the green homes, people just enjoy them better and that they'll stay in them longer, they will make, they will stay in a job instead of, you know, being transferred out of the country or to another part of the country that will, because they have such a nice place to live they'll want to stay there.

DT: We were talking about how these buildings might be better to occupy. Do you also find that, that green buildings are, are more engaging if you're actually involved in building them? I think you had mentioned of and

LW: Of course.

DT: The Montgomery house in 93 and 94.

LW: Yeah, of course. When, when people, when people are actually involved in design and planning and even the construction of them in some cases, you know, some people want to engage in that, they te, there, there's a lot more ownership in the final result.

And its very, its a very important principle, you know, it, but that doesn't mean the people that are, that are renting can't have the, you know, can't can't have the same sense of ownership in a sense to where they, where they, if they enjoy the, the structure, the being there and the energy bills and so forth the, and I don't see why they wouldn't have of, of, somewhat of that same feeling of, you know, well this is mine, you know, I, and and they'll, they'll take care of it better and so forth.

I'm not sure if I'm answering your question very well but I just think that, I just think that people will, if they appreciate it, they will take better care of it. If its just a regular old, a regular ole, it's, they're going to treat it like regular ole, regular ole, you know, or whatever they've treated it in the past and not pay much attention to it.

DT: Most of what we've talked about so far is about buildings that, that you've helped design and build from ground zero. What about the millions of homes that, that already exist and many of which were built just in very recent years but which are clearly not up to the standard they're going to need to be. How do we retrofit them?

LW: That's a hard question to answer. There is lots of things that can be done. I mean they're, you know, you, over a period of time as things wear out, you can just put better created materials in and you can better siding on. I mean you can put a better air conditioning system in, you can get rid of the flex duct and put, get rid of all the things that, that were planned, planned obsolescence bu, built into these homes, okay. Put in things that are more permanent.

You know, that composition shingle roof you got stuck with when you bought the house, put a metal roof up there. It's not that much it doesn't take a whole lot of bracing to put up a concrete roof. Clay tile is kind of exits really too, too expensive for most folks but you can put concrete up there. It's not really that much more expensive.

Like, you know, one thing that I've done, I really sort of, I went through a divorce and I didn't want to build so I bought this townhouse and it was and it's facing the wrong direction. It faces, you know, it's got all the windows facing east and west but luckily the, the windows that are facing west are all shaded by those big trees out front, but I really don't have a place where I can grow a garden.

Its too much it's either too much sun or too little sun. But one thing I did do here when I first moved in is I insulated at the roof line and I added some extra insulation to the ceiling. I did some work to seal the air leaks here. And I'm on 100% renewable energy now. I felt it was important to who, who I am and what I do that I had to be able to say that I'm on renewable energy, you know.

You know, I helped found the Texas Solar Energy Society, Houston Solar Energy Society, Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association, you know. It's, it's important that I be on renewable energy. So I just, you know, I use green green mountain for now, okay. I'm, I'm searching to see if there are better deals out there.

But that's how you can be on 100% renewable energy, support these people that are supplying it over the regular grid. So, and it's important that we recycle our building stock. Tha'ts the other thing, that I, reason why I decided to move my office into this town home is that I am actually, you know, I am recycling this building, you know.

Instead of just living here like most the people here and they go to work someplace else, I'm here twenty well, not always twenty-four hours a day but I'm here a lot, okay. And but I don't go someplace else to sleep at night. I, this is, this is my home, too.

And so I am making double use. And we need to, and I'm recycling an older building. I'm making it, I'm I'm extending the use of an older building and, and providing sec, helping provide security for the complex. I mean, someone here is always, when you got someone that's here during the daytime, it gives more security than what it would be if no one was here. So it, its just a win-win situation all the way around.

DT: We, we've been talking about a green building and about how designing houses and, and other structures in a better way can address energy and water and materials and, and health but I was curious if you could talk about maybe more intangible reasons for building in a green way. What does this mean to you individually?

LW: Well, to me, we have to go beyond green. But it, it, to me it's, it's, it's, it's a personal integrity type of issue. I don't want to go, I want to sleep soundly every day of my life and I do. I know that I am doing everything I possibly can to make a difference.

