As the price of oil and gasoline has skyrockted, so has the cost to heat homes and commercial buildings – and with that comes the demand from consumers to make buildings more energy-efficient. A recent report by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation states that North American buildings are responsible for 35 percent of the continent’s greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming, and that promoting the green design, construction, renovation and operation of buildings could cut total GHG emissions by a third. The report by the CEC – a group promoting cooperation among the North American Free Trade Agreement partners – says using energy-saving technologies in homes and commercial buildings could result in 1,700 fewer  emitted megatons of carbon dioxide by 2030, an amount equivalent to the CO2 by all the cars and trucks in the United States in the year 2000.

The operative word is ‘could’, however, because despite the environmental and health benefits of green building – which could encompass anything from eco-friendly roofing products to solar or geothermal heating systems to lowflush toilets – it accounts for a very small fraction of new home and commercial building construction; according to the report, just two percent of the new nonresidential building market, and less than half of one percent of the residential market in the United States and Canada.

I asked Stephen Koch, from the North American Insulation Manufacturers Association, the reason for the low numbers, and he told me it boils down to market forces. Koch said there is nothing in the Canadian Building Code to require builders to make homes more energy-efficient, and that’s created a regulatory no man’s land where it’s up to the provinces to implement such standards, or the industry itself, as has occurred through the Leadership in Energy and Design (LEED) rating program. “We’ve really created a process where good builders build energy-efficient homes, and others don’t have to,” says Koch, who is calling for a national baseline of energy-efficient criteria in the building code. The baseline could include correct sealing and proper insulation in the building envelope, an energy-efficient system of heating and ventilation, and guidelines for keeping a homeowner’s operating costs low – such as south-facing windows to absorb heat, low-flush toilets, and utilization of gray water. Koch admits it costs contractors money up-front to build homes that are more energy-efficient, costs that will ultimately be borne by the buyer, but he says those increases are minimal when amortized over the life of the mortgage, and will be recouped in three to five years – through lower heating and maintenance costs. Koch noted a couple of provinces are already trying to legislate green building, with Nova Scotia implementing a sticker program identifying eco-friendly new homes, and B.C. moving to enshrine green building in law, but he said an industry/consumer-driven process will work better than an onerous regulatory regime, one where building green eventually becomes the norm and those contractors who neglect to change their ways are left on the sidelines as consumers demand more and more from them.