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The conference had a different feeling from other green-building gatherings, such as the annual Greenbuild conference put on by the U.S. Green Building Council. This smaller CEC event — held in a single room at Seattle City Hall, with about 100 attendees — brought together policy makers, business leaders, and nonprofit leaders from the three NAFTA countries to advise the CEC on the draft of its report. The Seattle conference was preceded by a February workshop in Mexico.

Once the CEC report is complete, it will be submitted to a host of environmental ministries and agencies in the three countries, including the EPA in the United States. These agencies, collectively know as the Council of the CEC, will have a formal opportunity to make comments on the report and its recommendations prior to release.

Once the report is released in final form, the CEC will actively promote the findings both among the green building community and among various government officials and elected representatives.

One speaker at the conference, David Morillon Galvez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, called the push to make green principles the norm in building codes and city planning efforts "holistic standardization."

Jonathan Westeinde, managing partner for Windmill Development Group in Ottawa and chair of the CEC Advisory Group on Green Building, spoke of the increasing interest of banking, venture capital, and real estate leaders in green building. "That's a very significant sea change," he said. "But there's still more talk than action." Westeinde's company is in the process of transforming an abandoned industrial area in Victoria, Canada, into the CAD$350 million Dockside Green development, a community for 2,500 people, being built to LEED Platinum standards, with 26 buildings slated for residential, hotel, retail, office, live-work, and light industrial uses.

A continuing theme was that Mexico faces substantially greater challenges to moving green building forward because of continuing poverty in that nation. One study presented at the Seattle meeting looked at opportunities and challenges to meeting affordable housing needs with green building approaches.

Given the expected continuing rise in the cost of fuel, and the rate of housing construction in Mexico in both the present and future — some 350,000 units built in 2006, with numbers rising — green building would seem like an outright necessity there. But no green building certification yet exists in Mexico. "We need to achieve this goal," said Luis Antonio Garcia Diaz of Sinergia Capital. "But green building financing in Mexico is very, very new." In a session later that day devoted to housing, Fernando Mayagoitia of Lean House Consulting in Mexicali, Mexico, suggested measures such as government providing tax credits for lowered utility bills.

In a presentation called "Mainstreaming Green Real Estate Finance," presenter Leanne Tobias of Malachite LLC called for numerous actions: creation of green real estate standards and certification, tax incentives for longer leases and accelerated depreciation, and "greening" the $27 trillion state and local pension fund real estate portfolio. "Very frequently, the investment policies are not green, even though they perform well in the market," said Tobias, whose Bethesda, Maryland, firm provides green real estate consulting services. To accelerate support within the commercial real estate industry, Tobias also called for a government-underwritten database of research findings tying economic performance of green buildings to leasing and purchase rates.

"The real estate segment is conservative," added Chris Corps in a discussion called "The Role of Valuation." "They're hesitant to be first. But when they see there's a profit to be made, there'll be a flood."

Another hot topic at the CEC meeting was the American Institute of Architects and Royal Architecture Institute of Canada's 2030 Challenge, which calls for all carbon-neutral buildings by 2030. Martin Adelaar, a principal with Ottawa-based Marbek Resouce Consultants Ltd. and manager of its energy-management practice, called for an approach to addressing global warming through energy efficiency. Adelaar estimates the current stock of buildings will have to be retrofitted to be 50 percent more efficient, but that this could account for 70 percent of the savings necessary to meet the target — the equivalent of one year of energy use in 138 million homes. "Energy efficiency is a cost-effective means of achieving energy supply," he said.

Steve Selkowitz, head of the Building Technologies Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, argued that North America can actually exceed the 2030 Challenge. "We can get a long way through energy efficiency improvements, but it needs to be supplemented with renewable power."

In a session called "Coordinated International Actions," panelist Alex Wilson, president of Building Green in Brattleboro, Vermont (which publishes Environmental Building News), called for steps that could help shift the market towards green building: financing efficiency on a performance basis, embracing the market for carbon trading, and sponsoring results-based performance data demonstrating the ways in which many green building features enhance human health and productivity. One of Wilson's co-panelists, Douglas Webber of the Toronto office of Halsall Associates engineering firm, also called for a nationwide program to rebuild and "green" America. "It has to be seen as a great effort of our time, like the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project."

One of the pioneering leaders in green building design spoke later that evening. Bob Berkebile, an architect and the founding chair of the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment, provided a rousing call to action in a speech that was presented jointly by the CEC and Seattle's Urban Sustainability Forum series.

"I think we happen to be living at the most powerful moment in human history," Berkebile said. His accompanying presentation showed covers of Time and Vanity Fair magazines with sustainability themes, and he spoke of how corporations headquartered in LEED-rated buildings are more profitable. But that progress is overshadowed by the dark specter of global warming.

"After 450,000 years of tracking carbon and temperature, we know a spike in one will follow the other," he said. With carbon levels today higher than at any point, "that means a fundamental change in global climates. The debate over global warming is over. Now we move to what we do about it." Since 1995, for example, the planet has experienced the greatest strength and frequency of hurricanes of any era in recorded history.

But because environmentalism has permeated America's national consciousness to such a large degree in recent times, there may also be the chance for green architecture to become a mainstream reality. "I've been to New Orleans several times [since Hurricane Katrina]," Berkebile said. "It can be the tipping point for change. But we have to be willing to turn the system on its head." That means not just sustainable architecture and planning, the architect asserted, but also new ways of generating and transporting energy. He cited the current generation rates of coal-fired plants, which lose 70 percent of their embodied energy as waste — 10 to 15 percent from transmission and the rest from uncaptured heat. If more energy were generated by many smaller components throughout the system — be they alternative energy sources such solar panels and wind turbines, or micro-turbines powered by natural gas — far less energy would be wasted.

One of Berkebile's closing comments also spoke to the larger sense at the CEC conference. He reminded the audience that the Chinese-language character for the word "crisis" is made from the symbols for two other words: "danger" and "opportunity."

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Responsibility for global warming by country. Image: Courtesy Architecture 2030 A conventional residential development in polluted Mexico City. Photo: Scott Peterman Gwinnett Environmental & Heritage Center, designed by Lord, Aeck & Sargent, Inc., is a LEED Gold-rated building in Buford, Georgia. Photo: © Jonathan Hillyer/ Atlanta Factor 10 House, a sustainable affordable housing project by Esherick Homsey Dodge & Davis Architects was awared by the AIA Committe On The Environment (COTE) in 2004. Photo: Doug Snower Photography Dockside Green, developed by Vancity and Windmill Development Group, is a mixed-use development in Victoria, British Columbia. Image: Courtesy of Tartan Public Relations A water system is an integral part of the two-stage Dockside Green development. Image: Courtesy of Tartan Public Relations Architecture 2030 aims to significantly reduce CO2 emission levels from buildings. Image: Courtesy Architecture 2030   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.