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Americans are too reliant on air conditioning, an energy-hungry technology that worsens climate change. Artificial cooling already accounts for 10% of global heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, and the share could double in the next 25 years. Yet many of us live in homes that would be stuffy and uncomfortable without AC, and in extreme conditions turn dangerous. It’s not an overstatement to say that the pollution we generate for cooling inside is burning the planet outside.
But we have a sustainable solution to this problem in the form of passive housing, a new kind of low-energy architecture governed by old design philosophies. Passive houses consume only a quarter of the energy that is needed to warm a typical American house in the winter and cool it in the summer. In fact, some passive houses don’t need air conditioning at all.
Yet at present, it accounts for less than 1% of new American construction in the past decade. Why isn’t it more popular?
Passive houses embody what is known in energy efficiency circles as the split incentive problem, or an investment whose benefits do not accrue to the investor. The vast majority of American homes are built by developers and sold to someone else, and the vast majority of those developers are not financially incentivized to minimize their future occupants’ need for cooling, heating, and other utilities. In fact, the largest developers resist efforts to increase the home insulation needed to improve energy efficiency.
But most developers aren’t Jeff Stern, a brainy, 59-year-old architect who lives in a passive house of his own design in Portland, Oregon. From the street, the two-story, 1,965-square-foot house looks clean and modern: two conjoined boxes, clad in brown cedar and accented with Mondrianesque red stripes. The mid-century aesthetic camouflages the traditional thermal design.
Read more: Air Conditioning Will Not Save Us
A principal consideration is solar orientation. Stern’s house faces south,…
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