It Ain’t Necessarily So

Korky Koroluk, columnist for the Daily Commercial News, explores the contradictory effects that can result from energy-efficiency retrofits.

It has been persuasively argued by some that adding more efficient energy systems tends to reduce the amount of energy used, thus lowering over-all energy costs. But that, it is argued, tends to make tenants less careful in their energy use. Extending the argument, increased efficiency lowers cost and increases demand, which increases the rate of consumption, wiping out the initial savings.

That’s not a reason not do it, though. Resilient Design means doing it right, as RDI’s Alex Wilson explains in a quote in the column:

[Wilson] says the biggest challenge in trying to make communities more resilient is dramatically improving the energy performance of existing homes. It will also require “innovative financing approaches, the introduction of insurance policies that reward resilience, (and) stronger building codes.”

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.