The cost of achieving carbon neutral or zero homes to the Code keeps raising its head, as Phil over at Sustainability Blog points out.

I didnt catch the UCT speakers name on the US Greenbuild365 live webcast testerday, I was listening rather than watching, but a sound bite delivered with typical American style caught my ear…“The building sector is over-estimating the cost and under-estimating the impact of climate change issues”

How true, when we think about the moaning around the cost of the new Code for Sustainable Housing, which will be seen as a smokescreen for reluctance in doing anything at all.

Jonathan Porrit writing in his blog and in BD… makes the point well… why put a price on the importance of carbon free homes?

Government policy is being applied to decarbonising both new and existing housing, with Building Regulations and the Code driving that transformation. An industry that has lived for far too long in a feather-bed world, where nobody gave a tinker’s cuss about energy and resource efficiency, is being incentivised to change, and is marketing to rapidly rising consumer expectations. So why would anybody suppose that the combined genius of architects, designers, engineers, builders, surveyors and planners isn’t going to be able to come up with the zero-carbon goods?

I live in weird world these days. Having spent most of my life described as a prophet of doom, I now find myself having to shake people out of a fatalistic “can’t be done” mind-set! We seem to have moved from denial to despair in one effortless leap. So let’s get our creative act together here. After all, we don’t have a choice about this. Either we rise to this challenge, or the mealy-mouthed, risk-averse mediocrity that dominates this particular industry will take us all down with it.

The costs arising from inefficiencies through waste, poor project management, incorrect procurement, lack of working together, poor design, legal fees to check contract documentation and all the well documented historical ills of our sector etc far far outweighs the cost of achieving the Code… surely?

Acheiving the code needs a different mindset, as Einstein said… we cannot solve todays issues with the same mind set that created them in the first place...

By rearranging the debate towards opportunity we can can move from despair to exciting.