Against the will of 196 nations who had come together just two years earlier, President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Accord this Spring. Decades of progress towards making green construction both possible an economically viable threaten to come undone. Many fear a drop in sustainable investments may come of cheaper and less eco-friendly carbon fuels benefit from looser regulations.
Autodesk’s Redshift online magazine recently broke down the potential impact of recent policy decisions by the Trump administration. Per their analysis, the outlook for green building may not be as bleak as some fear.
“…policy leaders are confident that the US withdrawal will not slow investment in sustainable building, nor will it derail a robust private and municipal market for green technologies. “If anything, we have more business advocates and local government leaders coming to us on how they can leverage green building and other tools to increase their ability to meet the Paris goals,” Beardsley says.
The residential and commercial building sectors constitute about 40 percent of total US energy consumption per year, according to a 2017 report from the Energy Information Administration, and the building industry as a whole is heavily invested in voluntary sustainability initiatives such as LEED and the Architecture 2030 Challenge. A 2015 economic impact study, prepared for the USGBC by Booz Allen Hamilton, shows that US green construction generated $167.4 billion in GDP from 2011 to 2014 and is projected to reach $303.5 billion from 2015 to 2018.”
Read the full article at https://www.autodesk.com/redshift/climate-agreement-green-building/