In a World of Climate Solutions, Policy Needs a Boost
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a brief conversation I had with Space10's lead on the Urban Village Project. In the post, I discussed the origins of the Urban Village Project, the influence it had on the early ideation of Bay Modular, and lastly why I thought UVP would be a perfect test bed for testing hypotheses on urban redevelopment projects, impacts on communities, and the reality of corporate targets vs. political goals.
Although UVP, at its current stage, has not deployed any part of its technology or building infrastructure system to a physical site, they continue to maintain their ambitious goals and have been looking at suitable sites for implementation. While we never managed to put together a working arrangement, Guillaume and I had nearly an hour long conversation about the future of the project, ideas for implementation, and high leverage areas of opportunity for low-cost, easy wins.
This is what I mean when I talk about the difference between technology and solutions vs. politics and public policy. Innovation is one thing. Pace and deployment is another thing.
Science, Innovation, and Deployment
Say what you will about TED talks, while many of the TEDx series leaves much to be desired, I've found a lot of use and inspiration from conversations like this one between John Doerr of KPCB and Silicon Valley fame and Hal Harvey, a renowned climate policy specialist and author of Designing Climate Solutions.
During their conversation, I took away several key points:
Climate change is an inequity machine, those who contributed the least are impacted the most
Climate change transcends normal time scales; when CO2e enters the atmosphere, it lasts for thousands of years, when humans have grown accustom to timescales no longer than election cycles
CO2e is embedded in every aspect of our industrial economy; we can achieve drawdown by decarbonizing the electrical grid and electrifying everything plugged into it
Technological innovation and distribution are the key to bringing our carbon emissions down to 0 from 55B tons of emissions every year
To move the conversation forward, we need real-time emissions data, proper carbon accounting, and a real plan to communicate and meet critical timelines
The facts and data all speak to the same message, as Doerr puts it:
"I may not be optimistic, but I'm hopeful. The crucial question is: Can we do what we must, at speed, and at scale? The good news is, it is now cheaper to save the planet than to ruin it. The bad news is, we are fast running out of time."
To me, this final point seamlessly connects elements of science, innovation, and policy, and tries to sum up the current conditions in our economy and the relationships between agencies, corporations, and the government.
To drive the point home, I sat in on the Climate-Safe California Policy Summit held by the Climate Center this morning. During the 3-hour long program, speakers that spanned climate scientists, grassroots organizations, and politicians provided their 10-minute poignant take on the state of climate policy in California as it related to their body of work. To me, no point was more striking than the conversation between Dr. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, and Dr. Dan Kammen, Director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab (RAEL) at UC Berkeley. During their conversation, they balanced the conversation between climate justice and climate science, making a clear statement that uplifting front-line communities is necessary to deploy effective climate programs in California.
After discussing the benefits of certain local programs such as the Modular EcoBlock in East Oakland in partnership with the Google Solar Project and a bleak picture for the future of California weather painted by science forecasts, the two converged on a simple truth:
Technology is not holding us back. Policy is. From a physical science perspective, despite learning ground truth about the effects of climate extremes on individual regions, the reality is we're not learning new things about climate change. It's an exclusively political problem. The potential mechanisms to solve climate change exist, we just need to put them into place now.
Creating the Test Bed
Watching climate change legislation and the general attitude towards climate change policy yo-yo between political party preference has been traumatic, leaving citizens lying in the wake of indecision or brutal disinformation campaigns to downplay the impacts of burning fossil fuels.
Due to the instability, but generally positive outlook on global climate policy, I've been hopeful that more of the solutions and innovations that entrepreneurs and agencies are developing will have the funding and opportunity for mass deployment and I think programs like the privately-funded Urban Village Project have the opportunity to shake things up.
The Urban Village Project: A vision for liveable, sustainable, and affordable homes
I see the Urban Village Project as a combination of science, research, and technology, with a small toe in the world of policy. UVP could function as a testbed for new urban technologies, behavioral reconditioning, and urban planning redesign within the greater context of passing local climate policy.
Urban technology sits at the core of UVP, deploying solutions from innovative building materials like cross-laminated timber and volumetric modular components to its embedded climate-neutral energy systems featuring rainwater collection, renewable energy, and permaculture.
On the other side of the spectrum, its proposed digital companion ties community interaction to building design, with communal spaces, shared resources, and systems of co-habitation and equity that have been long forgotten since industrial-era capitalism and land ownership took shape. These democratic systems incentivize long-term investments through financial products like land trusts, co-ops, and pension funds, making it easy to co-own and support neighbors.
The last, and most policy-tied, component is the ambitious vision that sets up UVP for scale. With a long-term vision for deployment into more urban centers and municipalities, the objectives and key results (OKRs) for UVP need to be clear and viable — build a sustainable, affordable, and livable system of buildings to house and support a communal way of life in the middle of a bustling city. The system must meet or bend zoning & planning requirements, adhere or enhance city climate action goals, advance justice and equitability across transit and housing affordability, among many more locally defined benchmarks.
While overarching concepts of modular, sustainable, biophilic design are codified in the design, they must be delivered with certainty, establishing OKRs and time-sensitive milestones to achieve the vision and create proof points for future implementation.
Although it's unclear which element the teams at Space10, IKEA, and Effekt might tackle first, data should be the backbone of every core decision. What data to collect and how the collected data can be analyzed is critical for setting production benchmarks and meeting milestones from climate neutrality (embodied and operational emissions) and overall construction logistics.
A successful project will establish an objective and series of key results at every major phase of the prototype, creating a pathway for a scalable and deployable go-to-market strategy. The incremental stages of development will create a unified approach of collaboration for AEC and space design, urban planning and real estate, software and data, and local government and policy.
Deploying a multi-story, multi-family building as a technology product could be the perfect intersection of familiar trade and innovation that policymakers are looking for to make a case for future models of a climate-neutral, scalable building kit-of-parts that makes housing immediately more affordable enhances the goals for human-powered transit, reduces heat island effect, introduces equity to front line communities, and the list goes on.
What continues to motivate and encourage me in each step I take towards greater climate literacy is the basic understanding that the technology is here, it’s just a matter of getting the right people and the right programs to deploy the solutions. And while goals are always great, results are real.