I don't want my grandkids in future generations to say, Granddad, when you learned about global warming, when you learned about us exceeding the biocapacity of the earth, what did you do? I want to say, I want to say I did everything I possibly knew, I knew I could do, okay. I want them to know that I am doing possibly everything I can, I know how to do and continue to do it.

I could retire but I am doing this because this is my, its a passion, its a, I guess, you know, you asked me what my hobbies were, this is my hobby. I, I love to do research and I like to be able to to teach other people the, the results of my research and how to put that into practical application.

All I'm doing is, is, through my architecture is putting into practice what needs to be done from my learning, learning from my research. The thing is, though, the prob, the situation is so big that I can't be content in just doing my green architecture, its not enough. We have to go way beyond that.

We have to, everybody needs to be reducing their carbon footprint drastically, especially here in the United States, you know. Whether it's in the way you, the automobile you drive, the clothes you wear, how you live with the home you live in, what kind of profession you, you choose to be in, you have to, we have to all reduce our carbon footprint.

We have a very short period of time to really make a difference, otherwise, you know, our future generations are going to come back to us and say to us, you know, why didn't you do something?

You know, our earth, the earth is our everything. Think about that. The earth is our everything. If it wasn't for the earth, we wouldn't be living or breathing, we wouldn't have any of this. And it's crying out for our help. It's going to continue to be here after us.

I mean we can ignore the problems that we have facing us and it will lead to our eventual extinction but we don't have to ignore it, it's our choice. And if enough people do something about it and we do it quickly enough, then i'ts, we are, this is the most, we have the opportunity to become, can't think of the right word, the, this is the most important generation or the most important time ever on the face of the earth for humanity.

The possibilities for what we can do are tremendous if we just get our act together and our heads in the right place. And it's not just up to the older folks to do it. It's going to take everyone.

And quite frankly, the older folks are probably going to be less reluctant to do something about it than the younger generations. But we have to do something and we have to, we have to get on with it right now.

Again, Earth is everything and just realize there is no away, there is no away. We just can't, you know, those plastic bags that we get, you know, we just can't throw those away. We shouldn't actually be using plastic bags, you know, just little things.

If we all just start doing little things like buying a bag, a grocery bag when we, and taking it with us, you know, a cloth bag and taking it with us to put our groceries in, eliminating those plastic bags and, and all the trees that it takes to cut down to make those, those paper sacks. We quit subscribing to magazines that are delivered to our doorstep and just get them over the internet, huge amount.

We need that, that carbon needs to stay in those trees (laughs). That needs, those trees need to eventually be turned into carbon that goes back down and make, make, you know, to take, take the the CO2 out of the air. It's just and, and for those who want, want to build, build as green as you possibly can, you know. Now I'm, I'm, I'm rambling now.

DT: No, I think it is a good conclusion. And is there anything else that youd like to add?

LW: Thank you for inviting me to be here and to do this because it's, I find this, I'm honored to be asked to, to share my, my thoughts and my viewpoints and my experience or whatever and to help influence change because that's what we have to do. There has to be change.

You know, China is building several times the amount of coal powered, power plant that we are, okay. If we're ever, we have, they have to stop building those, those coal plants. But are they going to do it unless we stop doing it? Just like everything else in the world, the United States has been thought of to be the lea, leader.

We have had, we used to have the moral leadership in the world. We can regain that moral leadership by doing something that's totally responsible for the environment and all humanity.

And it's something that we need to be concentrating on and we're not even here, and something we need to demand the politicians doing and every leader be, to be doing. And, but we first need to start at home, the way we live, doing small things and then every time, every time you turn around, figure out some other way to reduce your carbon footprint. Use less energy, use, use less, make do with more, you know. Make do with less and it will be, we're, we're living way beyond our means.

The, the planet can't support the way we are, we're, we're living here. If everybody were to live like they do in, in Europe, it would take three earths to support the whole world. If everybody lived like we do in the United States, it would take five earths to support the world.

So if everybody is going to be able to live off the biodebas, biocapacity of the earth, United States, people in the United States need to reduce their consumption by, to one-fifth of what they're doing right now, give you, that's, that's a benchmark, okay, so to give you some idea.

DT: Thank you very much.

LW: You're welcome.